The Outstater

April 15, 2026

Unstacking Public Education

IF YOU DIDN’T already think it a bad idea to allow public-sector workers to hire their own bosses and set their own salaries in a self-serving fiscal doom loop then the headline this week in the Capital Chronicle should have been eye-opening:

“Union for ISTA Staff Files Unfair Labor Charges.” 

Yes, the teachers union’s own employees are suing to wrest management prerogative from the union just as the union has assumed such control from the state and in turn from the districts —   a sort of Russian stacking doll of management lunacy.

We’ve been writing on this for three decades now, so excuse the passion but dag nabbit it’s important: Public-sector collective bargaining doesn’t free teachers. Rather, it entrenches a privileged, oddly incompetent elite at everyone else’s expense, eroding accountability and making government less responsive and more expensive (think Brandon Johnson’s Chicago).

This foundation has argued that the 53-year-old Indiana Collective Bargaining Act is the reason that public education has stagnated. We have tried to show what should be obvious, that is, the predictable disfunction of government employee unions negotiating wages, benefits, pensions and work rules with politicians spending other people’s money.

But only crickets at the Statehouse. The union has successfully blocked every serious attempt to encourage individual school districts to pay faculty on the basis of value to the education mission. Rather, egalitarians rule, superior teachers getting less than they are worth and mediocre teachers getting more than they are worth — an Animal Farm formula certain to degrade any school over time.

Indiana’s collective bargaining agreements prioritize job security over performance. Teacher compensation is flat across the state with differences typically of only 10 percent for the same experience/credentials. With such a setup, firing the incompetent becomes nearly impossible, innovation stalls and resources flow to the least productive, DEI hires being particularly cherished. 

In effect, Indiana’s public school system is made up of 300 or so “Red Banner Tractor Factories,” to use the late Bill Styring’s description, all manufacturing the same product year after year, a product that nobody has said they want. Meanwhile, dedicated, talented and professionally called teachers go unrewarded.

Are there alternatives? For a survey of the literature, go to www.inpolicy.org and search “student-based budgeting” or “collective bargaining.” But don’t take our word for it. Begin by asking your preferred AI assistant for a comparison of public-sector unions with the more institutionally honest private-sector unions. Here is what our man Grok came up with: 

• In the private sector, unions bargain against profit-driven employers who face competition, bankruptcy risk and customer choice. If demands get too costly, the company can lose market share, cut costs elsewhere or go out of business. This naturally aligns incentives toward efficiency and sustainability. Public-sector unions face none of this.
• Public employee unions don’t just negotiate with neutral arbitrators — again, they bargain with politicians they help elect. These union members are major campaign donors, volunteers and voters in local and state elections.
• Finally, public-sector deals routinely produce back-loaded costs — especially defined-benefit pensions and retiree healthcare — that explode years later, long after the negotiating politicians have left office.

A solution? It would be politically bloody but Indiana’s Collective Bargaining Act can be repealed. Each school building can fashion a staff, a curriculum and a salary schedule as it sees fit. Let them succeed or fail on enrollment metrics, how well patrons think their particular school is handling its education obligations. 

Some schools will make bad choices and suffer enrollment consequences, Some parents will make bad choices as well, as they do in any case. The overall result, though, will be dozens of competing, accountable education strategies all doing their best to produce quality classroom learning, not union sinecure.

We’ve got nothing to lose. — tcl

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