A new way to bargain with, and pay, educators

There’s a lot of worry and hand-wringing everywhere in Michigan about the costs and quality of our public schools.

Folks in your neighborhood — and everywhere else in the state — are trying to figure out how to get better results in return for our growing taxpayer investment and — on top of that — what now looks like a multi-hundred- million dollar deficit in the School Aid Fund.

Maybe we really do need to partly reinvent the wheel.

So here is an admittedly and consciously radical question that might stimulate some much-needed debate.

What if the paycheck for your kid’s teacher came from Lansing rather than your local school district?

That’s right. What if all school employees became state employees? Could that be an effective way to jump-start some of the reforms so needed in our education system? It’s no secret that former Gov. John Engler liked this idea a lot but was talked out of it by nervous aides. Now, in recent weeks it has been forcefully advocated in my presence by some pretty highly placed folks in Lansing.

Here’s how it might work. Every three years or so, you’d have one big set of contract negotiations between the various unions representing school employees and state education authorities.

One result might be a statewide pay scale that directly links teacher pay to educational outcomes.

If things were settled with one big negotiation, you could bake merit pay for top performers into the system. This would be an especially good time to do that, now that every school needs to put in place our tough new required state school curriculum.

In an age when we’re struggling to emphasize math and science, does it really make sense to pay a physical education teacher the same as somebody who teaches physics?

Should a teacher who really can’t get Algebra II across to his students be paid the same as one whose kids consistently lead the state in their scores on advanced placement math exams?

And with the state negotiating wages and fringes, one result could be one big health care plan that would be competitively bid to maximize efficiency and minimize cost to the taxpayers.

You could even begin to get a handle on extremely expensive educator retirement costs by making sure all new school employees move from traditional defined benefit plans (pensions) to defined contribution plans (like the 401k plans now so prevalent in the private sector.) Schools now spend an average of $1,200 per pupil on health insurance and pensions, according to the Citizens Research Council.

The respected, non-partisan CRC also predicts that as it now stands, one out of every three dollars going to schools will be eaten up in health care and pensions in little more than a decade.

There would be other financial benefits to having the state doing the negotiating. Local school districts would not longer have to pay high-priced labor lawyers and tie up assistant superintendents time in conducting all those negotiations. (Remember, there are 549 school districts in Michigan; that’s a lot of lawyers and contract negotiators!) That alone should produce substantial savings, money that could go right back into the classroom.

And while they’re at it, state bargainers could put pressure on both unions and local school districts to consolidate all non-instructional functions into the Intermediate School Districts, where better technology and economies of scale could save millions.

This is not a small matter. Philip Cusick, a professor of education at MSU, told the Detroit News that 25 years ago some 70 per cent of employees in education were teachers.

Now, only 49 per cent — less than half — of them are.

Does central bargaining go on elsewhere in state government? It certainly does — here and elsewhere. The state of Hawaii converted its teachers into state employees, while Michigan State Police work under uniform statewide contracts.

Incidentally, many state administrative employees are represented by the United Auto Workers union. That means this idea isn’t union busting. The state would still have to negotiate with the various unions that represent teachers, bus drivers, custodians, etc.

Naturally, there are a couple obvious drawbacks to this modest proposal. First: If you have one great big negotiation with all school employees, you will always have the possibility of one great big statewide teacher strike every few years, anti-strike laws or no.

The second flaw runs deeper, and has to do with our deeply embedded idea, dating back to pioneer days, of local control of schools. That’s why we have 549 local school districts – count ‘em! – each supposedly a bastion of what local folks want from schools.

But in practice, it’s been tough to get all 549 locally elected school boards to tackle the kind of reforms the entire system needs.

Some of them are too small, too poor, or both to be able to realistically offer the kind of sophisticated 21st century education Michigan students have to have.

So if we’re really serious about reforming the employment and management side of our school system, we need to begin thinking outside the box. Considering making all school employees state workers is an example. Possibly there is a better answer — but this is just the kind of transformational question we need to start asking.

We need to challenge assumptions, not just about our schools but about the structure and operations of our entire public sector.

And we need to make some fixes, soon.

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Phil Power is a longtime observer of politics, economics and education issues in Michigan. He would be pleased to hear from readers at ppower@hcnnet.com. Phil Power is president of the Center for Michigan. However, these opinions and others expressed in Phil Power’s columns are individual opinions and do not in any way represent official policy positions of the Center for Michigan.