Edwize readers will recall the recent controversy among conservative education bloggers over the relationship between teacher unionism and student achievement. [Our comments, with a link to the debate, can be found here.]
In a rhetorical crescendo that is all too characteristic of educational discourse on the right these days, the Fordham Foundation’s Mike Petrilli concluded the controversy with the summary judgment that teacher unions were the enemy of all that is educationally good and right: “they are tenacious and need to be defeated, over and over and over again.” The supposed basis for this conclusion? The claim that Massachusetts teacher unions fought tooth and nail the educational reforms which made its current high academic achievement possible.
So it is with some interest that we read the just published report of the independent and widely respected public policy foundation MassINC, Incomplete Grade: Massachusetts Education Reform at 15. What this reports makes clear is that the conservative discourse on Massachusetts’ success left out the central piece. The 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act was, in significant measure, a response to a ruling by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court that the state had failed to meet its obligation to provide equal educational opportunity for every public school student. New Yorkers will recognize this case, McDuffy v. Secretary of Education Roberston, as an analogue of our Campaign for Fiscal Equity case. As a result of the McDuffy case, the system of educational funding in Massachusetts was reformed to provide all school districts with the minimum funding needed to provide that equal educational opportunity. Using six different possible measures, Incomplete Grade found that education funding in Massachusetts since 1993 had been equalized on every measure, and that equalization had taken place by raising the spending of the districts at the bottom. Massachusetts’ state education aid and general education spending increased significantly over the 1990s, and that additional money has been largely channeled into the classroom. “The main beneficiaries of the increased state spending have been districts that educate large shares of low income students [those who are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches] and those that educate large shares of students who have limited English proficiency [LEP].” [p. 6]
Despite the fact that it leads the United States in academic achievement and that it has made some progress in reducing the achievement gap, there is still much ground that needs to be made up in Massachusetts. Moreover, there is the danger that the current economic crisis will undermine its progress, much as the considerably smaller 2001 downturn did.
What is significant for the purposes of this controversy is the pivotal role that funding reform — increased expenditures on education and targeted aid to the districts with the largest concentrations of high need students — has played in Massachusetts’ advancement. But you won’t find any mention of that role in the overwrought conservative jeremiads against teacher unions for one simple reason: they were among the most outspoken opponents of that reform, and teacher unions were its strongest advocates.
