Are Teachers Unions Hurting American Education?
During the 1996 electoral season, public schools and teachers’ unions have been repeatedly attacked by Republican candidates as the cause of intellectual and moral decline among American youth. The Institute for Wisconsin’s Future initiated an updated review of the impact of collective bargaining among teachers on the performance levels of school children. This document presents findings of their study, which examines the impact of collective bargaining along with that of region, family income, race, school spending, and levels of private school attendance. The study focused on the relationship between high, medium, and low levels of unionization among teachers and the test scores of public school students on the 1995 Scholastic Aptitude (SAT) College Entrance exams and the 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) fourth-grade reading tests in a state-by-state comparison. Findings indicate that student performance on the tests was significantly better in states with high
