Bottom line is that like in any profession from law to medicine to teaching, there are going to be great ones, good ones, average ones, lousy ones and a certain percentage of horrible ones. Most of those professions weed out SOME of the garbage by using market forces but I’ve still seen my share of incompetent professionals from all walks of life. It’s part of the reality of being human. Some of us are not as good at what we do as others. Wishing unions away won’t significantly change that. My conversations with friends and relatives in Texas and other right to work states indicate even higher levels of dissatisfation with the teachers there.

You want better teachers? Pay for them! Make the salaries and working conditions desirable enough to have more applicants than openings. Do it over a period of years. And retain the best of the bunch with long term financial and professional gains. You do that and the issue of unions vs. no unions becomes secondary. Continue to run schools by expecting multi-degree owners to work for the lowest wages among any profession? That’s just not common sense.

Massachussets is not Eden, but it was 3rd in adults with a Masters or higher.

You are right, especially in regard to the urban centers. Still, low educational attainment and low rates of unionization might stem from related sources, but there’s unlikely to be cause/effect between the two.

Jonathan

And Massachusetts is Eden? The Northeast has also had its share of educational challenges – de facto segregation, massive immigration, large urban centers with entrenched areas of violence and decaying infrastructure.

But you are right — the picture is complicated. That is what makes the simple-headed statements of Jobs and Boortz so depressingly absurd.

I am certain that you have stumbled on real correlation, but I doubt there is a cause and effect relationship.

Think of the states with the lowest educational attainment. Think of the states with traditionally lower levels of unionization.

Now think of the places where slavery lasted the longest. Think of the places where cotton, rice, and tobacco were grown as cash crops. Think of the regions that industrialized relatively late…

There’s a whole bundle of things leaving the south behind the rest of the US, in many categories. Education is a piece of that.

Jonathan

By Phyllis C. Murray

Re.Boortz exclaimed, “Look, Al Qaeda, they could bring in a nuke into this country and kill 100,000 people …. It would be a terrible tragedy, but the teachers unions in this country can destroy a generation.”

The destruction of a generation has never been caused by teachers’ unions in this country. If we look back in history, one would see it was the long-term effects of educational deprivation of African American students in Prince Edward County Virginia ( 1954-1959) which led to what has been dubbed as “The Lost Generation and The Crippled Generation by reporters and researchers. ” Bagby And it is sad to say, yet true, white students who could not afford to attend the segregated private schools were also a part of the lost generation and crippled generation. And this has had and will continue to have a crippling effect for generations to come.

Surely, if we look back even further we are reminded:” with the ending of slavery and the emergence of quasi-freedom, Negroes were only partially educated…the huge masses were left handicapped in the shadows of ignorance.” Martin Luther King 1964.

The American public school system has to be protected. Teachers’ unions must also be protected. Teachers’ unions advocate for all students. Many unions,like the UFT and AFT, have been historically in the forefront of the civil rights/ human rights movement. Therefore, teachers unions have a very special place in the matrix of public education because they help to ensure democratization in education.

Phyllis C. Murray
UFT Chapter Leader

My opinion is based on several things. Before I get to that, I would love to arrange a public debate on this subject between you and another expert. Let me know if you are interested in this.

In any case, my opinion is based on:
1. Data
Numerous studies have shown that the most important determinant of student achievement is teacher quality AND that there is enormous variability amongst teachers including significant numbers that show basically little or no progress at all with respect to educating students.

2. Experience
I have visited and spoken to a large number of principals and teachers over the years in the NY public school system. The vast majority discuss this issue as a problem. Many of the most successful principals put this issue at or near the top of the list of problems. The vast majority of teachers agree that there are many teachers in the classroom that simply shouldn’t be there. Even UFT employees that I talk to will not deny that contention in one on one conversations with me.

3. Other Opinions
A large and growing number of other people that have looked closely at the system have reached similar conclusions. You might suggest that they are all right-wing union-haters, but I think you know this isn’t true. Many of them are Democrats and most of them have no incentive to attack unions.

4. Logic
It seems logically obvious to me that an extreme difficulty to terminate teachers that can’t get the job done is a bad thing.

Where do you get your opinion from? Are you denying that there are some teahers in the system that shouldn’t be teaching our kids? Again, I would love to arrange a debate between you and a greater expert than myself.

Ken

The whole thing seemed so insulting to me, and so ridiculous that, like I said, I looked up the right-to-work states and then measured them against the rest of the states on the 2005 National Assessment of Education Progress (“The Nation’s Report Card”). I did five or six different kinds of comparisons and here is what I discovered. almost half the states (22) are right-to-work states, and yet:

Grade 4 ELA: None of the 7 best-scoring states are right-to-work states. (By best scoring in this example, I mean the states that have the greatest percentage of students achieving at basic, proficient, and advanced levels combined.)

Grade 4 ELA.. Once we factor out basic mastery, and look only at proficient and advanced students, only 1 of the top 8 states is a right-to-work state (Virginia in slot number 5)

Grade 4 ELA: Only 9 states have a (somewhat) low failure rate (less than 30 percent). Only 2 of those 9 states with low failure rates are right-to-work .

Grade 8 ELA: The highest average score on this test was 274, earned by students in Massachusetts, a strong union state (MA does well on all the tests). Massachusetts was followed by Maine, and then North Dakota and New Hampshire Of these top four states, only North Dakota is right-to-work.

Grade 8 Math: The top three states with the highest average scores are not right-to-work.

Grade 4 Math: When we look at state average scores, 4 of the 5 top averages belonged to states that are not right-to-work.

In Grade 4 Math – Half the right-to-work states fall above the national average, and half fall below. Only one of the four top states is right-to-work.

Could I have made a mistake here? Absolutely. The numbers are written small on the charts and the charts are not that user friendly. I had to do a lot of adding and subtracting. But in every tabulation I did, right-to-work states, with their bias against unions, did no better, and generally worse, than the rest of the country.

I realize too that there are lots of factors, and it will take full-time researchers, and not this blogger to sort it all out. However, even when I looked at breakdowns by ethnicity and economic class, the trends were the same.

What is more, it is hard to see how these kinds of numbers, even with a thousand caveats, can lead anyone to the conclusion that the teacher unions are worse for this country than terrorism (Boortz), or that “our schools have become unionized in the worst possible way” (Jobs at Apple).

As I have written in the past, I feel that it is too difficult to terminate ineffective teachers in NYC. Only a very, very small part of our society functions with an arrangement in which the key performers are extremely difficult to terminate for poor performance. It is very hard for people that run super-effective organizations, like Steve Jobs, to understand how such an arrangement can work well. I wonder how many (any?) UFT members appreciate where Jobs is coming from with respect to this issue.

Ken