There's apparently a growing interest in Michigan in giving teachers unions the right to bargain with their districts to ban "privatization" of public school activities.

Your editor is sympathetic to the idea that school districts might prefer to bargain over wages, salaries and working conditions with the representative of a teachers' union rather than set the rules by fiat or negotiate with every individual teacher. But the extension of bargaining to all variety of management decisions, for example, assigning teachers to schools based on their own choices according to seniority, rather than where managers believe they can do the most good, takes too much authority away from the citizens who elect school boards preceisely to make such high-level policy decisions.

Putting a district's right to outsorce any school service in the collective bargaining arena can only constrain management flexibity still further. In the private sector setting it may or may not make sense for managers to agree not to pursue the outsourcing option. But giving school districts that authority shifts an unwarranted amount of political power from voters to employees. The target todate has been the outsourcing of cadeteria and maintenance services - but the Michigan bill would extend to core teaching and learning functions. Clearly it would cover direct school contracting, but your editor's guess is that it would also include banning the right of a school district to exercise its chartering authority.

It's simply bad public policy to close off important organizational and management flexibity, by giving parties with a structual incentive to oppose structural reforms more power to do so.