The current debate over the political agendas of education blogs [starting with Ed Sector's Kevin Carey, followed by responses from the AFT's Michele McLaughlin and Sherman Dorn] raises some interesting issues around the intersection of political commitment, policy debates and the educational blogosphere.
The most interesting blogs have a point of view, a distinctive — maybe even iconoclastic — perspective on the subject they cover. And that is a good thing, for it is that distinguishing perspective which makes them worth reading. It is far better, of course, if the point of view is also expressed in lively prose and if it is not entirely predictable. But the kiss of death for a policy blog, in education and in other fields, lies elsewhere — in a fear of advocacy, in a lack of political definition, in an absence of original and engaging voices.
In the best of all educational blogging worlds, there would not only be a diversity of blogs covering a wide range of points of political view, but they would be engaging each other in a vigorous, but intellectually honest and respectful, debate. The educational blogosphere would then function as a small version of Habermas’ well-known ‘public sphere,’ where an educated and informed public opinion on matters educational could take shape.
Unfortunately, a lot of educational policy blogs gravitate toward the ten second sound bite version of discussing issues and controversies. It’s far easier to write a few lines, as it can be squeezed into minutes, rather than hours, in front of the computer. There’s also the fear, not entirely without foundation, that some readers don’t have the patience to follow an extended argument, no matter how well constructed.
But the ‘quick and dirty’ ed blog posts have produced an unfortunate culture of short, dismissive put-downs, consisting all too often of ‘preaching to the converted’ and appeals to pre-existing prejudices. They have set into motion a dynamic that ends up in what one sees today on a number of educational policy blogs — comparisons of political adversaries to animals, making fun of other bloggers’ names, and so on. That is a poor substitute for engaging other’s ideas.
The exchanges around the Hoxby-Leigh “wage compression” thesis that inspired this post exemplify this problem. Kevin Carey was right to insist that the Hoxby-Leigh argument does not rise or fall because it was not published in a ‘peer reviewed’ journal or because it was put forward by an academic [Hoxby] who has, quite literally, never found anything but fault with teacher unions. These points are at best marginal, rather than dispositive, simply because they do not engage the actual arguments of Hoxby and Leigh.
But Carey goes on to commit the very same trangression he condemns when he suggests that the only reason for teacher unionist bloggers to question the Hoxby-Leigh thesis is an unthinking belief that teacher unions can do no wrong. Ed Sector bloggers at Eduwonk and The Quick and Ed have a point of view and are every bit as much advocates of that point of view in educational policy blog debates as the AFT bloggers at Let’s Get It Right and the UFT bloggers here at Edwize — the only difference lies in the particular points of view. Carey and fellow Ed Sectors bloggers would take umbrage, and with good cause, at the suggestion that their point of view makes them unthinking supporters of everything done in the name of charter schools, much less at a dismissal of their views on that basis. They should apply the same principle to others.
Sherman Dorn was right on target with the response to Carey that it was important to address and engage the actual substance and details of the analysis and policy in question. In the spirit of Dorn’s comments, let’s do just that.
It is generally recognized that there was a general decline in the aptitude of new teachers from at least the late 1970s forward. [Some argue that this trend starts in the early 1960s, but the actual evidence put forward by Hoxby and Leigh supports the later date, and at the very least, the trend is most dramatic from the late 1970s on.] Most scholars have attributed that decline to the fact that the civil rights and feminist movements had transformed the face of the American labor force in general, and the teaching force in particular, by significantly diminishing racial and sexual job discrimination. Historically, American education had relied upon talented women and people of color who had limited choices in work; after the late 1960s, entirely new fields of opportunity opened up for the those who had previously been caught in a captive, ghettoized teaching force. Hoxby and Leigh challenged this scholarly consensus, arguing that a post-1960s “wage compression,” the equalizing wage effect of collective bargaining conducted by teacher unions, was the major culprit in the loss of talented women. Women with greater aptitude won’t enter teaching, they argue, because the differential between what they earn and what less talented teachers earn is insignificant.
There are a number of fatal flaws in the Hoxby-Leigh argument. For starters, they simply ignore evidence that points in a direction different from their thesis. What was significant about the first decade of teacher union collective bargaining, from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, was the dramatic increase in teacher salaries. This pattern is uncontested in the scholarly literature. It was so significant that at a high point in the 1970s, the teacher union wage premium was 22%, according to one leading scholarly estimate [William Baugh and Joe Stone, "Teachers, Unions and Wages in the 1970s: Unionism Now Pays."]
Further, the equalizing impact of the first generation of teacher union collective bargaining agreements was in favor of women teachers and teachers of color. Historically, school districts had discriminated against women teachers and teachers of color in their salary schedules, sometimes overtly, by simply paying men teachers and white teachers more, and sometimes structurally, by paying high school teachers more than elementary school teachers, as there were many more men in the high school teaching ranks. One of the challenges faced by the first teacher unions to engage in collective bargaining [such as the UFT] was how to overcome that discrimination while maintaining union solidarity. In this context, the establishment of a single salary schedule, with differentials organized along the lines of educational degrees and course credits available to all teachers, was one of the important achievements of early teacher unionism. Women teachers and teachers of color benefitted most from that single schedule.
What is more, the evidence is that the decline in aptitude of new teachers increases significantly at the point — the late 1970s — when the momentum of this first decade stalls, and teacher salaries begin to stagnate. There are a number of factors that go into this reversal — probably most significant were the emergence of what political scientists called the ‘fiscal crisis of the state,’ exemplified by the 1975 fiscal crisis in New York City, and the rise of the right-wing ‘taxpayer’ revolts — but the stalling impact on the improvement of teacher salaries is quite clear. As the progress of teacher unions with regard to teacher salaries slowed seriously, the decline in new teacher aptitude picks up.
This evidence is disregarded by Hoxby and Leigh because it points to a conclusion quite different from the one they want to draw: far from being a cause of driving talented women and men of color away from teaching, teacher unionism and early collective bargaining agreements provided a powerful countervailing effect to the actual cause, the opening up of opportunities outside of teaching. The new teacher unions and new contracts made teaching more attractive, by equalizing salaries that had historically discriminated against women and people of color, by increasing dramatically the salary all teachers were paid, and by providing teachers with new, significant voice in the operation of schools. Insofar as teaching became a more attractive career, more talented women and people of color would choose it. It was the slowing of the initial collective bargaining momentum that accelerated the decline in new teacher aptitude.
At issue here also is the rigidly determinist and narrowly ideological view of teacher motivation held by Hoxby and Leigh. For their argument to be persuasive, one would have to accept the premise that talented women who were prospective teachers would be more concerned about the standing of their salary vis-a-vis other teachers than they would be about their real take home pay, and that they would be opposed to contractual practices that had ended collective discrimination against them because these practices precluded individual discrimination in their favor. Part of the reason why Hoxby and Leigh construct their argument around such implausible premises is because it is a brief for individual merit pay, and only a concern with one’s pay relative to other teachers would support the idea of ‘merit pay.’
But the Hoxby-Leigh premises also reflect the precepts of the ‘rational choice’/'public choice’ school within social science; Hoxby is one of the leading adherents of this school writing on American education today. According to ‘rational choice’/'public choice’ dogma, individuals are motivated solely by individual economic self-interest; at the root of all human interaction is the mercenary, maximizing pursuit of one’s personal material advantage. In this view, the world is a stock market, writ large. The idea that women and men might be attracted to teaching in no small part out of an altruistic sense of public service and nurturance, to make a positive difference in the lives of children, is ruled out on an a priori basis. Similarly, the idea that one might identify with other teachers and see a common interest of all teachers to be treated and respected as professionals, with voice in important school decisions and a professional salary, is also ruled out: there are only individual interests. Perhaps such a theory might describe some of what motivates professors of economics at Harvard, but it is provides little insight into the reality of American teachers. For most American teachers, teaching is a vocation, a calling — and not simply a job. American teachers want all teachers to be paid a fair professional salary, enough to secure a decent, middle class standard of living for themselves and their families.
When you see the world through the prism of ‘rational choice’/'public choice’ theory, it is not very difficult to conclude that a laissez-faire market is the solution to every problem. If you start from the assumption that teachers are completely atomized ‘market men’ maximizing their individual wealth, than you can conclude that individual merit pay will ensure that every teacher is a quality teacher. But when your conclusions are smuggled into the premises of your theory in that way, all that you have is an elaborate tautology, far from a convincing argument. And that, in the final analysis, is what the Hoxby-Leigh wage compression thesis is.
