How Big Labor Lowers Teachers’ Salaries
Government union officials like American Federation of Teachers (AFT/AFL-CIO) union President Randi Weingarten and National Education Association (NEA) union President Becky Pringle like to portray themselves as staunch advocates of higher pay for K-12 public schoolteachers.
But the fact is, AFT and NEA union bosses have often wielded their monopoly-bargaining privileges and their outsized political clout, which is primarily a product of those privileges, .to reduce the share of public-school expenditures that goes into teacher salaries.
From the 2000-01 through the 2020-21 academic years, the last two decades for which data are available, taxpayer-funded expenditures on K-12 government schools soared by roughly 32% after adjusting for inflation, to reach a total of $927 billion, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Over the same period, show other NCES data, nationwide K-12 government school enrollment rose by just 4.6%.
Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted teacher salaries “barely budged,” as Reason magazine Assistant Editor Emma Camp noted in a brief analysis of educator compensation published on September 10. The “extra spending,” Camp explained, has largely gone to “hiring more administrative staff.” And this huge investment has had little, if any, positive impact on student learning outcomes.
Despite the paucity of evidence that K-12 government schools’ “staffing surge” over the past several decades has benefited students academically, its political constituency remains very powerful, and teacher union officials are a key reason why this is so.
As Drs. Bradley Marianno and Katharine Strunk, two education policy scholars who focus on teacher unions, noted in 2019, AFT and NEA officials routinely wield their “exclusive” representation power over K-12 employees to push for increased staffing. Hiring additional K-12 employees, they explained, gives union bosses opportunities to collect more dues money and acquire more political power.
Big Labor’s warped value system, placing more importance on padding government union coffers and expanding its political clout than on helping schoolchildren acquire knowledge and skills they need, explains why union-boss puppet politicians regard fiscally tottering Chicago Public Schools (CPS) as a “success.”
Since 2012, CPS spending has nearly doubled, while reading and math scores have declined by 63% and 78%, respectively. But Democrat Party bigwigs saw no problem at all with inviting Chicago Teacher Union (CTU /AFL-CIO) boss Stacy Davis Gates to introduce Windy City Mayor and former CTU staffer Brandon Johnson at their national convention this summer. At the podium, Gates proudly affirmed that the CTU and its AFT parent union deserve the “credit” for the “political transformation” of Chicago!
For several months now, Gates and her cohorts have been pressuring CPS to rubber-stamp an “audacious” list of contract demands that would, according to district officials, “create a $2.9 billion deficit for the district next fiscal year and a $4 billion hole by 2029.”
A key reason why the CTU “wish list” would balloon the district’s budget shortfall, year after year, is $2.4 billion in additional spending to hire 2,500 additional teachers assistants and at least 4,650 other new personnel, including everything from librarians and “restorative justice coordinators” to “Climate Champions” and “gender support coordinators”! This in a district whose enrollment has fallen by roughly 80,000, or 20%, just since 2010.
Relentlessly pushing to put additional nonteaching staff on government school payrolls is just one of a host of ways in which Big Labor effectively lowers teachers’ salaries while purporting to do the opposite.
Another is union bosses’ bitter opposition to pay incentives for educators who do their jobs exceedingly well and/or are well qualified for “hard-to-fill” teaching positions. As veteran journalist Steven Brill, one of America’s most perceptive observers of teacher unionism, correctly observed during a recent interview, the most sure-fire way to infuriate Weingarten, other than to say a bad teacher “should be fired,” is to say a good teacher “should get a bonus.”
Critics of Weingarten, Pringle and Co. often lament how they put the interests of teachers over the interests of schoolchildren, but the sad reality is that characterization actually gives the AFT and NEA union hierarchies too much credit. The actual primary objective of the teacher union brass isn’t helping kids learn or ensuring government-school teachers get as sweet an employment deal as possible. To paraphrase Stanford political scientist Terry Moe, the real focus of AFT and NEA chiefs is threefold: members, money in union coffers, and power in politics.
Greer is the senior research associate with the National Institute for Labor Relations Research
