Yesterday was the last day of the first week of teachers being back to school. This year, I took on a new responsibility as the building rep for our local teachers’ union. My first task was to ask our teachers to review their contact information, sign, and date their contact forms. As might be expected, this year, there was a lot of discussion about the recent Supreme Court decision about public unions. I’ve always had mixed feelings about unions. I support the right to unionize and bargain collectively. It’s the implementation of some unions that give me mixed feelings, and so I can empathize with both those who are worried that this decision will reduce the rights of teachers AND those who don’t want to see their money spent on support of political candidates or ballot measures. I get it. I really do.

When I have mixed feelings about things, I try to look at research to help me make up my mind. I don’t like making decisions based on my gut. I like making decisions aligned with my core values and with long-term consequences in mind. Any decision can be a good one in the short term. In the case of unions, I have some of my own research to look at. I studied sanctions related to teacher misconduct in 12 states across a 10-year period. While I was looking primarily at the effect of legislated codes of ethics, I also looked at other variables–including union coverage. What I found was that as the percentage of public employees who were members of a union increased, the number of sanctions related to teacher misconduct decreased by a small percentage.

There are several possible reasons for this. One is that unions provide legal representation for disciplined employees, so some cases of teacher misconduct may never have made it to the teacher credentialing agency. However, unions don’t protect people from being fired for repeated misconduct; nor do they protect people who have committed egregious misconduct such as sexual assault or theft of public funds. The total impact of legal representation is likely smaller than the total impact of the very specific expectations outlined in collective bargaining agreements, as well as the education provided by union representatives to teachers. This helps both teachers (who I also found to sometimes be reprimanded for things they did not know were not okay) and schools (who obviously don’t want misconduct at their school showing up in the newspaper).

More importantly, it helps students. Collective bargaining agreements do more than outline wages and benefits. They provide exact hours that teachers are expected to work, carefully considered and crafted behavioral expectations that have been agreed upon by both the union and the school district, and an enforcement mechanism. Implemented well, unions have the ability to be a powerful force in training and retaining a high quality teaching force.

Are all unions implemented well? No. Does this solve the conundrum of political endorsements by unions? No. But it does give us something important to consider as we wrestle with this complex subject.