Teachers’ Unions and the Decline of the United States Economy

Part 1: A History of Underachievement

For nearly a half century, the American public school system has been the laughing stock of the world community. Today, high school graduates in the United States have far fewer math, science, and language literacy skills than their counterparts in other developed nations, not to mention their counterparts from previous generations. The U.S. economy has suffered as a result: GDP growth has slowed, jobs have been outsourced or filled by foreign firms, and the overall health of the economy has become increasingly unstable. Many economists believe that the United States will never be able to regain the prestige it held in the twentieth century. Much of the blame for this decline can be traced to teachers’ unions. In the United States, teachers’ unions make it extremely difficult for public administrators to fire teachers who do not perform. This coercion serves two purposes: it discourages competition (after all, why would anyone work hard or try to excel if they knew they could not be fired?) and it ensures that teachers’ wages remain low, effectively keeping qualified, incentive-driven individuals out of the education system. The cumulative machinations of teachers’ unions over previous decades are evidenced in the high unemployment rate, ballooning trade deficit, and ever more vulnerable national security. If the education system is not righted soon, the United States will confront a future that even Malthus could never have predicted.

Since the 1960s, professional educators have tried to instruct students using numerous methods, including New Math, open classrooms, and Whole Language; notwithstanding these educational fads, the quality of the teacher has always been the single greatest factor in determining how students perform. In fact, researchers have proven that the quality of the teacher matters more than class size, teaching method, technology, or curriculum. Even the quality of the school, statistically speaking, does not matter as much as the actual person who teaches the students. After all, large high schools can have as many as six different teachers teaching the same course, and even great institutions can have poor teachers.

As important as good, qualified teachers are, it is extremely difficult to determine a teacher’s ability by reviewing his or her resume or certifications. Teaching can be taught to a certain extent, but for the most part, the ability to teach is innate. Some individuals are naturally competent to control rambunctious children, lead by example, and inspire original thoughts and ideas. Others, no matter how many certifications they acquire or how prestigious the college or university they attended, simply do not have the interpersonal characteristics or leadership qualities necessary to be effective teachers.

Education systems would benefit from incentive strategies that would compensate teachers whose efforts regularly produced high-performing students; such compensation would not only motivate teachers, it would create a competitive environment that would encourage teachers to constantly be thinking of innovative ways to teach their students. Out of these free market principles of supply and demand, new and improved methods of instruction would emerge. Such an approach underlies the recent focus of U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on teacher accountability and their institution of a new 4.3 billion dollar program, “Race to the Top,” where states have to devise new ways to identify great teachers, determine what makes them great, and produce more of them in order to win the “race” and the many millions in federal prize money.

“Race to the Top” could be the first step towards true reform of an educational system that has been a national embarrassment for decades. Since as far back as the 1960s, teachers’ unions, such as the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, have worsened the education system protecting poor teachers at the expense of students. During his 23-year tenure, Albert Shanker, the former head of the National Education Association, pushed for better conditions for teachers regardless of talent or effort. Today, after only two or three years with a particular educational institution, most teachers are given lifetime tenure, making it nearly impossible to fire them. In fact, 99 percent of all teachers are rated “satisfactory” by their school systems, because experience has shown that firing teachers often leads to costly and fruitless court battles with local unions. The fact that the Obama Administration has confronted them is significant, not only because teachers unions are major contributors to the Democratic Party, but because unions have grown even stronger in recent years.

Because teachers have not been held accountable for their performance, education has become an attractive profession for underachieving college students. A recent review by McKinsey and Company showed that in the 2000s, most elementary and high school teachers were recruited from the bottom third of college graduates. Other experts believe that teacher-education is the main problem. According to an article in The Chronicle for Higher Education, “teacher-education programs at many colleges have been labeled as underachievers and were allowed to slide by with poor grades … for too long, the colleges of education have been cash cows – with big classes and little quality control.” Either way, the fact that educational institutions are attracting poor students and producing undereducated teachers is unfortunate, considering that children who have weak teachers in consecutive years are far less likely to succeed. Even more tragic is the fact that the worst teachers are often assigned to teach the neediest students – minority children in inner-city schools.

In addition to accountability, compensation is another issue. The average teacher’s salary is dismally low when compared to the salaries of other professionals. Because teachers’ unions do not permit that bad teachers be fired, schools often try to improve student performance by wasting money on programs that are usually ineffective. Cities, as a result, are not able to devote as much of their public school system budgets to teacher salaries (much less to increasing compensation for demonstrably good teachers). In a survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, median annual wages of kindergarten, elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers ranged from $47,000 to $51,180 in 2008. The lowest 10 percent earned between $30,970 to $34,280, and in the 2005-2006 school year, teachers who had recently graduated from college earned an average of $33,227. By contrast, surgeons – the highest wage earners – average $181,000 per year; other highly paid professionals include lawyers (who earn $110,590 per year), political scientists ($104,130 per year), and astronomers ($101,300 per year). Moreover, teaching used to be one of the few jobs not denied to women and minorities. As society has progressed and become more inclusive, however, talented women and minorities have left the teaching profession to pursue higher-paying careers.


Part 2: Effects on Education

As America’s teachers as a whole continue to get worse, the country’s elementary schools and high schools continue to produce poorly educated students. Today, the average college freshman has to take remedial courses for subjects that past generations mastered during high school. According to a report issued by the Educational Testing Service, Americans barely reach the international literacy average set by advanced democracies. Several years ago, the United States ranked 12th in a literacy test given to a survey of adults aged 16 to 65. Graduates in recent decades were the primary cause of this fall; Americans who graduated high school in the 1960s ranked third, those schooled in the 1970s ranked 7th, and those schooled in the 1990s ranked 14th.

Although bad teachers have caused an across-the-board decline in education standards, students’ math skills have especially suffered. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) long-term trends (LTT) assessment data, U.S. high school students have fallen far behind their peers in other advanced industrial countries. In 2003, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), average U.S. test scores were well below test scores of other developed countries. By 2006, the gap had increased. While the top 10 percent of students throughout the developed world who took the assessment scored 615 or above, the top 10 percent in the United States scored an average of only 593. These scores do not bode well for the U.S. economy, for as President Barack Obama said in his speech to a joint session of Congress in February 2009, “Countries that out-teach us today will out-compete us tomorrow.”

Considering that improving the math scores of U.S. high school students has been the subject of policy debates for the last thirty years, it is puzzling how the country’s high schools have gotten away with undereducating their students. The situation is further complicated by conflicting indicators. For instance, since 1990, the average number of math credits a high school graduate completes has increased by 20 percent. Moreover, high schools claim that they are performing better, as indicated by an eighteen percent increase since 1990 in the average math GPA of high school students. A significant disconnect exists, therefore, between the increase in the number of math courses taken, higher student GPAs, and actual skills acquired. Either the courses have gotten easier over the years or the performance metrics have become less rigorous or both.

U.S. elementary and high schools are also failing to teach U.S. students basic science skills. The United States now ranks below thirteen other countries – including Japan, Germany, and South Korea – in the percentage of twenty-four year olds with a college degree in science subjects. Twenty-five years ago, the United States ranked third. Once a world contender in science and technology, the United States’ position has eroded as our public schools have failed to teach these subjects to the next generation. Considering that twenty-eight percent of teachers who teach at least one science class between the 7th and 12th grades do not have a major or even a minor in science and that sixty percent of all science teachers do not have a major or minor in science, the decline in science proficiency among U.S. students should not come as a shock. Once again, the main issue is one of compensation – for the few individuals who do end up getting degrees in science, there are simply too many other lucrative opportunities.

U.S. students who do not gain science skills in high school are obviously ill-prepared for college-level science courses. According to the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, by the time American students reach their senior year in high school, they rank below their counterparts in seventeen other countries in science literacy. In physics, U.S. high school seniors scored dead last among 16 countries tested. The National Science Teachers Association reports that just twenty-six percent of high school graduates scored high enough on the ACT science test to have a good chance of completing a first-year college science course. Not surprisingly, fewer and fewer U.S. students are becoming science and engineering majors, despite the fact that demand for these skills continues to increase.


Part 3: Economic Impact

In most countries, and the United States is no exception, education and training are cause-and-effect related to economic performance; in fact, economists generally consider labor quality to be among the most important contributors to a robust economy. In a recent article about education, Eric Hanushek, an economist for the Hoover Institution, wrote that, “The simple answers in the discussion of economic implications of education are that educational quality measured by cognitive skills … has a strong and robust influence on economic growth.” Skills acquired through education are essential to economic development. Time spent in school, however, will not lead to greater math and science proficiency unless children receive a quality education from well-qualified, effective teachers. While resources are important, the key barrier to quality education is a lack of incentives for both students and school personnel to improve learning outcomes. Improving the quality of schools in the United States will require profound structural changes to create these incentives.

As American students have become less skilled in science and mathematics, the economically critical engineering, information technology, and manufacturing sectors have stopped growing and are now in decline. For most of the second half of the 20th century, strong demand in the United States for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals fueled significant economic growth in these sectors. During that time, STEM professionals not only met labor demands for these sectors, they generated demand through the innovation of new products and processes. Since the mid-90s, however, STEM professionals have accounted for a declining share of total employment in the United States. In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine issued a joint report in which they found that “the scientific and technical building blocks of our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations are gathering strength.” As globalization continues to spread, markets continue to arise, and emerging countries continue to develop, demand for new engineering and technology products will be met not by the United States but by our foreign competitors.

The decline of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics sectors in the United States has also led to a deep trade deficit that has cost the country millions of jobs, lowered wages, increased national dependency on foreign countries, and destabilized the domestic economy. Since 1998, the U.S. has lost nearly 2.5 million manufacturing jobs that were either outsourced overseas or filled by foreign firms. Data from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis on imports indicates that payments for foreign computer and information services nearly doubled between 2001 and 2005. Imported research, development, and testing services tripled. As the trade deficit continued to increase during the 2000s, many economists worried that new surges of imports would further damage other domestic industries. So far, foreign lenders have provided the funds the United States needs to finance its deficit, but many economists believe that if foreign countries stop lending to the United States, the value of the dollar will plummet and interest rates will rise. As a result, credit will tighten, business investment will decrease, and the foreign goods we are now so dependent on will become much more expensive.

The effect of lost jobs on the U.S. economy can be seen by the slowdown in year-to-year GDP growth, which has been occurring ever since the 1970s. The technology boom jumpstarted the U.S. economy during the 1990s, and much of the growth during the first decade of the 21st century was driven by the financials sector and consumer spending. After the economy collapsed in September 2008, however, Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, stressed the need for the U.S. to expand its manufacturing base, claiming that the United States has outsourced too many jobs and that consumer spending and the financials sector would not be able to sustain the economy in the future. Indeed, since 2008 the manufacturing base has not been expanded, and economic forecasts for the next several years remain grim. Fifty percent of unemployed Americans have been out of work for more than six months, the U.S. would have to generate 400,000 jobs each month for three years in order to replace the number of jobs lost during the recession, and the unemployment rate is likely to remain close to six percent by 2015, even as the economy stabilizes. Furthermore, of the remaining U.S. jobs requiring PhDs in science and technology, 38 percent are now filled by foreigners, many of whom send money home to their families and therefore out of the U.S. economy.

In addition to widening the trade deficit, costing the United States jobs, and slowing economic growth, the decline in the number of U.S. students with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics degrees is threatening our national security. According to a report released by DARPA, the research agency for the Pentagon, the issue is of “national importance” and “affects our capacity to maintain a technological lead in critical skills and disciplines” on the international stage. The report claims that there is a downward trend in computer science degrees, despite the importance of these degrees in the Internet Age. As a result, our national security is at risk. DARPA writes:

"Our systems are becoming more complex, requiring more people with the
software engineering talent to manage and maintain them. Finding the right people with increasingly specialized talent is becoming more difficult and will continue to add risk to a wide range of DoD systems that include software development."

In an effort to reverse this trend, DARPA is accepting proposals for programs and initiatives to get American students into STEM careers, especially in computer science. The fact that the government is asking the public for help is worrisome, because it indicates that is has no solution to the problem. Considering that the poor quality of U.S. education today can be directly linked to the prevalence of poor teachers and that teachers’ unions that protect and promote poor teachers are gaining, not losing, power and influence, discrete, individual initiatives will more than likely fall short and the situation will only be remedied when the United States completely overhauls its educational system.


Part 4: Conclusion

The decline of the manufacturing, engineering, and computer science sectors, the trade deficit, and the increased vulnerability of our national security represent major problems for the United States. The country is losing the ability to sustain itself, and consequently, is becoming increasingly dependent on foreign countries. Millions of jobs lost during the Great Recession do not appear likely to be regained. Terrorism and the growth of other countries’ militaries pose ever-greater threats. If these trends continue, lost jobs and lower wages will lead to ever-lower standards of living coupled with ever-larger indebtedness, which in turn will lead to foreign governments demanding higher rates of return on U.S. Treasuries. Higher interest rates will result in even less consumption and business investment, which of course translates into further declines in economic growth. Potential terrorist attacks or wars as a result of a weakened national defense will harm tourism and lead to capital destruction (GDP would go up as capital goods are rebuilt, but the rise would not indicate true economic health). These trends and their respective problems can be directly traced to teachers’ unions. By discouraging competition and keeping wages low, teachers’ unions have kept qualified individuals out of the public education system and ensured that underperforming, undereducated rubes could keep their jobs. While up until now it has been students who have suffered most from the poor quality of American education, in the future, the entire nation will be sacrificed.