Teachers unions protect incompetent teachers at students' expense

The claim

Teachers unions, through tenure protections, seniority rules, and adversarial contract negotiations, make it effectively impossible to remove underperforming teachers. The result is a public school system that tolerates — and by protecting them, institutionalizes — mediocre instruction. Students, particularly those in low-income schools who most depend on excellent teaching, bear the cost. The reform argument, popularized by Davis Guggenheim’s 2010 documentary Waiting for Superman and advanced by education reform organizations throughout the 2000s and 2010s, holds that union resistance to accountability systems is the primary obstacle between the current state of American public education and a dramatically better one. In this framing, tenure is a jobs program masquerading as an educational institution.

The mechanism

The causal chain proposed by the individual claim runs as follows: (1) unions negotiate tenure protections and dismissal procedures that require extensive documentation and due process before a teacher can be removed; (2) this makes the marginal cost of dismissal so high that administrators do not attempt it, even for clearly ineffective teachers; (3) ineffective teachers therefore accumulate in the system, disproportionately in high-poverty schools where administrative capacity to build dismissal cases is lowest; (4) students in those schools receive years of below-average instruction, compounding into large achievement gaps.

The mechanism has a coherent internal logic and is not entirely wrong. There is genuine research, particularly from Eric Hanushek and Raj Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff, showing that teacher quality has large effects on long-run student outcomes and that the distribution of teacher quality is wide. If poor institutional design systematically protected the low end of that distribution, the harm would be real and substantial.

Where the mechanism breaks down is in the empirical chain between unions and teacher quality. Due process is not the same as irremovability. Most union contracts require documentation of poor performance and a remediation period before dismissal — procedures similar to those required in many non-union white-collar settings for legal and HR risk management reasons. The conflation of “requires process” with “impossible to fire” is the critical overstatement in the popular claim.

The evidence

Actual dismissal rates contradict the ’nearly impossible’ narrative. Research by Loeb, Kalogrides, and Béteille (2012) and NCES Schools and Staffing Survey data indicate that US teachers are dismissed at approximately 2.1% per year — a rate that is low by some comparisons but not dramatically out of line with dismissal rates in other professional occupations requiring graduate-level credentials. The more significant constraint is that administrators frequently choose not to initiate dismissal processes, which is a management decision rather than a union contract limitation. Research on principal behavior consistently finds that documentation burden, not legal impossibility, explains most non-removal of low-performing teachers. Jacob (2010) found that when Chicago implemented an accountability policy that directly incentivized principal attention to teacher performance, dismissal of low-performing teachers increased substantially — within existing union contracts.

Finland is the fatal counter-case for the strong claim. The OAJ (Trade Union of Education in Finland) represents approximately 95% of Finnish teachers, making it one of the most unionized professions in any country. Finland consistently ranks among the top 10 nations on PISA in both reading and mathematics. If union protections were the primary obstacle to educational excellence, Finland’s outcomes would be inexplicable. What Finland demonstrates is that union membership and strong educational outcomes are compatible — and indeed that the conditions that make teaching an attractive profession (job security, professional autonomy, competitive compensation relative to alternatives, respected social status) contribute to a high-quality applicant pool. South Korea and Canada, also with strong teacher unions, similarly outperform the United States in international assessments.

The SES achievement gap dwarfs the teacher quality gap. Sean Reardon’s landmark 2011 analysis found that the income achievement gap in the United States grew by approximately 40% between children born in the 1970s and children born in the 2000s — a period during which union membership in teaching changed very little. The gaps Reardon documents are driven by income stratification in neighborhoods, differential access to early childhood education, housing instability, and the growing divergence in cognitive enrichment investments between high- and low-income families. Teacher quality contributes to achievement outcomes, but the variance explained by socioeconomic structure is many times larger than the variance attributable to differential teacher quality within schools. Blaming unions for a trend that accelerated in direct proportion to income inequality, and not in proportion to any change in union strength, is inconsistent with the data.

Value-added measurement and Race to the Top provide a policy test. Following the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative (2009–2011), many states adopted or expanded value-added measurement (VAM) systems as part of teacher evaluation, explicitly reducing the influence of union seniority norms. This constitutes a partial natural experiment. The resulting evidence is not encouraging for the reform hypothesis: Darling-Hammond et al. (2012) found that high-stakes VAM evaluation systems did not produce consistent achievement gains, and multiple studies found that VAM scores were too unstable year-to-year to serve as reliable individual teacher assessments (American Statistical Association, 2014). The predicted improvements from tenure reform did not materialize at scale.

Where the claim has real purchase: seniority rules and school assignment. The strongest specific finding supporting the concern about union contract provisions involves “last in, first out” layoff rules and voluntary transfer provisions that allow senior teachers to bid away from high-poverty schools. Staiger and Rockoff (2010) and Hanushek and Rivkin (2010) both document that teachers sort away from high-poverty schools as they accumulate experience — and that union seniority rules in some districts facilitate this sorting. The result is that the least experienced teachers are concentrated in the most challenging schools. This is a genuine structural problem that specific collective bargaining provisions contribute to. However, it is a specific, remediable provision in some contracts — not evidence that unions as institutions are anti-student or that collective bargaining itself degrades teacher quality.

The teaching pipeline and compensation. The union critique largely ignores the supply-side problem. US teacher starting salaries average approximately $42,845 (2022) — well below the earnings of comparable graduate-degree occupations in science, engineering, finance, and healthcare. The Learning Policy Institute estimated in 2017 that approximately 44% of teachers leave the profession within five years, creating chronic churn that harms school culture and continuity. Singapore, South Korea, and Finland all pay teachers at salaries competitive with other graduate professions and make teacher training highly selective. These choices, which union advocates support and which require funding commitments that anti-union reformers have not generally championed, do more to explain international performance gaps than any dismissal procedure.

Who benefits

The claim as a political instrument primarily benefits a specific coalition: charter management organizations seeking to expand market share in public education (KIPP, Success Academy, and their affiliated networks), foundations with explicit anti-union policy positions (the Walton Family Foundation, which has donated hundreds of millions to anti-tenure litigation and charter advocacy; the Broad Foundation’s superintendent training program; the network associated with Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children), and state-level Republican political coalitions seeking to reduce public sector union strength as a general political goal. Waiting for Superman was funded and promoted in close alignment with these networks. The specific framing of unions as the obstacle to reform serves to redirect accountability away from inadequate school funding, concentrated poverty, and political failure to provide competitive teacher compensation — substituting a villain (unions) for a structural analysis that would require more expensive and politically difficult interventions.

The counter

The steelman position is not that unions are faultless. Some union contracts do contain provisions — voluntary transfer rights, layoff-by-seniority rules, excessive documentation requirements for even egregious misconduct — that produce bad outcomes for specific students, particularly in high-poverty schools. The New York City “rubber room” (reassignment centers where accused teachers continued to receive pay while awaiting hearings) was a genuine pathology, eventually reformed through negotiation. Tenure decisions are sometimes made too quickly (after as few as two years in some states) and with insufficient evidentiary basis.

The strongest version of the reform case focuses on these specific provisions rather than on union existence itself. A school system that requires documentation of poor performance before dismissal is not obviously wrong — summary dismissal of public employees carries real risks of political interference and favoritism. What is defensible to reform is the speed of tenure decisions, the portability of seniority rules across school assignments, and the transparency of performance information available to administrators. These are arguments for smarter collective bargaining, not for destroying unions.

Moreover, the evidence on what happens when unions are weakened is sobering. Right-to-work laws have not produced measurable gains in state-level educational outcomes. The Louisiana, North Carolina, and Arizona cases — states with weakened or absent teacher collective bargaining — do not show the achievement gains that union-removal advocates predicted.

References

American Statistical Association. (2014). ASA statement on using value-added models for educational assessment. American Statistical Association. https://www.amstat.org/asa/files/pdfs/POL-ASAVAM-Statement.pdf

Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., & Rockoff, J. E. (2014). Measuring the impacts of teachers II: Teacher value-added and student outcomes in adulthood. American Economic Review, 104(9), 2633–2679. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.104.9.2633

Darling-Hammond, L., Amrein-Beardsley, A., Haertel, E., & Rothstein, J. (2012). Evaluating teacher evaluation. Phi Delta Kappan, 93(6), 8–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/003172171209300603

Hanushek, E. A., & Rivkin, S. G. (2010). Generalizations about using value-added measures of teacher quality. American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, 100(2), 267–271. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.2.267

Jacob, B. A. (2010). The effect of employment protection on worker effort: Evidence from public schooling (NBER Working Paper No. 15655). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w15655

Learning Policy Institute. (2017). Understanding teacher shortages: An analysis of teacher supply and demand in the United States. Learning Policy Institute. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/understanding-teacher-shortages

Loeb, S., Kalogrides, D., & Béteille, T. (2012). Effective schools: Teacher hiring, assignment, development, and retention. Education Finance and Policy, 7(3), 269–304. https://doi.org/10.1162/EDFP_a_00068

OECD. (2023). PISA 2022 results: The state of learning and equity in education (Vol. I). OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/53f23881-en

Reardon, S. F. (2011). The widening academic achievement gap between the rich and the poor: New evidence and possible explanations. In G. J. Duncan & R. J. Murnane (Eds.), Whither opportunity? Rising inequality, schools, and children’s life chances (pp. 91–116). Russell Sage Foundation.

Staiger, D. O., & Rockoff, J. E. (2010). Searching for effective teachers with imperfect information. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 24(3), 97–118. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.24.3.97