Teachers' unions holding their members back

An outdated industrial relations framework cossets teachers and promotes militancy, writes MARTIN HAMES*.

After submitting to his compulsory training, the good potential teacher lands in an antediluvian industrial relations environment, where the mediocre are protected and the good discouraged.

Even when the Employment Contracts Act was transforming labour relations in the private sector, teachers remained on detailed, centrally negotiated salaries and conditions.

The New Zealand Educational Institute, which represents primary teachers, and the Post Primary Teachers Association had by the 1990s become two of the most powerful unions in the country.

There is nothing wrong with unions as such: private sector unions played a responsible role under the Employment Contracts Act. The problems come when unions are given monopoly powers - when employers are forced to deal with unions, or to bargain collectively, whether they want to or not. The union will then attempt to use its powers to extract maximum resources for its members - resources which must come from other groups in society.

Most New Zealanders appreciate that when well-paid vets strike at a highly inconvenient time for farmers, or watersiders carve out grossly inefficient work practices for themselves, or airline pilots start rolling stoppages just when the holiday season is getting underway, these uses of monopoly power are utterly contrary to the general welfare.

However, there seems a greater reluctance to apply standards of common sense to the behaviour of our teacher unions - a reluctance to appreciate that, by definition, the interests of teacher unions and the interests of schoolchildren will often differ.

By retaining centralised wage bargaining for teachers, governments permitted industrial relations in education to remain stuck in a time warp.

The teacher unions were allowed to adopt the screeching demeanour of militant organised labour, with strikes, demonstrations, working-to-rule and rolling stoppages. They also jealously guarded their role in centralised bargaining.

Because of the cosy cartel between government and unions:

* It is difficult to sack a bad teacher. It used to be virtually impossible, short of the type of scandalous misbehaviour that would titillate readers of a British tabloid newspaper.

Yet from our own schooldays we all remember lazy or incompetent teachers. If a principal has a bad teacher in his school, often his best hope is to see that person shift elsewhere - eventually.

Various devious strategies can be employed to that end. Needless to say, playing pass the parcel does not solve the problem for the system as a whole. The children suffer.

Competent and conscientious teachers end up subsidising the lazy and the useless.

* Centrally determined salaries and conditions lead to shortages in key areas. For instance, there has long been a shortage of good maths and science teachers. There can also be regional shortages of teachers.

* There is only a weak connection between pay and performance. Many good teachers are underpaid, while bad teachers are overpaid.

It is a characteristic of labour monopolies that they vigorously resist attempts to introduce more competition into any system - for the most obvious of reasons. One teacher unionist recently described flexibility and choice as the "F" and "C" words of the 1990s. He wasn't joking.

Almost anything which gave parents more choice, or schools more flexibility, seemed to be anathema to the teacher unions, which often put up the most flagrantly specious arguments in opposition.

Thus, the teacher unions opposed the abolition of zoning, which increased parental choice within the state sector. They opposed the introduction of the Targeted Individual Entitlement scheme, which paid for a limited number of poor children to attend private schools of their choice.

That scheme may have been a success in the eyes of the children and their families, but it was opposed by the teacher unions.

The unions also waged a long and successful battle against bulk funding teacher salaries in state schools.

The teacher unions have become, if anything, more extreme in their political stance over the past generation. Today the unions spend a great deal of time blaming "society" for the problems in our schools.

The political stripe of the NZEI can be gauged from its recent extraordinary suggestion that the Maori language be made compulsory in schools.

We can all approve when schoolchildren display a genuine desire to learn Maori: the Maori heritage is part of New Zealand. Making Maori compulsory would be a wholly different matter.

Quite apart from the practical difficulties involved in training all those teachers, it is hard to imagine a more certain recipe for European and Asian backlash, and for growing racial tension: children would be compelled to learn a language spoken in no other country on Earth, and whose literature to date is minimal to say the least.

As for the PPTA, a few years ago Phil Raffills commented that in the 1970s he was "proud to be a teacher and happy to be a member of the PPTA because it was a professional organisation. It's completely lost its direction in the past 25 years ... It's a union now, as much a union as the Engineers Union".

Ultimately, much of the problem is that the teacher unions today represent existing teachers - not potential teachers or teachers as they might have developed had they been placed in a more favourable environment.

Many teachers know deep down that the schools in which they teach are not performing. Some know deep down that they themselves are not performing.

Many teachers are also insufficiently versed in the subjects they are teaching. They naturally fear competition - from people with different qualifications, and from schools where things are done differently.

It all leads to a shrill defensiveness on the part of the unions.

A wide variety of compounding circumstances have led to the doleful fact that our teachers, as a class, are undereducated, overpoliticised, overstressed, overobstructive and underperforming.

* This is an extract from The Crisis in New Zealand Schools by political commentator Martin Hames, which is published this week.