Strangley Mixed Impact of Teachers Union in NM

From Burlington Free Press- In an article in the Yale Law Journal, Benjamin Lindy finds that collective bargaining had the effect of raising SAT scores and lowering graduation rates. The “results suggest,” he writes, “that mandatory collective bargaining shifts the focus of schools away from lower-performing students toward higher-performing ones.”  Why might that be? His best guess is that higher-quality teachers used their transfer rights, under their contracts, to move into schools with higher-quality students, leaving the less-experienced, less successful teachers preponderantly in the schools with low-achieving students. Then in the years without collective bargaining, when transfer rights went out the window, better teachers were more likely to be assigned to the high-poverty, low-achieving schools.  In other words, by Lindy’s reckoning, collective bargaining favored the high achievers and made matters worse for the low achievers.  More News New Mexico

Strangley Mixed Impact of Teachers Union in NM