Teacher Labor Market Reforms: A Look Ahead to the Next Decade

This chapter outlines recent reforms to the teaching profession, and discuss where and how future policy change is likely to occur. It focuses on teacher evaluation, job security, compensation, and recruitment, and on collective bargaining agreements that teachers’ unions negotiate with their districts, and the authors conclude with the expectation that the next decade will feature new and ongoing debates over each of these issues. Teacher labor issues will continue to vary in their details by state, as do other areas of education law and policy. The chapter notes, however, that new changes to the teacher labor market are unlikely to be substantial enough on their own to change more fundamental economic, demographic, and sociological conditions that provide the backdrop to where teachers work and organize. The chapter also acknowledges that much remains hidden from view. As researchers and policymakers understand more about how children learn, the authors believe that the laws governing not only teachers and teaching but public education more generally will shift to incorporate those new directions—wherever they lead. For teacher advocates, such changes need not undermine the professionalism or the security of employment or of purpose that historically has drawn new educators into the profession. But all stakeholders should hope and expect that whatever new reforms occur—for teachers, their unions’, their contracts, and the schools in which they work—they begin from a perspective that places opportunity for children as the first principle of public education.