The Challenge
The most important policy adopted by any school or school district is its contract with its teachers. Yet new and aspiring school board members in Illinois have few accessible guides to a collective bargaining process that will determine how teachers are hired, placed, compensated, rewarded and disciplined.

A New Tool for Better Policy
There are more than 5,500 active school members in Illinois’s 870 school districts.  Additionally, tens of thousands of men and women across Illinois aspire, and indeed will, serve as a school board member over the next five, ten or twenty years. A new publication of the Illinois Policy Institute – “Bargaining for Better Schools: An Introduction to Collective Bargaining in Illinois”– will introduce them to the important task that lies ahead.

Through the 1984 Illinois Education Labor Relations Act (IELRA), the Illinois General Assembly enacted collective bargaining requirements between educational employees and their employers in order to create more “harmonious” relationships between the two. Unfortunately, the nature of collective bargaining is adversarial and often serves to create tension between employees and their employers, rather than promote harmony.

While attempting to provide a level playing field, the Illinois General Assembly and subsequent judicial interpretations have altered and reformed the public education collective

bargaining process in ways that decidedly favor organized labor. Due in large part to the collective bargaining process, Illinois public school teachers now enjoy highly favorable benefits and competitive salaries, as well as tenure rights unheard of to private-sector workers. Many experts have noted that unions have maintained their advantage in the bargaining process due to their vast resources.

Taxpayers — and new or potential school board members — often lack the training that would allow them to understand the collective bargaining process. As a result, procedural matters obscure the larger policy concerns at stake during contract negotiations. Understanding collective bargaining ahead of time should help level the playing field between entrenched interests and relative newcomers to the process.

By clarifying the collective bargaining process in general, the new primer published by the Institute aims to help readers who are hoping to impact local school district policy to feel more at ease doing so. By extension, perhaps more citizens will decide to run for school board, more journalists will understand the local balance of power between labor and administration, and more taxpayers will understand exactly how many of the biggest spending decisions are made.