Union influence on teacher pay

Published in San Diego's North County Times, April 9, 2010

This newspaper's editorial board has issued an invitation for the community to engage in a discussion of how to improve our schools, narrowing the topic to five areas: teacher tenure, class size, school finance, union influence and leveraging technology. My thoughts about teacher tenure and union influence were shaped by five years of teaching high school English, followed by a 30-year career in public university administration.

Recent studies show that as many as half of all beginning teachers leave the profession in five years. I was a member of that group. When I left teaching it wasn't because of the pay, or that I didn't like working with students, or that I was a failure in the classroom. My principal offered me a pay raise to persuade me to stay.

I quit because I saw no career advancement as a classroom teacher and had no interest in being a school counselor or principal. Had there been a career track leading to a "master teacher" status, with a modified teaching load and responsibilities for mentoring beginning teachers, I might have happily remained in teaching.

Instead, I took a pay cut and an extension of my work year from nine to 12 months to accept a job working with students as a college admissions counselor.

I wonder if other former teachers have left the classroom for similar reasons.

My brief teaching career began in a small rural school in Washington in 1965, at an annual salary of $4,800. An online inflation calculator tells me that would equal the buying power of $33,000 today. If there was a teachers union at the time, nobody told me about it. But there is one today. This year's union-negotiated salary schedule in my old school district shows a first-year teacher's pay has risen to $34,000. Union influence over the years had boosted a novice teacher's buying power by a whopping $83 a month.

The Vista Unified School District's 2009-10 salary schedule lists a beginning teacher's pay at $38,771. That would be the equivalent of $5,450 in 1965 buying power. I'd say the ghosts of Sam Gompers and Jimmy Hoffa are not exactly exchanging high fives about union clout over teacher pay in those two school districts.

While most would agree today's teachers are not overpaid, some say unions are to be blamed for making it hard to get rid of bad teachers and impossible to reward the best. In a future column I'll have more to say about why I think blaming unions is often used as a smokescreen to hide administrative incompetence and a lack of financial commitment to school reform.