Weaken unions to strengthen physics teaching?

Physics Today‘s offices are situated inside the Washington, DC, Beltway in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The county’s school system had an enrollment last year of 127 129, a budget of $1.71 billion, and a chronic difficulty in attracting qualified physics teachers.

A look at the county’s union-agreed pay scale provides a clue to the shortage. A teacher’s pay depends on just two factors: length of tenure and class of degree. In Prince George’s and other US counties, a new effective teacher would be paid less than an old ineffective teacher. And a high-school physics teacher would be paid the same as an elementary-school teacher of the same tenure.

To its credit, Prince George’s County tries to work around the rigid pay scale by offering hiring bonuses to teachers whose expertise is scarce and prized. Second-career teachers who are experts in their subjects but who lack a formal background in education are allowed to work for certification while teaching and drawing a salary.

Still, imagine how a young physics teacher might feel, after she’s spent her bonus and earned her certification, to find herself among colleagues earning twice as much as she earns, regardless of the effort required to master the subject or the effectiveness of their teaching. Imagine how she’d feel if she’s laid off in this recession because her state’s regulations protect senior teachers before junior teachers.

Working for their members—most of them

Unions work for their members. Without them teachers’ salaries would undoubtedly be lower, as my mother-in-law, a former gym teacher, found out. She had taken a break from her public school job to raise her son. When she reapplied to work for her former employer, the county pay scale had made her too costly. She had to settle for a lower-paying job at a private school.

But unions, it seems to me, work hardest for most of their members, not all of them. Young teachers are outnumbered by a cadre of veteran teachers whose interests the unions promote and defend. That bias affects physics and other areas that must attract young teachers to fill empty positions.

Uniform, rank-based pay scales are the norm in the military and in paramilitary professions like the police force. There, uniform scales promote camaraderie and unit cohesion. In schools, they might be justified because the teachers in a given school have to teach more or less the same students. But because those students are the same, a school should be free to pay higher salaries to teachers whose students learn more.

There is a growing movement to reward teachers based on their effectiveness. As Steven Brill reported in the New York Times magazine, its impetus comes in part from a growing federal role in US education. In a recent opinion piece in APS News, Judy Franz, the former CEO of the American Physical Society, cited the lack of merit-based pay as one of the reasons for the dearth of qualified physics teachers.

Freeing schools to pay their best teachers more would help retain talented physics teachers, as would reforming tenure rules. But to attract young physicists to the teaching profession in the first place, high schools should be freed from another union-secured restriction; they should be allowed to offer subject-based pay.