What do you know about teacher's contracts?

Teacher union contracts with their employers have been at the center of the national school reform debate since there there has been a thing called "school reform." Though many strong opinions exist that lock the debate into a for/against dichotomy, little is known about the contracts beyond those in the school district negotiating lair.

Education Sector, an independent think tank focused on education policy, points to a tool from the National Council on Teacher Quality that demystifies the issue. They have created a database of teacher union contracts that allow lay people to review and compare actual contracts.

From their website:

Despite increasing attention to contract reform, the public often has no idea what a typical teachers contract looks like. Although they are public documents, most contracts are not easily found on the Web sites of school districts or teachers unions; newspapers and local media do not publish them (and often offer only cursory coverage of the issues being discussed during collective bargaining negotiations).2 Meanwhile, those negotiations are often held out of public view, and the deals cut late at night. The documents themselves can be cumbersome, lawyerly, heavily influenced by side agreements and addendums, and generally hard for non-experts to figure out.

In 2007, the National Council on Teacher Quality launched the database "TR3" cataloging teachers contracts in the nation's largest school districts and allowing users to analyze contracts from 100 districts in 50 states along major dimension.3 For researchers and analysts, that database is a landmark step forward in understanding the role of contracts in the development and reform of human capital policies in education.

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