One of the simplest ways that local and state lawmakers can increase collective bargaining rights for school employees is to make collective bargaining mandatory with public employers. This is what New Mexico did in 1992 – the state passed its first public employee bargaining statute that would expire in 1999.  The law expired after the state’s Republican governor vetoed the legislature’s attempt to reauthorize the statute.  It was not until Democratic Governor Bill Richardson took office in 2003 that the legislature successfully passed a new version of the original bargaining law. One study compared student achievement statistics between school districts that did not have mandatory bargaining and those that did during 1999 and 2003 – it found that while SAT stats increased, high school graduation rates decreased. The study stated that this may have been caused by collective bargaining agreements that had to honor voluntary transfers in reverse order of seniority, meaning that more senior teachers (who were also often higher performing) could concentrate themselves in higher-income, higher-performing schools. Although this trend is troubling, states could create or amend their collective bargaining laws that do not require transfers to be honored if done by more senior staff.

Another idea that has been implemented is known as “professional unionism,” where the union assumes a partial stake in all policies implemented by the school district, thereby expanding the scope of bargaining and promoting a working environment that is focused on problem-solving rather than zero-sum negotiations. One school district that has adopted a version of professional unionism is the Toledo City School District in Ohio – among other things, the district has established peer review-based teacher performance evaluations rather than management-driven ones. Under this system, the union is more focused on judging its members’ professional standards instead of preparing to defend its members from management’s harmful reviews.  Additionally, the teacher’s union in Toledo collaborates with school district administration to select textbooks, develop curriculum, implement school improvement plans, and establish reading and math academies to improve early literacy and computational skills.