By Victor Skinner
EAGnews.org

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A new study from the American Action Forum highlights the major issue dragging down K-12 education in the United States:

Union collective bargaining.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

The study synthesizes numerous studies that illustrate the impact of collective bargaining on the education system and compares four large urban school districts –  two with collective bargaining and two without.

“The paper compares student-performance data from … New York City and Chicago (both of which require collective bargaining), with data from Charlotte, N.C., and Austin, Texas, urban districts in states where collective bargaining is banned for public employees,” National Review Online’s Andrew Stiles reports.

“The two different situations reveal how collective bargaining is inflating salaries, compensation, and job security while it’s strangling policies that could help student achievement.”

The 2011 data shows that about one in five Chicago fourth graders could do math at grade level and about 18 percent were reading at grade level, far below the national average. It was a similar story in New York City.

Students in Charlotte and Austin, however, performed above the national average on both measurements.

The study also looked at how performance-based teacher evaluations play into student achievement. It notes the work of existing studies from professors at Harvard and Columbia who concluded the quality of a teacher is the key component of student learning and plays a big role in their success in life.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

“ … (S)tudents assigned to teachers classified as ‘high-value added’ … attend better colleges, earn higher salaries, and are less likely to have children as teenagers,” the news site reports. “Furthermore, simply replacing a ‘low value-added’ teacher with an average one can increase students’ lifetime earnings by as much as $1.4 million.”

The obvious conclusion is the restrictive policies that result from collective bargaining – particularly in cities with powerful unions like New York City and Chicago – put teacher “employment rights” ahead of the best interests of students. The study notes that three out of four states recognized by the National Council on Teachers Quality as the most effective at removing bad teachers and recognizing good ones do not mandate collective bargaining with teachers unions.

Education reformers, however, are making some progress. The study notes a dozen states now require student achievement data to be incorporated into teacher evaluations, something teachers unions have long opposed.

The bottom line: “(I)f teachers unions continue to oppose such (reform) efforts, our students will continue to fall behind,” according to the report.