A Wall Street Journal article describes a new contract between Harley Davidson and it employees’ union. Harley’s management was threatening to move its motorcycle manufacturing operations from its home base in York, Pennsylvania, to a new site in Kentucky. To prevent this the union agreed to workforce cut and increased flexibility for management to hire workers on an as-needed basis. The cuts at Harley were painful, but there seems to have been general agreement that this was the only way to save existing jobs. That part of the story has little relevance to public school negotiations, but I was struck by this paragraph:

The union also agreed to slash the number of job classifications to five from more than 60 and allow for much greater flexibility in moving workers from one task to another.

Although I’ve yet to meet a school board member who wants to sharply reduce the numbers of teachers as an economy measure, the public should be more aware that contract restrictions on ability-based assignments are likely to protect the weakest teachers at the expense of the kids they teach.

Here’s an example — with enough details changed to protect my sources. In response to parental and local employer interest, a school offers an especially appealing elective. Lots of students sign up in the first year, but enrollments drop sharply after that. The evidence points to a poorly qualified instructor with the necessary paper credentials and seniority, but a reputation for mediocre work in his non-elective courses. (But there’s nothing bad enough to warrant an “unsatisfactory” rating.) A highly qualified instructor is available to teach the course — one with a track record her colleagues agree is outstanding — but she can’t be offered the course because the mediocre teacher ranks her. In the end, the elective is dropped “for lack of demand.”

I don’t know if any school districts have as many instructional job classifications as Harley Davidson, and I think most of the credentialing rules are set by PDE, not local contracts. Some limits on management discretion help maintain instructional quality by preventing assignments based on favoritism. Others merely protect incumbents from competition from their own better qualified faculty colleagues. More transparency is contract negotiations would at least legitimize open analysis of the issue.