Teacher Unionization

With the recent strike of the Chicago teachers, an interesting question is posed: Are teacher's unions helpful?  America says "no".  As you can see from the attached image above, since 1976, the general opinion of the unions have received a negative connotation.  The image is from the article, Polling Shows Most Americans Think Teachers Unions Have Hurt Education Quality. Why does the public seem to think the unions lower education quality?  After some research, in most districts teacher compensation, or salaries, makes up 80% of the budget.  That means that only 20% of the budget is left over for school advances, sports, extracurriculars and so on.  Teachers are strongly protected by their union when it comes to pay cuts and other aspects of financial "equality", which they basically control.  Being unionized, they can essentially refuse pay cuts so schools are forced to dip into that remaining 20%, which makes school less enjoyable, which makes children hate their lives more, which makes for lower willingness to learn, which makes for lower marks, which makes for lower quality of education.  A lot of teachers get tenured in as little as working at a school for three years, which pretty much ensures they cannot get fire no matter how much they suck at teaching.  Basically, with teacher unions, there is no way to improve the quality of school and education when they are taking 80% of the money allocated to school districts.  In a lot of cases even, teachers receive a 4% annual salary upgrade.  Teachers really do not have it all that bad like people tend to think, they get free health care (in most cases for life) for themselves and their families, extraordinary job security and much better benefits than those in the private sector.


Source:
http://www.michiganreview.com/archives/2857
http://reason.com/blog/2012/09/10/polling-shows-most-americans-think-teach