Do Canadian Teachers Unions Make Education Worse?

A recent Free Press article painted a depressing picture of life inside many U.S. public schools. Who, according to the Free Press, is to blame?

“…The teachers unions, by making bad teachers unfireable, are the primary obstacle to improving schools. Consider who the villains in [the] story are. They are the teachers who did not assign homework; the teachers who didn’t show up to class; …the staff who sat by idly as kids tore each other apart in the cafeteria; the absentee principal who couldn’t be bothered to respond to emails. All of these people are protected by the union, unfireable except for the gravest of offenses.

There are obviously many American schools where real education happens and plenty of teachers - even unionized teachers - who care deeply about their work. But the point made by the Free Press is that the underlying structure and incentives common to at least some unions feed horrible outcomes.

Do teachers unions in Canada present similar threats to students’ success and well being? Any attempt to answer that question will require some background.

For the most part, Canadian teachers unions exist as large, province-wide institutions that are effectively embedded in the governance structure of public education.

How deep does the structural integration go? In Ontario, for example, a teacher in the publicly funded system is legally required to belong to the one of four provincial teachers unions - each corresponding to a publicly funded school system. BC goes even further, with all 60 public boards bargaining with the BC Teachers Federation through a common employer organization (BCPSEA). Those arrangements would tend to inflate the power of the unions.

In contrast to Canada’s relative uniformity, the experience faced by American teachers will depend on the particular state where they work. 36 states require school districts to bargain collectively with teachers, nine states permit but do not require bargaining, and six states prohibit collective bargaining altogether. It’s reasonable to assume that unions in at least some of those 36 “mandated” states self-moderate their activities based on the possibility that an unfriendly state government could disrupt their business models at any time.

As an aside, that state-by-state variability makes it possible to compare results. As the National Council on Teacher Quality dryly reported:

“Research finds that collective bargaining is associated with higher salaries for teachers, but research is inconclusive on the outcomes for students.”

To a large degree, Canadian teachers organizations aren’t just labour unions tasked with collective bargaining. Their mandates also include professional development and standards, legal representation, and education policy advocacy.

Those activities can translate to serious political power, perhaps even greater power than what’s enjoyed by their U.S. colleagues. And some of that power can be aimed directly at provincial governments - because the unions are effectively negotiating with them.

And it’s not just political power. The larger U.S. unions famously spend a lot of their financial resources on overt activism. As I’ve written, the American Federation of Teachers directs 22 percent of the $190 million in annual dues paid by their members to political lobbying.

There’s no way to know exactly how much money teachers unions in Canada spend on political activism. But based on financial reports from Ontario’s four unions, a reasonable estimate would place their total annual spending on such activism somewhere between 12 and 20 million dollars.

Depending on the larger context, that might not necessarily be an insane figure. But the ability to spend like that certainly adds to an organization’s political clout. How might unions be using that power?

One possibility is for shielding teachers under performance review. Ontario, for example, has a formal performance-appraisal process for teachers facing complaints. A school board can in theory terminate a failing teacher, but the process involves jumping through multiple hoops.

The collective agreement lets unions challenge aspects of that process. At least one Ontario agreement, for example, explicitly gives the union the right to challenge a performance-appraisal report that could lead to termination.

If a school board actually dismisses a teacher, the union can demand the dispute moves to grievance arbitration. The union doesn’t necessarily have to prove that the teacher is competent or effective in the classroom. On the contrary, unions can force employers to prove they followed the rules and had sufficient evidence to justify dismissal.

So the problem isn’t necessarily that arbitrators are sympathetic to bad teachers. Instead, it’s that proving incompetence is difficult, particularly when the evidence consists of subjective assessments of teaching quality.

Having said that, dismissals do sometimes happen. CanLII database data covering ten years of arbitration cases involving the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, reports 21 decisions where the complaints against the teachers were upheld. Four of those led to suspensions of between one and six months, three led to revocation of teaching certificates, and the rest resulted in weaker consequences that included reprimands and publication of the decisions. There were zero outright dismissals.¹

However, those numbers suggest a selection-effect hypothesis, where the 21 CanLII cases are just the visible end of a much larger funnel. In other words, there may have been many more cases where administrators decided that the costs of working through the process outweighed the educational benefits required to remove bad teachers.

Consider what it would take to successfully move through all of these steps:

Administrator notices poor performance
↓
Informal intervention / coaching
↓
Formal Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA)
↓
Unsatisfactory TPA
↓
Improvement plan / additional observation
↓
Second unsatisfactory TPA / review status
↓
Possible third unsatisfactory TPA
↓
Board considers termination
↓
Union grievance / settlement / resignation / retirement / reassignment / arbitration
↓
Possible report to OCT
↓
OCT investigation
↓
Possible caution/admonishment/remedial undertaking
↓
Possible Discipline Committee hearing
↓
Published decision

So it’s possible that the numbers we’re seeing substantially understate the real number of terrible teachers. It’s also plausible that the cost, procedural burden, and uncertain outcomes associated with efforts to get rid of dangerous teachers convince some administrators or boards to opt for less drastic alternatives, or to do nothing at all.

This could be particularly relevant when the unprofessional behavior involves in-class indoctrination for politically-charged causes - like teachers who pressure students to support designated terrorist organizations like Hamas. Even assuming a principal opposes such behavior, who would want to expose himself to the kind of firestorm that would surely inspire?

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Here’s some more related reading:

1. Which is not the same as saying that no teachers were dismissed for cause during those years. It’s possible that such dismissals did occur with the cooperation of the union.