NCTQ TR3 - Teacher Rules, Roles and Rights

About TR³

TR³ gives the public unprecedented access to the content of collective bargaining agreements, school board policies and state laws from all over the country. NCTQ presents and maintains these otherwise unwieldly texts in an online interface allowing policy comparisons across more than 100 districts and all 50 states. TR³ users can compare over 300 unique policies on a range of topics, including:

Teacher compensation
Evaluation
Hiring, transfer and assignment
Layoffs
Leave
Tenure

Context
The formal policies and agreements that establish the rules, roles and rights governing teachers have important consequences for what schools can and cannot do. Despite their importance, collective bargaining agreements and personnel policies too often escape public scrutiny. We aim to bring greater transparency to what is contained in these agreements. It is important to note however, that collective bargaining agreements do not exist in isolation. What can be negotiated by districts is shaped, and sometimes dictated, by state law.

Related Work
While there have been a number of efforts to analyze individual state contracts. NCTQ is the first to create a national, publicly accessible website that contains both the full text of agreements and a database that permits easy searches on key terms, unlimited analysis and comparison. To date, there has been no single source to go to in order to view and easily search these lengthy texts. Consequently, there has been almost no research on these contracts, despite their tremendous impact on schools.

Ensuring Accuracy
In designing the site, we recognized the need to build wide consensus in the education reform community. Both of the nation's largest teachers' unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) have provided us with useful feedback and will continue to do so. Each school district and local union has the opportunity to vet our data, make corrections and comment on the accuracy of our findings. We believe that fostering positive relationships with unions and district leaders is essential to the strength and integrity of this database.

Policies, Not Practices
This website tells you what the policies of a school district are. It does not tell you what the actual practices may be.

Many agreements and handbooks are silent on many of the questions that we ask in this database. In fact users may be surprised at the extent to which these formal policies do not address issues of importance to schools.

If you have questions on the database contact Emily Cohen at ecohen@nctq.org or 202-393-0020 x102.

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Click here if your district is not included on TR³

If your local district's agreement is not included on this site, you should be able to obtain a copy without too much trouble. Remember, collective bargaining agreements are public documents. They are often posted on the school district or local union affiliate's website, so it is certainly worth a quick search to see if the agreement can be downloaded. Some districts may also have hard copies sitting around and you may be able to walk into the district's HR office or union headquarters and pick one up.
If you do find a contract posted online, make sure it is still current. Sometimes teachers operate under an "expired" contract until the district and union negotiate a new one. This process can take anywhere from a couple of months to two years in some cases.
If your district's collective bargaining agreement is not posted on either the district's or union's website, you'll need to request a copy from the human resource or labor relations department of your district or from the teachers' union. Because these are public documents you should have no trouble in this request, but just in case, it is a good precaution to cite your state's Freedom of Information Act.
Be aware that there are often ancillary documents that complete the picture of your district's policies governing teachers. When making your request, it is worth asking if there are any MOUs (memorandum of understanding) in addition to the contract.
Once you receive the documents, keep in mind that these documents address formal policy and do not reflect informal practice. How districts may execute policy may differ from the way it may be explicitly written in the contract or board policy. The contract should be the first step of many to understand how districts handle personnel issues.
You can also use the same model we use to help frame your research. You can benefit from our own trial and error, asking the same questions that we do-many of them modified repeatedly to achieve more exact responses. View the list of detailed questions that we used to code the agreements in the database.

TR³ is the nonpartisan, authoritative source on local school district policy and collective bargaining. TR³ has data from more than 100 school districts and all 50 states. These districts represent 20 percent of public school students in the United States.