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From Contracts to Classrooms: Covering Teachers Unions A P R I M E R F O R J O U R N A L I S T S CONTENTS 2 The Rise of Teachers Unions 5 How Unions Flex Their Political Muscle 7 Basics of Collective Bargaining 9 Understanding Teacher Compensation 10 Alternative Teacher-Pay Plans 11 Retiree Benefits: A Ticking Time Bomb? 13 Seniority Rules and Education Reform 14 Teacher Unions and Charter Schools 15 How Work Rules Shape the School Day 16 Behind Teacher Grievances 17 New Database Tracks Teacher Contracts 18 Contract Coverage Often Misses the Big Picture Perspectives on Teachers Unions 19 Tenure Investigation Hits a Nerve 23 A Labor Expert’s Tips on Covering Bargaining 26 The Education of a Beat Reporter 30 10 Ways to Improve Union Coverage 33 Why Unions Are Vital to School Reform 34 Books on Collective Bargaining 35 Experts and Additional Resources Joe Williams, a writer, contributor and speaker on education reform, wrote many of the articles in this primer. Williams has more than a decade of experience in covering education for newspapers, including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where he won numerous local and national awards for his coverage of that city’s private school voucher program, and the New York Daily News, where he covered the city’s public school system. The author of “Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Williams is a nonresident senior fellow at Education Sector, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank. It’s often been said that the teacher union contract is the single biggest influence on what happens in schools. Yet most newspaper stories about the collective bargaining process remain strangely divorced from what happens in schools, as if labor negotiations involve teachers and their unions but have nothing to do with kids and schools. Stories typically report on the average wage increase in the contract and quote both sides saying that each won or (disingenuously, often) that “kids were the true winners.” The Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Teachers College, with support from the Joyce Foundation, is publishing this guide to help reporters go much further and to provide historical perspective, practical advice and inspiration. Many of the pieces were authored by Joe Williams, a former New York Daily News reporter who has written about schools throughout the country. While editing these pieces, Hechinger Director Richard Lee Colvin and I recalled how heavily we relied on teachers unions for reaction, quotes and perspective during our many years on the education beat – mine at New York Newsday and Richard’s at the Los Angeles Times. Like many education reporters caught up in the daily grind and stymied by reticent or There’s more to uncooperative school board officials, we regularly sought out union contacts. In retrospect, we wished we’d also paid more attention to teacher unions and the contract, which is the compromise that representatives of school districts and teachers unions, the adults in the room, have reached contracts than meets on many issues that will have a great effect on children. the eye. Read all We might have probed deeper into issues like work rules and asked about the question Dan Weisberg, director of labor policy for New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, and others pose in this primer: How does every aspect of the contract influence teacher quality, performance, and student achievement? How many minutes are students being taught eac