Addressing Teacher Quality Through Induction, Professional Compensation, and Evaluation: The Effects on Labor-Management Relations

Conventional wisdom has it that teacher unions are singularly concerned with enhancing the compensation packages of those whom they represent. Issues central to educational quality, from better teacher preparation to more rigorous professional evaluation, play second fiddle to the primary union focus on wages and benefits, according to conventional wisdom. However, the notion that teacher unions are interested only in improving salary levels belies an emerging truth in some school district-union partnerships. In the locales that are the subject of this article, union and management are creating a new text about labor-management relations. Minneapolis’s Achievement of Tenure process, Denver’s Professional Compensation system, and Montgomery County, Maryland’s Professional Growth System reflect very different kinds of labor-management agreements than are the usual subject of discourse and critique. In these places, labor-management agreements form the foundation of programs designed to improve the quality of teaching and levels of student learning.