The Return Of Jay Greene And The United Cherry Pickers

Diane Ravitch’s common sense counterfactual on the relationship between teacher unions and educational achievement has engendered quite the firestorm on the Flypaper blog of the Fordham Foundation.

If teacher unions were half of the obstacle to educational achievement postulated by ideologues on the ultra-right, Ravitch asked, why is it that the state with the consistently highest educational achievement, Massachusetts, is also among the national leaders in teacher union density, and has some of the strongest teacher unions? And why is it that Finland, which consistently appears at the top of international comparisons of educational achievement, is also among the international leaders in union and teacher union density?

The denizens of the ideological right in education weren’t about to take that salvo sitting down, and they responded. Read the whole exchange, at least to date, here: Mike Petrilli posing the issue, Ravitch making her case in response, Jay Greene weighing in against Ravitch, Sol Stern taking on Greene, Greene responding to Stern, and Stuart Buck rushing to Greene’s defense.

Jay Greene dismissed Ravitch’s inquiry on the grounds that “isolating the effect of teacher unions would require a rigorous social science research design that could identify the influence of unionization independent of other factors.” He cited an essay of  Caroline Hoxby, an academic of the hard ideological right who regularly preaches the virtues of laissez-faire markets and the vices of unions, as the only piece of scholarly research which meets these specifications. In “How Teachers’ Unions Affect Education Production” [The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 111, No. 3. August 1996], Hoxby argued that there was a positive correlation between strong teacher unions and higher drop out rates.

Greene is up to his old “cherry picking” tricks here, citing the one study which supports his position while ignoring the many which do not. There is a small body of scholarly literature on the subject, and Hoxby’s essay is clearly the minority view; there are more noteworthy studies showing a positive relationship between teacher unionism and educational achievement. Lala Steelman, Brian Powell and Robert Carini, “Do Teacher Unions Hinder Educational Performance? Lesson Learned from State SAT and ACT Scores” [Harvard Educational Review. Volume 70, No. 4. Winter 2000.] makes that case based on correlations between the presence of teacher unions engaged in collective bargaining and high SAT/ACT scores, and F. Howard Nelson and Michael Rosen, “Are Teacher Unions Hurting American Education? A State-by-State Analysis of the Impact of Collective Bargaining on Student Performance” [Milwaukee, WI: Institute for Wisconsin’s Future: October 1996.],  makes that case based on correlations between the presence of teacher unions engaged in collective bargaining and high SAT and NAEP scores.

Two reviews of the scholarly literature are available on the Internet: Robert Carini’s “Teachers Unions and Student Achievement” [in School Reform Proposals: The Research Evidence. Alex Molnar, editor. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2002. ; the link is to a version of the chapter available from the Educational Policy Studies Laboratory of Arizona State University ] and the essay of Randall Eberts, Kevin Hollenbeck and Joe Stone, “Teacher Unions: Outcomes and Reform Initiatives” [University of Oregon Department of Economics Working Papers]. Both conclude that the weight of the scholarly literature supports a positive relationship between teacher unionism and educational achievement.

For reasons I will take up in a subsequent post, I think there are good reasons to be skeptical about all broad stroke generalizations about teacher unionism and educational achievement, whatever the scholarly apparatus supporting them. But if you think that the scholarly literature on the subject is a guide, it clearly comes down in a place quite different from that suggested by Greene: this is a movie we have seen many times before.

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