How teachers unions impoverish teachers

Public school education is being strangled by three levels of bureaucratic regulation: local, state, and federal. Between 1950 and 2015, students in America’s public schools doubled, but the non-teaching staff increased seven-fold. The staffing increases were justified — if that is the word — by the need to implement state and federal regulatory mandates. But another important driver has been the teachers’ unions, which pushed for expansion of the non-teaching staffs so that they could unionize them and thereby fatten union coffers. Urban Democratic politicians supported the unions in this because the expanded union membership not only meant more money for the union leaders but also to the politicians to whom the unions are a major source of campaign contributions. In so doing, the politicians and teachers unions expanded the cost of education to the point that taxpayers could no longer afford generous educational budget increases, and teachers’ salaries were the first to suffer. Leslie Hiner, vice president of programs at EdChoice, says that “Public school teachers could have seen an $11,000 increase in their [annual] salaries if the increase in nonteaching personnel would have kept pace with, instead of wildly exceeding, the increase in students….This appears to be a conflict of interest for the teachers unions. Do they prioritize more members or a better deal for their existing members? For decades, it has been the former.”  [hat tip to Tori Hart in The Heartland Institute’s School Reform News.]

Click here to go to the previous Founders Broadsheet post (“Monday’s news (8/21/2017)”)