A couple of months ago, I warned, “We cannot possibly continue to move solely in the direction of ‘college and career readiness’ in History & Social Studies education without ensuring that ‘civic’ readiness is valued equally.” While our struggle continues in New York State, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) took an extremely promising first step towards assuaging my fears with the release of The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards. This document was intended for a targeted review by certain groups last month. Copies, however, are not difficult to find by searching.

Simply put, the proposed C3 Framework is brilliant. It is exactly what our nation needs to ensure civic life and participation is properly valued, and it is what the Social Studies teaching profession needs to ensure our discipline retains its unique and essential role within our education system. It is brilliant in its conception, its modesty and its usefulness as a document to inform policy and practice.

The C3 describes itself as a document that provides “states with voluntary guidance for upgrading existing social studies standards… [which] aims to support states in creating standards that prepare young people for effective and successful participation in college, careers, and civic life.” It is not another set of Common Core standards, but rather a framework to guide states as they seek to upgrade existing state Social Studies standards to align them with the Common Core. The work to create the document was led by Kathy Swan, a professor at the University of Kentucky, and involved representatives from state education agencies and from various social studies organizations, overseen by the CCSSO.

The primary brilliance of the the C3 is that it moves beyond the over-simplified debates of content vs. skills (the discourse in which the Core Knowledge Blog made a misguided attempt to engage with my previous piece for the Shanker Blog), and instead recognizes Civics as more than the sum of those two parts. Rather, it recognizes that Civics is about dispositions that lead to action. For students, this means that they will not only learn the story of history or explanations of economics and government. Nor does it mean, as many fear, that social studies courses will just become another site of reading and writing instruction, void of content or understanding, to improve students’ scores on Common Core-aligned exams. It means that as students’ develop skills, gain knowledge, and uncover understandings, that these gains will come from a position of inquiry, and will be applied, in hopefully meaningful ways, to the issues and audiences students’ face in their lives.

According to the Framework, to act with civic responsibility:

students need the intellectual power to recognize societal problems; ask good questions and develop robust investigations into them; consider possible solutions and consequences; separate evidence-based claims from parochial opinions; and communicate and act upon what they learn. And most importantly, they must possess the capability and commitment to repeat that process as long as is necessary.

The C3 framework begins with the act of questioning, and ends with the act of sharing knowledge and taking informed action. In between, it offers clear guidelines for disciplinary thinking and research. It is particularly strong in its definition of historical thinking and recognition of history as “interpretive.” The Framework describes these four stages as the “arc” of social studies. By repeating this arc of inquiry multiple times in a grade, year after year, it will create more than civic knowledge and capacities; it will create a civic disposition.

The C3 is also intelligent for what it is not: It’s not a list of content that students should learn. Those decisions are smartly left to the states, and I hope that states will leave those decisions to school communities. Any attempt to do otherwise would lead to a lowest common denominator approach, which, in the end, would not serve anyone.

Finally, the C3 Framework is very useful document. It clearly shows its own connections with the Common Core. It lucidly articulates expectations of performance for each part of each dimension at different levels. And it documents the research behind its work and recommendations. Kathy Swan and her team deserve high praise for this contribution to our field.

However, the framework is not perfect, which is not at all surprising, as it is just a draft. Its description of Civics and Political Institutions focuses too much on government, and would improve with additional emphasis on civil society and types of non-governmental civic institutions – e.g., churches, advocacy groups, non-profits, etc.

In addition, the draft’s expectations for Economic Decision Making would be stronger if it portrayed risks and rewards as dynamic rather than static considerations – that is, as factors that change over time. I hope the process of targeted review will strengthen the document in other small ways, without comprising its high quality and overall vision.

The C3 Framework represents a significant step forward for Social Studies teaching and our country’s civic life. Teachers and caring citizens should support its implementation.  I will be doing what I can to push New York to adopt it.

- Stephen Lazar

Every year, a few major media outlets publish high school rankings. Most recently, Newsweek (in partnership with The Daily Beast) issued its annual list of the “nation’s best high schools.” Their general approach to this task seems quite defensible: To find the high schools that “best prepare students for college.”

The rankings are calculated using six measures: graduation rate (25 percent); college acceptance rate (25); AP/IB/AICE tests taken per student (25); average SAT/ACT score (10); average AP/IB/AICE score (10); and the percentage of students enrolled in at least one AP/IB/AICE course (5).

Needless to say, even the most rigorous, sophisticated measures of school performance will be imperfect at best, and the methods behind these lists have been subject to endless scrutiny. However, let’s take a quick look at three potentially problematic issues with the Newsweek rankings, how the results might be interpreted, and how the system compares with that published by U.S. News and World Report.

Self-reported data. The data for Newsweek’s rankings come from a survey, in which high schools report their results on the six measures above (as well as, presumably, some other basic information, such as enrollment). Self-reported data almost always entail comparability and consistency issues. The methodology document notes that the submissions were “screened to ensure that the data met several parameters of logic and consistency,” and that anomalies were identified and the schools contacted for verification. So, this is probably not a big deal, but it’s worth mentioning briefly.

Partial, self-selected sample. Newsweek sent their survey to roughly 5,000 schools (I couldn’t find any description of how they were chosen). Around 2,500 responded, and these are the schools included in the rankings. There are over 20,000 public high schools in the U.S. (any one them, surveyed or not, can submit their data, but it’s not clear how many of the 2,500 were unsolicited). It’s therefore more than a little strange to call this list “the nation’s best high schools” when it seems to have considered only a small portion of the nation’s high schools, and a non-random portion at that – the schools that were surveyed and/or responded may differ in “performance” from those that weren’t surveyed or didn’t respond. 

Inappropriate interpretation of measures. The six indicators that comprise the rankings are all measures of student performance, not school performance (a distinction we’ve discussed here many times). Schools vary widely in the students they enroll. Every year, some high schools enroll incoming cohorts that are way ahead, whereas other schools must continually catch their students up. To be clear, schools can have a substantial impact on these outcomes, but the raw statistics, such as graduation and college acceptance rates, are predominantly a function of student background and prior schooling inputs (e.g., elementary/middle school effectiveness). Thus, the Newsweek rankings tell you far more about the students enrolled in a high school than the school’s actual impact on those results.*

In other words, Newsweek is not really ranking the high schools that “best prepare their students for college” as much as they’re ranking the high schools whose students are best prepared for college (or, more accurately, the high schools whose students are best prepared among the 2,500 or so that responded to the survey). This is one big reason why the top of Newsweek’s list is dominated by high schools that are either selective (e.g., magnets) or located in more affluent neighborhoods (i.e., have low free/reduced-price lunch eligibility rates).

To reiterate, even the best measures are highly imprecise and subject to all sorts of bias; isolating schools’ contribution to measured outcomes is extremely difficult. In addition, the utility of school performance measures can vary quite a bit depending on who’s using them and for what purpose. Rankings, including Newsweek’s, that are not quite appropriate for use in a formal accountability system might still be useful to, say, a parent choosing schools for his or her children (i.e., parents have an interest in their children being surrounded by high-performing peers).

That said, some publishers of these “best high schools” take a different, in many respects more thorough approach. Most notably, the U.S. News and World Report rankings, the analysis for which is done by the American Institutes for Research, include over 18,000 high schools. They also rely on publicly-available data rather than self-reporting (which is easier given their choice of measures), and part of the process of ranking schools entails assessment of outcomes versus statistical expectations that roughly account for subsidized lunch eligibility (i.e., residual analysis), as well as consideration of the performance of “disadvantaged subgroups.” This represents a rough attempt to address differences in the students these schools serve (at least in the first two stages of the three-stage process).

To put it mildly, the U.S. News rankings still require very cautious interpretation (for several reasons, a couple of which pertain to Newsweek’s as well). Nevertheless, given the considerable constraints, it is a fairly well-designed system (and one that required a lot of groundwork). None of these “best high school” lists is anywhere near perfect, but some are arguably better than others.

Overall, though, the most important point to bear in mind is that all of these rankings are potentially useful so long as they are presented and interpreted properly. First and foremost, in the case of the Newsweek or similarly constituted lists, there should be much stronger warnings about the sample, which includes only a fraction of the nation’s high schools (and a self-selected fraction at that). It’s not enough to simply report how many schools were surveyed and how many responded; that should be put in context.

In addition, the results of these systems, like all performance metrics, are to varying degrees confounded by the observed and unobserved characteristics of the students who attend the schools (as well as other factors). Depending on how one conceptualizes school effectiveness, this might be considered very serious bias, and so, at the very least, a more prominent discussion of these issues — one that is accessible to and likely to be seen by the average reader — might go a long way toward ensuring better interpretation of the rankings.

- Matt Di Carlo

*****

* To their credit, Newsweek did at least standardize the measures before combining them, which is more than one can say for most states’ school rating systems (and for NCLB).

NCTQ looks at 41 of the 50 largest districts in the U.S. (i.e., all but nine responded to the survey). Between 2008-09 and 2011-12, four out of five of these districts froze pay at least once. As would be expected, districts did so in different ways – sometimes by freezing step increases (or awarding them without associated raises), sometimes via lower (or no) cost of living adjustments, etc. It’s compelling evidence that public school teachers, like most U.S. workers, have felt the pain from the recession. This is useful information (also check out NCTQ’s TR3 database, a terrific resource).

There are, however, a couple of points worth mentioning about salary schedules, which may seem picky (or even obvious), but they do bear on the data presented in this report.

NCTQ (properly) calculates within-lane schedule raises as a function of two “components”: A salary increase from experience “increments” (teachers move up a step on the scale); and cost of living adjustments, or COLAs (typically, the entire salary schedule increases by a percentage every year).

In the report, these raises seem to be averaged across all the steps on the schedule for each district, which NCTQ calls the “average annual teacher raise.” They even compare the “average teacher raise” with the increase in median earnings among other occupations during this time period.*

There is, however, a very important distinction between the “average teacher raise” and the average raise on a given salary schedule. The basic issue here is that teachers are not distributed equally across the steps on the salary schedule. Or, put differently, each step does not “contain” the same number of teachers.**

For example, most basically, it is not uncommon for districts to have a fairly large proportion of teachers on the “top step” of the schedule (for their particular degree, or “lane”), particularly in districts in which there are fewer steps on the salary schedule – i.e., teachers reach the top step more quickly. These teachers do not receive step increases anymore, only COLAs (though some districts also grant “longevity” raises at points after teachers reach the top step). In these districts, the “average raise” may to some extent overstate how much of an increase teachers are actually getting.

Similarly, the raises for experience might be small at first and get progressively larger as one moves up the steps, or vice-versa. To the degree teachers are clustered in one “end” of the schedule rather than the other (or in one lane, if the lanes vary as well), the “average annual teacher raise” may be sending misleading information about what’s going on with the typical teacher’s pay in any given district. In other words, if the biggest raises occur in the later steps, and most teachers are located in the later steps, they are actually getting larger raises than the schedule average would suggest.

Finally, one should use caution in making inter-district comparisons. For instance, the 41 districts are ranked in terms of the “average teacher raise” they gave between 2008-09 and 2011-12. Some of them were negative, a few close to zero, while most were positive but rather small.

Even if one ignores the aforementioned issue of the distribution of teachers by experience (and it’s of course relevant here too), schedules vary widely in the number of steps they contain. In some districts, teachers reach the top step after just 7-10 years, whereas in others, it can take as long as 25 years or more. As a rule, schedules with fewer steps will tend to give larger proportional raises. It is therefore problematic to compare districts in terms of the “average schedule raise” without accounting for differences in the number of steps.

Overall, salary schedules transmit a great deal of information of how much teachers can earn in a given district, but you need to be a little more careful about conclusions regarding how much they do earn, on average. To be clear, there’s not much NCTQ could have done to address the issues discussed above, since it’s difficult to get data on the distribution of teachers across steps and lanes. But they are important to keep in mind.

That said, this report is useful, and it’s more than appropriate to conclude, based on the data, that teachers’ raises slowed down during these years, at least in these 41 districts.

- Matt Di Carlo

*****

* This general interpretation of the results was also repeated in the New York Times, among other places.

** As another way to think about this, let’s say you calculated the average of all the amounts, or “cells” (step/lane combinations), in a salary schedule. You wouldn’t call this the “average teacher salary” in the district, because some of those cells contain many teachers (e.g., top step of MA lane), whereas a bunch contain few or even none.

Now, I personally am not opposed to using these estimates in evaluations and other personnel policies, but I certainly understand opponents’ skepticism. For one thing, there are some states and districts in which design and implementation has been somewhat careless, and, in these situations, I very much share the skepticism. Moreover, the common argument that evaluations, in order to be “meaningful,” must consist of value-added measures in a heavily-weighted role (e.g., 45-50 percent) is, in my view, unsupportable.

All that said, calling value-added “junk science” completely obscures the important issues. The real questions here are less about the merits of the models per se than how they’re being used.

If value-added is “junk science” regardless of how it’s employed, then a fairly large chunk of social scientific research is “junk science.” If that’s your opinion, then okay – you’re entitled to it – but it’s not very compelling, at least in my (admittedly biased) view.

And those who hold this opinion will find that their options for using evidence to support their policy views are extremely limited. They should, for instance, cease citing the CREDO charter school study, which uses a somewhat similar approach – i.e., put simply, judging effectiveness by statistical comparison with schools serving similar students. In this sense, CREDO (and most of the charter school literature) must also be called “junk science.”

Furthermore, what is the case against calling classroom observations “junk science” too? Even when done properly — by well-trained observers observing multiple times throughout the year, observation scores also fluctuate over time and between raters, and they are subject to systematic bias (e.g., poorly-trained or vindictive principals).

You might believe that human judgment is a better way to assess performance than analyzing large-scale test score datasets, and you might be correct, but that’s just an opinion, and it hardly means that all alternative measures are “junk” no matter their policy deployment.

It’s also important to bear in mind the obvious fact that value-added has a wide range of research-related uses outside of high-stakes personnel decisions (including program evaluation). In fact, many of the conclusions from this literature are things with which few teachers would disagree – e.g., teachers vary widely in their measured performance, they improve a great deal during their first few years, etc.

In short, value-added models are what they are – sophisticated but imperfect tools that must be used properly. We can and should disagree about their proper uses, but calling the models “junk science” adds almost nothing of substance to that debate.

- Matt Di Carlo

Two events last week which might seem worlds apart provide evidence that working people around the globe are indeed tied together in King’s “single garment of destiny.”

In Texas, fourteen people died and up to 180 were injured in an explosion that obliterated a fertilizer factory and leveled the surrounding town. In Bangladesh, over 400 garment workers died when a factory building collapsed with thousands inside. Rescue and recovery operations continue to find additional Bangladeshi dead, with hundreds still missing. The human toll makes this the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry worldwide, even before the terrible final count is known.

Neither of these terrible events was “an accident.” In both cases, factory management engaged in dangerous and reprehensible conduct, creating entirely avoidable conditions that made these events possible, even predictable.

There was a history of environmental safety violations at the Texas factory (see here,  here and here). It warehoused large amounts of ammonium nitrate fertilizer — the main ingredient in the 1995 Oklahoma federal building bombing by Timothy McVeigh — which the owners never reported this to the Department of Homeland Security, as required by law. (In 2012 alone, the plant processed 270 tons of the explosive fertilizer.) Complaints by surrounding townspeople of noxious ammonia smells seem to have been largely disregarded, even though the factory had on hand large amounts of an extremely hazardous gaseous chemical, anhydrous ammonia.

In Bangladesh, large cracks appeared in the foundation of the illegally constructed factory building the day before its collapse, leading local authorities to ask for an evacuation (see here, here  and here). The owner of the building and owners of the garment factories on the building’s upper floors refused to comply. Since the garment workers knew they would be penalized three days of unpaid labor for every missed day of work, most felt they had little choice but to enter the building and go to work. The building owner and factory owners have now been arrested.

Clearly, the managements in both settings were greedy and unscrupulous. But it would be a mistake to write off these events as that and nothing more; both reflect larger economic and political realities.

The context for the Texas factory disaster is a decades-long corporate assault on workplace safety and health in the U.S., a campaign which has grown in strength with the decline in the American labor movement. After years of deregulation, U.S. occupational safety and health laws are weak and poorly enforced; oversight relies in significant measure upon corporate self-reporting. The factory owners had told the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that there was no ”worst case scenario” risk for fire or explosion at the factory, and that proffer alone was sufficient to make it a low priority for inspections: the last federal OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) inspection was nearly thirty years ago, in 1985. After decades of defunding, OSHA can maintain only a bare bones regimen of inspections, with a triage-like focus on the most critical situations. There were also Texas agencies charged with oversight, but they communicated irregularly with each other and the federal agencies, and lacked the necessary expertise for the work–as evinced in the decision to allow a factory to process and store such dangerous and explosive chemicals in the close vicinity of schools, a nursing home, and residential housing.

The context of the Bangladesh catastrophe is especially grim. Just last November, Bangladesh was the site of another horrific mass death of 112 garment workers in a factory fire. Workers died in such large numbers because they had been locked inside the factory by management and so could not escape the fire, a scenario eerily reminiscent of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City that provided the impetus for the first meaningful occupational safety legislation in the United States. Dangerous workplace conditions are widespread in Bangladesh’s garment industry, with over 500 workers killed by factory fires since 2006.  Bangladeshi garment factories provide textbook examples of “sweatshops.”

In both Texas and Bangladesh, the international political economy has set the stage for needless human tragedy on a mass scale. The “race to the bottom” that has decimated industrial unions and undermined industrial working conditions in the United States now finds its nadir in Bangladesh, the world’s second largest exporter of apparel after China. Bangladeshi garment workers earn 18¢ an hour; with monthly earnings of about $36, it’s highly unlikely that any of these workers will ever be able to purchase a single garment she has produced. Unbelievably, these wages represent an increase over even lower pay, a concession wrested from the government in 2010 by massive worker unrest. Working conditions are also among the most unsafe and exploitative in the world, as Human Rights Watch thoroughly documented in its October 2012 report on one Bangladesh company. With some of the lowest labor costs in the world, the Bangladeshi garment industry is exporting $18 billion of garments annually, and is on the cusp of a major expansion.

To maintain the low wages that attract foreign investment, Bangladeshi law restricts the development of free and independent unions and creates “export processing zones” for the garment industry in which unions are illegal. Bangladesh’s authoritarian government treats the garment industry as a national security issue and actively suppresses worker efforts to organize. The New York Timesreported last year that “a high-level government committee monitors the garment sector and includes ranking officers from the military, the police and intelligence agencies. A new special police force patrols many industrial areas. Domestic intelligence agencies keep an eye on some labor organizers.” And according to Human Rights Watch, over a dozen Bangladeshi union leaders are now facing spurious criminal charges.

The brutality of the repression aimed at Bangladeshi garment workers takes on a human face in the story of Aminul Islam, a key garment worker organizer and labor leader. Islam “was vocal, and he was fearless,” Babul Akhter, the head of the nonprofit labor group where Islam worked, told the New York Times. “Whenever workers came to him, he took them as his own case, as if it was his own pain.”

And that made him enemies. A little more than a year ago, he was tortured and killed. To date, his murder remains unsolved.

Islam’s troubles started when his fellow garment workers elected him to represent their grievances. Fired from his job, he became a full-time worker advocate at the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity. In 2010, state security revoked the Center’s registration and arrested Islam’s two bosses, charging them with inciting workers to riot. Police wire-tapped Islam’s phone and regularly harassed him. In June 2010, he was kidnapped and beaten by domestic intelligence agents, who threatened his life and the lives of his family members. In March 2012, a dozen members of the Industrial Police took Islam in for questioning, and on April 4 he disappeared. Two days later his corpse was found. His knees had been smashed, his feet had been broken, and a hole had been drilled into one knee. He had bled to death.

Torture and extrajudicial killings by police are common in Bangladesh and, as reported by both the International Crisis Group and Amnesty International, are often done at the behest of wealthy individuals and business executives. Despite the focus of the international human rights community, Islam’s murder remains unsolved after a year, leading many to suspect that the police forces had a hand in his demise.

Who profits from this state of affairs?

The factories in the collapsed Bangladesh building were producing garments for Wal-Mart, The Children’s Place, Dress Barn, Primark, Mango, Benetton, C&A, KIK, Cato Fashions, Matalan, and Bon Marché, among others. Wal-Mart garments were also being produced by the company that locked in its workers last November, leading to the death of 112 workers in a factory fire. The Gap, Calvin Klein, H&M, Target, and Tommy Hilfiger are other well-known brands and retailers that also manufacture their garments in Bangladeshi factories. In the classic “race to the bottom” production model in use in Bangladesh, China, and other low-wage settings enforced by anti-union authoritarian governments, these Western firms outsource their actual production to foreign-owned factories, such as those in the collapsed Bangladesh building, seeking to create plausible deniability about what is entailed in the manufacture of their products. 

In the days since the building collapse, corporate public relations machines have been in overdrive, seeking to distance their firms from events in Bangladesh. But only the most gullible can believe in the ignorance or innocence of those at the helm of these corporations. It is worth noting, for example, that in the wake of the November 2012 factory fire, Wal-Mart and Sears, who profited from the lax conditions, refused to provide compensation to the victims and their families who bore the cost. Wal-Mart was also one of a group of corporations that rejected a 2011 plan put together by labor advocacy groups and international and Bangladeshi unions to create an independent inspectorate “to oversee all factories in Bangladesh, with powers to shut down unsafe facilities as part of a legally binding contract signed by suppliers, customers and unions.” Wal-Mart’s representative to a meeting on the plan declared that it was “not financially feasible … to make (the) investments” required to implement the inspectorate. In other words, Wal-Mart and the other corporations know full well that the low production costs they enjoy are subsidized through the blood, sweat, and lives of Bangladeshi garment workers. It simply could not happen otherwise.

Sadly, there its little new to distinguish these stories from the several decades worth of news reports on the ways in which workers worldwide suffer from the greed and indifference of multinational corporations. But my point is this: We ignore these stories at our own peril.

The global “race to the bottom” in which multinational corporations outsource the manufacture of products to repressive, low-wage nations has exacted a very real price on American workers as well. The decimation of American industries and American industrial unions, with the resultant decline in the income, benefits,  and health and safety protections of the current U.S. workforce, has been made possible by the outsourcing of the work they once did to, in the words of William Blake,  the ”dark satanic mills” of Bangladesh and other, similar nations. The collapsed factory in Bangladesh and the obliterated factory in Texas are artifacts of an international political economy in which power and wealth is concentrated more and more in the hands of a small elite, at the expense of working people the world over. And, as U.S. unions and the American middle class they helped to create have weakened, states have become more prone to engage in their own “race to the bottom” behaviors, attempting to lure or retain corporate investment by offering to lower wages or business taxes or relaxing the environmental and workplace oversight that could have prevented the West, Texas, explosion from happening.

That is, the future of American workers and their unions is tied, inextricably, to the future of the workers of other nations. So long as the world’s most exploited workers can be denied the right to free, independent unions that would empower them to fight for their own rights and freedoms, our rights and our unions will be in danger. So long as the workers of Bangladesh and similar nations can be harshly exploited, our living standards and our working conditions are also open to exploitation.

International solidarity is no longer simply a virtue; it has become an imperative. Without it, our “single garment of destiny” could well be a shroud.  

- Leo Casey

*****

* See Worker Safety Under Siege: Labor, Capital, and the Politics of Workplace Safety in a Deregulated World. Vern Mogensen, editor. M. E. Sharpe, 2005.

I ended my previous post by arguing that (1) if teaching is at least as valuable as research, and (2) nontenure-track (NTT) faculty teach at least as well as tenure-track (TT) faculty, then the very large pay disparities between the two classes of faculty that characterize American universities today violate a basic principle of workplace fairness: equal pay for equal work. When conditions (1) and (2) are met, then, all an institution can do to defend current practice is plead poverty: we can’t afford to do what we ourselves must acknowledge to be “the right thing.”

But what about places like the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where I work? Is condition (1) met in what are sometimes called “R1” universities like mine? If not, maybe big pay disparities are warranted by the fact that, in such universities, research is a much higher institutional priority than undergraduate teaching. If teaching is a low enough priority, current pay inequalities could be justified by the fact that NTT faculty are not paid to do research and publishing – even though many of them do it – and, conversely, that most TT faculty pay is for their research and publishing, rather than their teaching.

We can estimate what we might call the “implicit” value of teaching at a place like UM-AA, by starting with the unrealistic assumption that TT and NTT faculty are paid the same to teach a course. At my university, the median full-time NTT faculty member, if they start (as most do) as a Lecturer I, will be paid an average of $38,289 to teach six courses. That is about $6,381 per course. The median Assistant Professor will be paid $80,361 to teach three courses. Three courses at $6,381 per course is about $19,144. This implies that the value of the median Assistant Professor’s non-teaching work (mainly research, though there is some service work here too) is $80,361-$19,144 = $61,217.

Survey work conducted for a recent study by my union – Teaching Quality: What the Principle of Equal Pay for Equal Work Means for Lecturer Pay at the University of Michigan (2012) – shows that TT faculty at UM-AA spend about half their time on teaching-related activities during the academic year. So an hour of TT faculty time spent on teaching is worth about 15 minutes spent on research (or service) according to our illustrative estimate of the implicit value of teaching at my institution.

Does that assessment of the relative value of undergraduate education and cutting edge research make sense for a public R1 university? I don’t think so, for two basic and inter-related reasons. First, it is radically out of whack with the way the university’s academic activities are funded — a disjuncture that is only likely to grow. Second, it is not aligned with the core mission of the public university, which says that research and teaching that contribute to the understanding and solution of pressing public problems must be prioritized over other kinds of research and teaching.

On the financial side, tuition fees – the bulk of them from undergraduates – now account for almost 68 percent of the UM-AA’s General Fund, the fund that pays for almost all academic activities (i.e., compensation for faculty and staff, internal research funding, scholarships and subsidies to students, library expenses, heat, light, building maintenance, etc). Only three significant university activities are funded without much General Fund money: the UM Hospital, our sports teams, and research that is directly supported with outside grant money. This last category is quite large – projected to be about $850 million in FY 2013 — but it is important to understand what that sum supports.

Part of it – overhead charges for the use of university infrastructure (aka “indirect cost recovery”) – goes to the General Fund, where it accounts for about 11 percent of the total revenue, as indicated in the 2008-09 estimates in the figure below (roughly $200 million out of $1.8 billion overall). The rest supports project-related expenses: extra salary for the principle investigator(s), the hiring of grad research assistants and other support staff, lab equipment and so on.

While this money enables us to support a much higher level of research activities than we could conduct without it, these grants mainly pay for research. They do not subsidize non-grant activities such as teaching, with the important exception of its contribution to financing the PhD training of graduate research assistants. On the contrary, teaching heavily subsidizes research by paying the lion’s share of TT faculty salaries, while demanding only half of their time during the academic year. This is so even in an R1s like mine, which get more outside research grant funding than all but a handful of universities.

The graph also shows that this was not always so. In the late 1960s, state transfers accounted almost two thirds of UM’s General Fund revenues. But those days are long gone, and the data make clear that the share of all revenues accounted for by tuition has been steadily rising since the late 1970s. It is not likely to shrink any time soon, even if worries about student indebtedness and accessibility to higher education restrict further growth. Given that reality, we ought to give more recognition to the contribution of undergraduate teaching to the fiscal viability of our university, and more respect to the NTT faculty, who specialize in undergraduate teaching, and account for about 30 percent of all undergraduate student credit hours on the Ann Arbor campus.

Turning to our mission as a public university, the fact that we are an R1 means that research plays a more important part in our mission than for non-R1 public universities. But we are still tasked with providing an “uncommon education for the common man,” as UM’s longest-serving President, James Burrell Angell (1871-1909) once put it, at a price that students whose parents are not rich can afford to pay without going deeply into debt. As things stand now, only about 15 percent of our undergraduate student body comes from families at or below Michigan’s median family income of about $50,000. Many from the bottom half of the state’s income distribution no longer even apply – they see the sticker price and conclude UM-AA is far beyond their reach. And many of our students – including those from families between $50,000 and $100,000 — like their counterparts around the nation, are going deep into debt to fund their time here. Student debt – most of it accumulated in the last decade, during which tuition fees have sky-rocketed – now surpasses the sum of all credit card debt in this country (see the stories by Andrew Martin in the New York Times, May 12 and 14, 2011).

Over the longer haul, unless we get much more substantial financial support from state governments, public R1s are going to have to scale back their research ambitions. This will likely happen in two ways, and signs of both are already visible: first, we will have to scale back the share of our faculty who, as members of the tenure-track research elite, are allowed to devote half of their time to doing research; and second, we will have to stop competing with richer private R1s to attract and retain the most highly prized members of this elite, across all domains of academic research.

On the first point, the latest AAUP data show that TT faculty in 2011 made up just 24 percent of the higher education faculty workforce nation-wide, down from 32 percent in 2008. UM-AA is a relatively rich university, so these trends are less pronounced: in 1995-6, Lecturers in Ann Arbor constituted just 17 percent of teaching faculty; by 2010-11, their share had increased to 24 percent, still much lower than the national average. Nonetheless, this was a 41 percent increase in the share of all UM-AA faculty who are nontenure-track.

On the second point, the gap in pay for tenured profs in public and private R1s has grown significantly in recent years: on average, private R1s can now afford to pay their faculty 25 percent or more than their public R1 competitors (Tamar, “Gap Widens for Faculty at Colleges, Report Finds,” New York Times, April 8, 2013). They can do that because they have much bigger endowments and/or are willing and able to charge their students much higher tuition fees, which is itself enabled by the fact that they do not have the same mandate to provide affordable education to working and middle class students. Yes, the top private R1s claim that anyone they admit will be provided with sufficient financial aid to attend their schools. But they do not admit nearly enough such students to fulfill the equality of higher educational opportunity mandates to which public universities must adhere.

The changes at the UM-AA, like other top-tier public R1s, are less dramatic than they have been for lower-tier publics, but we are nonetheless moving in the same direction. And we are already at the point where we can predict with some confidence that, for all but a limited number of research domains, the public R1s are going to have to cede research pre-eminence to the private R1s. The public R1s’ real choice is not whether they can halt this trend, but whether they respond to it by redefining their mission and the balance among their teaching and research priorities, or by clinging to their traditional ambition to match the private R1s in competition for research eminence across the board.

So far, we have pursued the latter path. The longer we do that, the greater the inequalities between our TT and NTT faculty we will have to create, and the greater the financial burden we will have to place on our students and their families, in order to fund this competition.

We in the public R1s need to re-think the relationship between our core mission and our priorities. We need to define more precisely the kinds of research and teaching that public universities ought to prioritize, giving primacy to the development and dissemination of knowledge that helps us to better understand and respond to our most pressing social needs. What are these?

First, we must identify and promote ways of reversing the profound inequalities of income and wealth that are undermining the quality of our democracy, delegitimizing our system of government and betraying the promise of equality of opportunity. Second, we must find ways of reducing inequalities that are compatible with making our economy ecologically sustainable. Finally, but most important of all, we must nurture our students’ commitment to democratic principles and the public good. It is they who will (or will not) turn the solutions that we discern through our research, and share through our teaching, into realities. If they emerge from our universities as careerists pursuing their self-advancement above all else, our research and teaching alike will not contribute nearly as much as they could to the public good.

We need to pay attention not just to research agendas and the content of course syllabi but also to our “hidden curriculum.” If we want our students to commit themselves to build a more just and ecologically sustainable world, we must model what that looks like in the community that we ourselves constitute and lead. Our failure to acknowledge and address the injustices associated with the creation of a major new subordinate class of nontenure-track faculty is a tacit but powerful lesson for our students. By asserting, as UM’s current Administration does, that Lecturers ought to be paid “whatever the market will bear,” without reference to the principle of equal pay for equal work, we are teaching our students that the highly unequal way in which we organize the UM’s labor market is perfectly appropriate, not only here but in the wider world. It is as if we built vast, energy-guzzling buildings while preaching conservation in courses and public statements.

To conclude, we must reconsider the priorities of the public R1 university in light of the profound historical shifts in our funding sources, and in our political, economic and ecological contexts. Among the most important changes needed is the recognizing the centrality of undergraduate teaching, and the faculty who do it, to the mission of public R1s. We must give our teaching faculty the resources they need to do a very challenging job, and the respect they deserve for doing it with excellence. From this vantage point, it makes good sense to treat an hour of faculty time devoted to teaching as equal to an hour of time devoted to research and writing. If we do that, the principle of equal pay for equal work implies that we must substantially reduce the pay inequalities between TT and NTT faculty.

- Ian Robinson

Spring 2013 marks the 30th anniversary of two landmark publications. One, an essay by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in The American Scholar titled “Cultural Literacy,” sparked a small but steadily growing movement dedicated to educational excellence and equity. The other, A Nation at Risk, set off a firestorm by conveying fundamental truths about the inequities in our educational system with prose so melodramatic they have proven unforgettable.

In the 80s, only one leader seemed to fully grasp the importance of both of these publications: Albert Shanker. Shanker, then-president of the American Federation of Teachers, was prominent partly due to his position, and largely due to the force of his intellect. He saw that schools were in trouble. He agreed that, as stated in A Nation at Risk, “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.”

Mediocrity is what filled the void as schools slowly retreated from teaching all children rigorous content. That retreat happened throughout the 20th century: Progressive educators’ misunderstandings of the essential role of specific, relevant knowledge in reading comprehension and critical thinking resulted in weak curricula being the norm and pockets of excellence typically being reserved for our most advantaged youth.

E. D. Hirsch was a professor who shared that misunderstanding until his own research awoke him to the (now well-established) fact that broad literacy depends on broad knowledge. Shanker was by far the most prominent educator to grasp the veracity and power of Hirsch’s work.

Rigor is the antidote to risk.

According to Richard Kahlenberg’s terrific biography of Albert Shanker, Tough Liberal,* Shanker “believed, with E. D. Hirsch, Jr., that if one really wished to be a political progressive concerned about disadvantaged kids, one needed to be an educational ‘conservative’ who stood for teaching students certain core knowledge that was essential to upward mobility in American society” (p. 10).

It was in the early 1980s, when Shanker read both A Nation at Risk and “Cultural Literacy,” that his particular form of progressivism took shape: Shanker saw that poor children needed a whole array of supports—including a traditional, rigorous curriculum that would give them all the knowledge that wealthier children get from their college-educated parents.

While virtually all education leaders panned A Nation at Risk, Shanker did not. According to Kahlenberg, Shanker’s reaction was “pivotal”:

When the … report was released … Shanker and a group of top union officials sat together and read the document. Sandra Feldman recalled: “We all had this visceral reaction to it. You know, ‘This is horrible. They’re attacking teachers.’ Everyone was watching Al to hear his response. When Al finished reading the report, he closed the book and looked up at all of us and said, ‘The report is right, and not only that, we should say that before our members.’ ” (p. 275)

Shanker did just that in a speech to members less than a week after the report came out. And then he spent the remainder of his life (he passed away in 1997) fighting for several major reforms. A few of the noteworthy ones were peer assistance and review, charter schools, and standards.

Thanks in part to Hirsch, Shanker had a very clear sense of what educational standards needed to accomplish. According to Kahlenberg:

Shanker disagreed with education-school professors who favored general thinking skills over gaining specific-content knowledge. He believed students needed both, and that John Dewey’s education theories had been misinterpreted by some “progressive” educators…. “Dewey himself was shocked when he went into some of these progressive schools and saw what was going on in his name.”

In the 1980s, Shanker became an early advocate of University of Virginia English Professor E. D. (Don) Hirsch Jr.’s argument that American students needed to be “culturally literate”—to master a body of facts that literate American’s know—in order to be successful in mainstream society. A full two years before Hirsch’s bestselling book Cultural Literacy became a phenomenon, Shanker embraced Hirsch’s view that knowing subject matter was important to reading comprehension…. “To read well you need background information that is culture-specific,” Shanker argued. Students needed to be taught Shakespeare and mythology so they could understand common cultural references.

Shanker was also taken by Hirsch’s argument that when students know particular content matter, their interest and curiosity are more likely to be aroused. A student who knows something about dinosaurs is more likely to pick up a book on dinosaurs when browsing through the library. “Subject matter,” Shanker argued, “is the life’s breath of learning.” While some “progressive” educators dismissed Hirsch’s approach as emphasizing “mere facts,” Shanker wrote thirteen separate columns mentioning Hirsch’s theory, invited Hirsch to speak at the AFT’s biennial QuEST Conference, and featured Hirsch on the cover of American Educator….

Shanker … believed that the core knowledge of the dominant culture was essential for all students to master if they wished to advance socioeconomically within the society…. Shanker argued:

Some people have been very critical of Hirsch’s proposals on the grounds that they try to impose the dominant culture on groups that would rather have their children learn their own culture. But the thrust of Hirsch’s proposal is egalitarian. He believes that by starting early and by giving all children the same core knowledge to learn, we can prevent the creation of an educational underclass…. (p. 323-324)

Despite their best efforts, neither Shanker nor Hirsch succeeded in bringing the need for knowledge-building curricula into mainstream reform efforts.

But now, the tide is finally turning.

The Common Core State Standards demand rigor—and a strong curriculum. The Common Core State Standards for English language arts and literacy, the need for a knowledge-building curriculum is plainly stated and explained:

While the Standards make references to some particular forms of content, including mythology, foundational U.S. documents, and Shakespeare, they do not—indeed, cannot—enumerate all or even most of the content that students should learn. The Standards must therefore be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum consistent with the expectations laid out in this document. (p. 6)

To build a foundation for college and career readiness, students  must read widely and deeply from among a broad range of high-quality, increasingly challenging literary and informational texts. Through extensive reading of stories, dramas, poems, and myths from diverse cultures and different time periods, students gain literary and cultural knowledge as well as familiarity with various text structures and elements. By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades. (p. 10)

Shanker, no doubt, would applaud the effort. Hirsch certainly is. As more and more states take implementation seriously and support schools in creating the content-rich curricula they need, we all should be applauding.

- Lisa Hansel

*****

* In quoting Tough Liberal, I have not included the endnotes. 

A big part of successful policy making is unyielding attention to detail (an argument that regular readers of this blog hear often). Choices about design and implementation that may seem unimportant can play a substantial role in determining how policies play out in practice.

A new paper, co-authored by Elizabeth Davidson, Randall Reback, Jonah Rockoff and Heather Schwartz, and presented at last month’s annual conference of The Association for Education Finance and Policy, illustrates this principle vividly, and on a grand scale: With an analysis of outcomes in all 50 states during the early years of NCLB.

After a terrific summary of the law’s rules and implementation challenges, as well as some quick descriptive statistics, the paper’s main analysis is a straightforward examination of why the proportion of schools meeting AYP varied quite a bit between states. For instance, in 2003, the first year of results, 32 percent of U.S. schools failed to make AYP, but the proportion ranged from one percent in Iowa to over 80 percent in Florida.

Surprisingly, the results suggest that the primary reasons for this variation seem to have had little to do with differences in student performance. Rather, the big factors are subtle differences in rather arcane rules that each state chose during the implementation process. These decisions received little attention, yet they had a dramatic impact on the outcomes of NCLB during this time period.

As is so often the case when using the small samples of state-level datasets, the authors are limited in their modeling options (though it bears mentioning that these data were very difficult to assemble, and, by the way, are available to the public). Instead, they identify five factors that made the most substantial contributions to the variation in AYP outcomes:

1. Deviation from NCLB rules. During the early years of NCLB, a few states didn’t quite follow the law. (Note that this is the only one of the five factors that has been largely rectified.) In at least one case, such failure was due to simple human error – Iowa’s one percent AYP rate in 2003 seems partially to have been a result of a leave of absence taken by the staff member responsible for the data, who suffered an injury. In other cases, states bent the guidelines set forth in the legislation. Texas, for instance, petitioned the U.S. Department of Education for flexibility on a rule that permitted a maximum of one percent of a school’s special education students to use alternative assessments. Their petition was turned down, but they went ahead with the plan anyway and, as a result, 22 percent of Texas schools that would have failed to make AYP in the first year actually made it.
2. “Generosity” of confidence intervals. As is fairly well known, if just one of a school’s “accountable subgroups” (e.g., low-income, students with disabilities, etc.) fail to meet proficiency targets (or “safe harbor”), that entire school does not make AYP. In order to account for the inevitable fact that, in some schools, these subgroups would consist of very few tested students, NCLB allowed states to apply “confidence intervals.” Basically, these adjustments meant that smaller subgroups (i.e., those consisting of fewer tested students in a given school) would be required to meet lower targets. However, states were given flexibility in how much “leeway” they granted via these confidence intervals, and a few specified none at all. Florida, for example, did not use them, and thus a fairly large group of schools that would have made AYP had this rule been applied did not do so.
3. Different targets across grade levels. States had the option of either setting the same proficiency targets for all grades or letting their targets vary by grade (and subject). Using the former system – the same targets for all grades – basically meant that schools serving particular grade configurations would have an advantage in making AYP (if their starting rates were higher) whereas others would have a disadvantage (if their starting rates were lower). For example, Pennsylvania set uniform targets, but their high schools’ starting rates were much lower, on average, than those of elementary schools. The end result was that 27 percent of the state’s high schools failed to make AYP in 2004, compared with just 7 percent of elementary schools. 
4. Number of “accountable subgroups” and minimum sample size. As mentioned above, NCLB required schools to be held accountable for the performance of student subgroups. But states were given flexibility not only in how many subgroups they chose (and which ones), but also in setting minimum sample sizes for these subgroups to be “included” in AYP calculations. For example, schools with only a handful of students with disabilities in a given year could be exempted from having this subgroup count at all. As a rule, states that chose to include fewer subgroups in AYP, or set higher sample size requirements for their inclusion, tended to have lower failure rates, all else being equal. Once again, states varied in the choices they made, and this influenced their results. 
5. Definition of “continuous enrollment.” Finally, states had to specify the rules by which mobile students (e.g., transfers) were or were not counted toward schools’ AYP calculations. Some states set more stringent enrollment requirements than others, which meant that they excluded more students from being counted in their testing results. For instance, Wisconsin’s rules excluded students who were not enrolled in late September of 2003 (the tests were administered in November 2003). Thus, fairly large proportions of students who took the test were not counted. To the degree excluded students’ performance was different from their “continuously enrolled” peers, these choices affected failure rates.

Now, it’s important to note that all of these rules interacted with each other (as well as with other rules and factors, such as school and student characteristics) to produce outcomes.

For instance, 23 states opted to use the most generous confidence intervals (which, by itself, “inflates” AYP rates), but these states did not have appreciably higher AYP rates, on average. The reason is that they also tended to choose other options (e.g., minimum subgroup sample size requirements) and/or they exhibited characteristics (e.g., tested grades, student characteristics) that, on the whole, “cancelled out” the differences.

From this perspective, it would be fascinating to look at the results of this paper in terms of general strategies and principles reflected in the decisions states made. Such coherence may not be easy to decipher – some choices increased failure rates, whereas others were certain to lower them. States varied in their decision making structures and resources, and they only had a relatively short period of time to devise their plans (which often had to be rectified with pre-existing accountability policies).

Many state-level NCLB configurations ended up being complex, sometimes inconsistent webs of rules that reflected varying incentives and priorities. Making things worse, the ESEA waivers that most states have submitted will only result in more heterogeneity (see this paper by Morgan Polikoff and colleagues).

This is not quite how accountability systems are supposed to work, and, as the authors of this paper note, it illustrates the ever-present difficulty of finding the right balance between standardization and flexibility in policy design/implementation.

(It should be lost on no one that these issues are extremely relevant to the current efforts in over 30 states to install new principal and/or teacher evaluations.)

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, accountability systems can play a productive role in education, but this analysis demonstrates very clearly that, when it comes to the design and implementation of these systems, details matter. Seemingly trivial choices can have drastic effects on measured outcomes.

In short, phrases such as “we need to hold schools accountable” sound wonderful, but what really matters is how we do so.

As the war against American unions reached a fever pitch in recent years, there emerged a small group of right-wing academics and think tanks that have taken up the anti-union cause in intellectual circles. Of particular note for our purposes are Terry Moe’s book, Special Interest, and a recent study, How Strong Are U.S. Teacher Unions?, which was jointly sponsored by the Fordham Institute and Education Reform Now. [6]

Since I’ve already written a critique of Moe’s book for the American Political Science Association’s journal, Perspective on Politics, my focus here is mainly on the Fordham/ERN report.

Both publications tell a very similar story (all the more remarkable given the political and economic context I discussed in Part I of this post), in which incredibly powerful teacher union Leviathans invariably win the day in all manner of educational and public policy fights. The Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli offered a ten-second sound bite for this meme, when he recently wrote that teacher unions “were the Goliath to the school reformers’ David.”

How does one find one’s way to such an unfounded conclusion? With an ideological analysis that has only the thinnest veneer of social science.

Take the most basic issue in this narrative, the supposed “power” of teacher unions. As I used to teach my Political Science students, power can not be understood as a static, fixed property possessed by an individual or a group, but must be seen as a relationship among various players. Like any other political actor, a teachers union possesses no power in the abstract, but only in relation to other parties – school districts; school boards; state education departments; county, state and federal governments; corporations; political parties; parents groups; and so on, across the field of education policy players. Yet, in discussing the power of the “Goliath” teachers union, Moe and the Fordham/ERN report make no mention of the greater relative power of the education reform “David.”  This omission is telling for three important reasons:

The Fabulously Wealthy: Imaginary and Real

First, both Fordham/ERN and Moe highlight teacher unions’ spending on elections and lobbying as a primary source of strength. But neither study compares teacher unions’ financial resources and spending to the resources and spending of teacher unions’ foes in the “education reform” movement. Moe provides details on the federal election spending of the “fabulously wealthy” NEA and AFT – with the combined expenditures of the two national unions adding up to $60 million over the past decade. [7]

How does that compare to the resources and spending of the leading education reform actors? In a matter of days after she publicly announced the formation of StudentsFirst, an explicitly anti-union political lobbying organization, Michelle Rhee had raised pledges of more than $100 million, with a goal of raising $2 billion over five years. Rhee’s donors list includes many high profile corporate leaders and foundations with an anti-union bent, including Murdoch (NewsCorp), Walton Family (Wal-Mart), Fisher (The Gap), Langone (Home Depot), Tepper (Appaloosa), Arnold (Enron), New York City Mayor Bloomberg (Bloomberg Inc.), Fournier (Pennant), Loeb (Third Point), Tudor Jones (Tudor Investment) and Broad (SunAmerica-AIG). [8]

And StudentsFirst is only one of many such organizations. Wealthy individuals and foundations are literally pouring billions of dollars into various anti-union, privatization and corporate “education reform” efforts on a scale that teacher unions could never hope to match. [9]

A similar picture emerges at the state level. Consider New York, the state in which teacher unions have the highest member density and greatest financial resources in the nation, a fact that the Fordham/ERN report confirms. In 2010 and early 2011, during the height of the battle to shape legislation that would make New York competitive in the Race to the Top grant competition, Education Reform Now Advocacy (ERNA), an arm of the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), outspent not only the state federation of teacher unions, the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), but also the combined expenditures of NYSUT and its largest local, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in New York City. [10] And ERNA/DFER was only one of a cohort of New York State organizations working on behalf of an anti-union, “corporate reform” educational agenda. [11]

The Anti-Union Organizations That Dare Not Speak Their Agenda

Secondly, and here the case of ERNA/DFER provides a perfect segue, the omission of any discussion of teacher union opponents and their resources allows Fordham and ERN to ignore their own role within that opposition. ERN and ERNA are both arms of DFER (the ERN that co-sponsored the report that we are considering here is the sister organization of the ERNA, which opposed New York’s teachers unions over Race to the Top). [12]

In its analysis of teacher unions in New York, the Fordham/ERN report includes a brief description of the battles around Race to the Top (p. 255), but without a single mention of the fact that ERN/ERNA/DFER was actually a major player in those battles and had in fact outspent the unions. This brief narrative was entitled “Full Disclosure,” a remarkably ironic title under the circumstances.

Further, both Fordham and ERN are the recipients of large amounts of money from corporate foundations and corporate leaders who have supported anti-union efforts. Fordham receives funding from the following sources, among others: the Walton Family (Wal-Mart), Gates, Fisher (Gap), Robertson (Tiger), Arnold (Enron), Broad (Sun America/AIG) and Bradley (which also provided direct funding for the report we are discussing).  ERN receives funding from the following sources, among others: the Walton Family (Wal-Mart), Fisher (Gap), Robertson (Tiger), and Broad (Sun America/AIG). Prominent also in support for ERN/DFER are a number of Wall Street hedge fund managers, including Ravenel Boykin Curry IV (Eagle Capital), Joel Greenblatt (Gotham Capital, protégé of Michael Millken), David Einhorn (Greenlight Capital), John Petry (Gotham Capital), Charles Ledley (Highfields), Whitney Tilson (T2 Partners and Tilson Funds) and Tony Davis (Anchorage). [13]

What is problematic here is not just that Fordham and DFER/ERN/ERNA are prominent political actors in the struggles over the future of public schools and teacher unions, with a vested interest in the subject they are analyzing, or that they are financed by corporate foundations and wealthy individuals who also have a vested interest, but that they fail to offer even the most minimal self-disclosure of these facts. Imagine a study of the power of the “Goliath” American Cancer Society, financed and conducted by various “Davids” connected to the tobacco industry who just don’t reveal their industry ties, and you have an analogue to the Fordham/ERN report.

Wealth and Power vs. America’s Teachers

Thirdly, the focus that Moe and Fordham/ERN place on teacher unions’ political and financial resources creates a distorting lens for understanding these unions’ real political power and the power dynamic between teacher unions and the “education reform” movement. The very ferocity of the attacks against teacher unions, even in the face of a declining American labor movement, suggests that teacher unions are real political forces capable of mounting a serious defense of their members and the public institutions in which they work. But teacher unions’ base of power rests not with their financial resources – which will always be dwarfed by those available to corporate leaders on the other side – but with an educated, politically active membership of millions who care deeply about education and understand it through first-hand experience.

Neither Moe nor Fordham/ERN account for the fact that, by law, the overwhelming majority of the funds that teacher unions spend on political action cannot be taken from membership dues, but must be raised through voluntary donations by members. [14]

Though easily outmatched by fundraising on the other side, the unions’ political action dollars go much further because they are used to support an army of volunteers who staff union voter registration drives, make calls for union phone banks, walk door-to-door union canvases, lobby elected officials and vote in large numbers. Teacher union activists are influential across the entire range of civil society associations, from neighborhood groups to faith communities; they write letters to the editor and pen their own blogs; they turn out in large numbers for street demonstrations and protests. Recognizing their disadvantage on this “people-to-people” terrain, some “education reform” forces have attempted to use their overwhelming financial advantage to organize their own “astro-turf” (as opposed to “grassroots”) teacher, parent and student organizations; though, thus far, with only limited success. [15]

Yet neither Fordham/ERN nor Moe attempt to include any measure of member activism and mobilization in their calculus of union strength. The Fordham/ERN report develops a five-measure model for assessing union strength, ranging from financial resources to political spending. The closest thing to a measure of member activism and mobilization is a measure of union density, the extent to which the union represents all of the teachers in a given state. Moe dedicates a single sentence to union “activists,” offering as his sole observation that union work of this sort is “difficult to document.” (p. 280.)  All of this brings to mind the old joke about the drunk who is looking for his keys under the streetlight. “Where did you drop them?” asks a passerby who stops to help. “Over there,” the drunk says, pointing to a spot at some distance. “So why are you looking here?” the passerby responds. “Because this is where the streetlight is.” When it comes to teacher unions, Moe and Fordham/ERN are content with what they find under the streetlight.

As one examines the issues, the struggles over the future of public education and teachers unions in America comes to resemble the classic populist conflict of wealth and money on the one side and masses of ordinary people on the other. One cannot understand the real power and role of teacher unions, nor the balance of political power between unions and their corporate-funded opponents, without coming to grips with this central premise. And, in truth, when attacks on pubic education and teacher unions are cast as a concerted campaign by the rich and powerful against ordinary working teachers, they lose a considerable portion of their potency. [16]

Thus, the importance of intellectual apologies for America’s union suppression movement – by portraying teacher unions as wealthy leviathans, with all manner of undue influence and control over educational policy, their opponents seek to provide cover for the corporate-funded campaign to privatize public education and eviscerate what remains of the American labor movement.

Further, in the case of the Fordham/ERN report, the five-measure model of teacher union strength is a house of cards that collapses under the weight of its own inadequate conceptualization. One measure of union strength – the perceived influence of teacher unions – involves a survey of unidentified “influential” actors selected by the report’s authors. (This raises, among other methodological problems, the issue of confirmation bias.) On average, eleven “influentials” were sent the survey in each state, and, as the report concedes, as few as three replies per state were deemed sufficient to provide a measure (p. 28).Without belaboring the obvious, let me simply note that there is a point at which a sample size is so small that the resultant evidence can only be characterized as anecdotal. A sample size as small as three would certainly fall into this category, especially when the methodology does not consider whether or not the sample is representative of some larger universe.

Another measure of union strength involves state education policies, either in the form of legislation or regulation, which the report then compares to its own conception of what teacher unions want. A third measure, resources and membership, includes an entire section which treats state spending on education as in input into teacher power when it clearly is an outcome. Indeed, close to half of the Fordham/ERN study’s five measures of the causes (or foundation) of union power are, in fact, measures of the results of union power, although the study uses them to account for nearly 50 percent of total union strength. [17] That is, the Fordham/ERN report is a thinly disguised example of tautological reasoning, in which the conclusions are embedded in the major premises of the argument.

Given this rather heavy hand on the scales, the conclusions drawn by the Fordham/ERN report are remarkable:

Many states in our top two tiers [state teacher unions with the greatest strength – LC] have education policies that are not particularly favorable to teacher unions. Conversely, states without strong collective bargaining rights nonetheless have union-friendly policies. That’s because other factors matter, too, sometimes greatly – beginning with state collective leadership (both past and present), federal policy, the conditions of the economy, the influence of other key stakeholders, and the state’s own macro-politics.” (p. 14.)

That’s another way of saying that, even with the use of this very flawed methodology, there is little correlation between the report’s five measures of teacher union power, on the one hand, and the policy outcomes that, according to the report, teacher unions want, on the other hand. It took Fordham/ERN three years to conduct its research and publish a report of over 400 pages, and at the end of this Odyssey, the report tell us that it has all been in vain, and that we have not arrived home in Ithaca. Careful readers are invariably left wondering why they were taken on this long voyage, if this is where they disembark when it is over. There are numerous attempts in the report to apologize for this state of affairs: this is “not a perfect study,” “its conclusions are more nuanced, more equivocal than we are accustomed to,” “we are humbler than usual in the conclusions,” and “this is a pioneering study, fraught with methodological challenges, data difficulties and judgment calls.” (pp. 4 and 17.)

Notwithstanding these admissions, Fordham/ERN is so intent on getting to a particular set of the conclusions that it offers them still, in the form of four over-riding impressions. We make no causal claims, nor are any of these assertions free from exceptions, but it would be irresponsible not to share with readers the picture that these data have drawn in our mind.” [Emphasis added.] (pp. 53-54.)

The ideological character of the report is deeply embedded in all of its architecture: the omissions are as telling as that which is included. One significant output indicator of teacher union strength would have to be the level of state spending on education, and three different metrics for measuring union influence on education spending are included. [18] But the report then discounts the connection between education spending and student achievement, tendentiously asserting without any supporting argument or documentation that such spending could only “touch” students indirectly and that there is “no strong evidence to support (a) link (of education spending) to student achievement.” (p. 5.) The proposition that education funding and student achievement are unrelated may be an article of faith on the hard right, much like the denial of climate change in similar circles, but in the worlds of education and social science that are evidence-based, it holds little currency. [19]

Similarly, in discussing teacher evaluations the Fordham/ERN report focuses entirely on matters of seniority layoffs, tenure and dismissal. There is no discussion of whether evaluations provide meaningful feedback and professional supports to teachers, thus improving the quality of teaching and learning across the board. The notion that tenure and due process could provide good teachers with the necessary protections to speak out when students are not being properly educated or are being unfairly treated is not even contemplated.

Even the terminology of the Fordham/ERN report is riven with ideological framing. Consider the following misleading and deceptive description of collective bargaining legislation. “Thirty-two states require local school boards to bargain collectively with their teachers,” the report contends, “fourteen states permit local school boards to do this, and five states prohibit collective bargaining altogether (Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.)” (Emphasis in original – LC) (p. 5.) Throughout the report, collective bargaining in the first category of states is characterized as “mandatory,” and the report’s first major conclusion is that “mandatory bargaining appears to tilt the playing field in favor of strong unions.” (p. 54.) Given this language, readers might reasonably conclude that unionization was universal in these states, and that teachers had no choice but to be represented by a union in collective bargaining.

But a close reading of the report’s own state level data indicates that this is clearly not the case. What laws require of local school boards and districts in these thirty-two states is that they respect the democratic decisions of teachers to organize a union and bargain collectively: when a majority of teachers have voted in a representation election to take such a step, the local school board or district must engage in collective bargaining with the union; when a majority of teachers choose not to form a union or to decertify an existing union, there is no collective bargaining. Further, what the Fordham/ERN report characterizes as “permitted” collective bargaining laws are state laws that give local school boards and districts the legal authority to ignore the democratic decision of teachers to form a union and bargain collectively.

Throughout the Fordham/ERN report and the Moe book, again and again one finds examples of ideological argumentation designed to support a pre-determined political conclusion – teacher unions are wealthy and powerful institutions, with inordinate and undeserved influence over educational policy. Such a conclusion aligns perfectly with the legislative objectives of the wealthy individuals and corporations behind American’s union suppression movement: the evisceration of the last remaining strongholds of American unionism. [20]

- Leo Casey

*****

[6] Terry Moe, Special Interest: Teacher Unions and America’s Public Schools. Washington DC: Brookings, 2011. and Amber Winkler, Janie Scull and Dara Zeehandelaar, How Strong Are U.S. Teacher Unions? Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Education Reform Now, 2012. Education Reform Now is a not-for-profit arm of Democrats for Education Reform. According to the Foreword to the Fordham/ERN report, Moe was consulted on its content.

[7] See Moe, p. 282.

[8] Since StudentsFirst does not publish its funding sources, this information has to be culled from a number of different sources. See Stephen Brill, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011. p. 396.; Andrew Rice, “Miss Grundy Was Fired Today” in New York Magazine, March 20, 2011. available here; Joy Resmovits, “Michelle Rhee’s Backers Include Obama Bundler Billionaire, Big Romney Backer” available here; Laura Clawson, “Rhee’s StudentsFirst pretends to be grassroots, but $1 million of Walton money says otherwise” available here; and Stephanie Simon, “StudentsFirst Spending: National Education Reform Group’s Partial Tax Records Released” available here. While Brill includes Julian Robertson (Tiger Management) among StudentsFirst funders, Resmovits reports a Robertson representative denying it, so I have not included him here.

[9] Joanne Barkan, “Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools.” in Dissent Magazine. Winter 2011. pp. 49-57 (available here). In addition to StudentsFirst, leading national organizations include DFER (Democrats for Education Reform), 50CAN, Stand for Children, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and Center for Education Reform. Anti-union and hard right organizations such as the National Right to Work Foundation, Richard Berman’s Center for Union Facts and ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) are also deeply involved in the attacks on teacher unions.

[10] See the 2010 and 2011 annual reports of New York State Joint Commission on Public Ethics available here. ERNA expenditures appear to have decreased once the RttT battles had ebbed, starting in mid-2011.

[11] Other leading ‘education reform’ organizations include NY StudentsFirst, NYCAN, FERA (Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability), the NY Charter School Association and the NYC Charter School Center.

[12] ERN is a 501-c-3 organization, a not-for-profit with the strictest rules against involvement in politics, while ERNA is a 501-c-4 organization, with more flexible rules for political involvement. DFER skirts the edges of legality in its use of these two entities for campaigns against teacher unions.

[13] Michael Hirsch, “Who are Democrats for Education Reform?” in New York Teacher. December 16, 2010.

[14] The rules governing the raising and spending of funds used for political purposes have been marginally loosened by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, but the restrictions on the use of dues remains fundamentally intact.

[15] For example, the Gates, Walton Family and Broad foundations have funded Parent Revolution and the Gates and Walton Family foundations have funded Educators for Excellence, both of which are widely considered to be astro-turf organizations.

[16] Hence the extraordinary effort to reframe a corporate-funded anti-union campaign as the “civil rights issue of our time.”

[17] The Fordham/ERN report gives equal weight to each of its five measures, and equal weight to subsidiary metrics within the each of the five measures. No justification is provided for dividing the measures equally, so one is left with the unavoidable conclusion that is was done this way because the authors couldn’t figure out any other way to do it. Unfortunately for the report, the lack of methodological sophistication on the part of the authors does not obviate what is clearly still an arbitrary decision that resources and membership, political action, scope of bargaining, state policies and perceived influence are all of the same equal weight in determining teacher union strength.

[18] As noted above, Fordham/ERN treats the level of state spending on education as an input, or cause, of union strength rather than an outcome, an example of the confusion of cause and effect that runs throughout the report.

[19] See Bruce Baker, “Does Money Matter In Education?”  Albert Shanker Institute: 2012 (available here).

The American union movement is, it must be said, embattled and beleaguered. The recent passage of the Orwellian named ‘right to work’ law in Michigan, an anti-union milestone in the birthplace of the United Auto Workers and cradle of American industrial unionism, is but the latest assault on American working people and their unions.[1] Since the backlash election of 2010 that brought Tea Party Republicans to power in a number of state governments, public sector workers have faced a legislative agenda designed to eviscerate their rights to organize unions and bargain collectively in such states as Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Iowa, New Hampshire and Virginia.

Fueling these attacks is an underlying organic crisis that has greatly weakened the labor movement and its ability to defend itself. Union membership has fallen from a high point of 1 in 3 American workers at the end of WW II to a shade over 1 in 9 today. [2] At its height, American unions had unionized basic industries – auto, mining, steel, textiles, telecommunications – and had sufficient density to raise wages and improve working conditions for members and non-union workers as well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report for 2012, organized American labor has fallen to its lowest density in nearly a century. Today, American unions have high density in only one major sector of the economy, K-12 education, and in that sector unions are now under ferocious attack. [3]

Even this stark description understates the true depth of the crisis. At the end of WW II, public sector workers in the ranks of organized labor were a small fraction of their private sector counterparts. Today, that relationship is dramatically reversed: 4 in 11 American public sector workers belong to a union, while only 1 in 15 private sector workers are unionized. Public sector workers are organized at more than five times the rate of private sector workers. The explosive growth of public sector unions in the late 1960s and early 1970s took place just as private sector industrial unions were beginning to hemorrhage from a ‘race to the bottom’ fueled by technological change and a deeply flawed model of economic globalization dominated by corporate interests (see here, here, and here).

These trends were reinforced by weak labor law that was increasingly tilted against the rights of workers and poorly enforced, a development condemned by Human Rights Watch, Freedom House and Amnesty International. In this context, the emergence of the leading public sector unions – the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) – masked a great deal of the blood-letting to the industrial unions that had been the heart and soul of the American labor movement from the New Deal onward.

For decades, public sector unions have decried the harm done to American working people as a result of the decline of private sector unions. Others have pointed to the long term economic damage done to the U.S. by this anti-union campaign.  The mounting economic inequality that has plagued the United States since the 1970s is, in significant measure, an artifact of the shrinking political and economic power of the American labor movement, a phenomenon that tracks with the decline of the once mighty industrial unions. [4]

But, until recently, public sector unions believed that the nature of their members’ work provided important protection against the economic globalization that has decimated private sector unions. It is not possible, after all, to offshore the nursing of critically ill patients, the policing of communities, or the teaching of reading to children in the same way that unionized manufacturing jobs have been sent abroad to low-wage, authoritarian settings that deny workers the right to organize into free, independent unions. That difference was sufficient, many believed, to prevent public sector workers from being drawn into the ‘race to the bottom.’

The great economic downturn of the last five years has shown this belief to be an illusion. The loss of union density in America’s private sector, with the resultant decline of salaries, benefits and working conditions, has left public sector workers and their unions vulnerable to a politics of fear and resentment, which seeks to cast them as a privileged class.

One telling example can be found in the attacks on public sector workers’ retirement plans. The decline of industrial unions has been accompanied by the systematic dismantling of private sector workers’ “defined benefit” pension plans, which had guaranteed retirement security to generations of America’s unionized workers. Unionized public sector workers, who for the most part still possessed such plans, were then exposed to a right-wing campaign arguing that government could not afford such ”rich” retirement plans. A demagogic appeal was made to private sector workers: “why should a teacher, a nurse or a firefighter have such retirement benefits, when you, who finance that retirement with your taxes, do not?” Similar attacks were launched on public sector salaries and health insurance, in hopes of fueling a backlash movement that would weaken public sector unions and leave their members with diminished real income and living conditions. [5]

In a coordinated campaign, corporate-financed advocacy and “think tank” groups launched an attack on the due process rights of public sector workers, such as teacher tenure, with the objective of forcing workers into nonunion, ”at will” employment. If successful, this campaign against public sector unionization would leave workers in the same diminished condition as their private sector brethren.

The campaign against public sector workers and their unions reached a crescendo in the aftermath of the 2010 elections that swept Tea Party Republicans to power in numerous states. Fearful that the demographics of 21st century America were stacked against them (and the long-term electoral prospects of the Republican Party), Tea Party activists opened up two major fronts in their fight to retain power:  On the one hand, they advocated for “voter suppression” laws, designed to make it more difficult for core Democratic constituencies – people of color, immigrants and the poor – to vote. On the other hand, they pushed forward on “union suppression” laws, designed to undermine the core strength of the American trade union movement in the electoral arena – public sector unions. In the wake of the 2010 midterms, as the nation followed the gripping struggle of public employees in Wisconsin to retain their right to free association and collective bargaining, similar battles were being waged in state capitols across the nation. In each and every state, the theme of public employee privilege was played out with a strategy to incite fear and resentment.

To appreciate the full power of the forces now arrayed against American unions, consider that, at the height of the Wisconsin struggle, 9 of the 10 individuals on the Forbes list of the top ten richest Americans were actively financing part of the campaign against public sector unions. With U.S. income inequality at the highest levels since just before the Great Depression, it appears that the nation’s corporate elite are intent on delivering a coup de grâce to what remains of the American labor movement.

- Leo Casey

*****

[1] Research shows that there is no evidence that “right to work” laws enhance productivity, encourage innovation or create jobs; they do, however, tend to lower wages and labor standards. Unions, on the other hand, can serve to generate higher wages, which leads to higher consumption and demand, and thus greater economic activity.

[2] This and subsequent data on union membership trends is drawn from the Bureau of Labor Statistics annual report on the subject. For the latest report, see the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Members – 2012” available here. The high point of the American trade union movement preceded the 1947 passage of the Taft-Hartley Act by a Republican-Dixiecrat dominated Congress that overrode a veto by President Harry Truman. Among other things, Taft-Hartley authorized the passage of state “right to work” laws, with the goal of keeping multiracial unions from gaining a significant foothold in the Jim Crow South. The CIO’s Operation Dixie, a post-WW II campaign to organize unions in the South, was thwarted in significant part by right to work laws passed in the Deep South. The recent passage of right to work legislation in Indiana and Michigan is significant in the extension of right to work laws into what had been labor’s heartland.

[3] For measures of union density, see the chart at UnionStats. The only comparable rates of density to K-12 education are found in considerably smaller sections of the public sector, such as fire fighters, and parts of the transportation industry, such as flight attendants.

[4] See Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012. See also Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld, “Unions, Norms, and the Rise in American Wage Inequality” available here.

[5] These charges do not stand up to scholarly examination, see here, here, here, and here, but they remain part of the standard attack on public sector employees.