This summer, the nation’s two major teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), changed leadership. The NEA’s Dennis Van Roekel replaced president Reg Weaver, and the AFT’s Randi Weingarten replaced Edward J. McElroy. The transitions provide a good opportunity to step back and rethink the role of unions in increasing teacher quality.

Critics see unions as an unproductive force in education, generally, and in teacher quality issues, particularly. At the 1996 Republican National Convention, in his acceptance speech, Bob Dole famously said he had no quarrel with teachers, but he thundered at teachers unions: “If education were a war, you would be losing it. If it were a business, you would be driving it into bankruptcy. If it were a patient, it would be dying.” He continued: “And to the teacher unions I say, when I am president, I will disregard your political power, for the sake of the parents, the children, the schools, and the nation.” More recently, at a December 2007 Republican presidential debate in Iowa, candidates fell over one another attacking teachers unions. Mitt Romney, for example, called teachers unions “the biggest obstacle to change in education.” The main critique on teachers’ quality issues is that unions protect incompetent teachers and block proposals to reward good ones.

At their best, however, as the collective voice of teachers, democratically elected union leaders should be at the forefront of promoting higher teacher quality. Under the leadership of the legendary AFT president Albert Shanker, for example, the AFT unleashed numerous proposals that cut against traditional orthodoxy in an attempt to turn teaching from mere occupation into a true profession. With polling data suggesting that younger teachers today are particularly interested in ways that unions can improve educational quality, it may be time for a resurgence of union leadership in this area (Duffett et al. 2008).

A good touchstone for reform today is a vision Al Shanker laid out in an April 1985 speech, “The Making of a Profession.” There, Shanker provided a conceptual framework that tied together a number of educational reforms — better teacher pay, a national teacher test, differential teacher pay, and peer review — under a rubric of teacher professionalism. In the speech, Shanker outlined a classical definition of what it meant to be a professional and urged steps to make teaching more like medicine and law. A professional receives a liberal arts education, then specialized training, and must pass a rigorous exam before beginning to practice. She participates in an internship, is guided by mentors, and participates in reviewing the performance of colleagues. Once these professional responsibilities are met come the reciprocal set of rights: greater autonomy and higher compensation.

In this article, I suggest that the new leadership of the NEA and AFT could boost teacher quality by pushing efforts in four areas:

• raise the wages and benefits of teachers and the status of the profession
  
  
• support a rigorous exam for entry into the profession
  
  
• support innovative types of performance pay and career ladders that will lure good teachers into the profession and keep them in the classroom
  
  
• support efforts to remove inadequate teachers from the profession through teacher peer review