National Council on Teacher Quality launches website on working conditions
National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a Washington-based research and advocacy group, has launched a website that promises to shine a light on teachers' working conditions. It gathers the minutiae of union collective-bargaining agreements and state policies for the nation's 50 largest school districts into a consumer-friendly database that allows anyone to compare districts. NCTQ hopes to expand the database by year's end to include the top 100 districts. NCTQ Director Kate Walsh insists the site will help parents, policymakers, journalists, and others understand how teacher contracts work by giving them access to largely unfiltered information about teachers' workdays, salaries, benefits, and more. Teachers unions say the data could be misinterpreted—unions often agree to contract provisions to comply with local or state regulations, or contracts are hard to compare for other reasons, says Edward McElroy, president of the American Federation of Teachers. "It is important for the public to realize that labor relations are far more complex than what this database captures," he says. "This is just one layer of a three-dimensional onion." Bill Raabe, director of collective bargaining and member advocacy for the National Education Association, is concerned that users could draw "erroneous conclusions" from what they read. For instance, if a contract is silent on class size, it doesn't mean that the union did not address it. The issue could simply be dealt with by state law. "The contract is really just a piece of the picture," he says. Although the contracts are public documents, Andrew Rotherham, co-editor of the 2006 book Collective Bargaining in Education, notes they are not always accessible. He says he was "stunned" at the lack of information available in most districts. He points out that NCTQ’s database "moves you past the sort of anecdotes" that typically frame teacher issues. "This transparency is good for everyone."
USA TODAY
By Gregg Toppo
[Full story]
[Editor’s Note: The website is below.]
[NCTQ’s collective bargaining agreement website]