Democracy in America

Don't let FreeExchange see the bad score for Texas.

They are pretty big one Texas being the best place to live and work.

Regards

Yep. Beating up unions is more fun than doing real work, the same with being in one. If a legislature has the brass to attack unions, it ought to have the nerve to bargain with them. Starting with decertification, in my opinion, is an admission of frailty.

I still think public employee pensions are a disaster and the teacher's unions verge on being anti-education, but I do get a little ticked that attacking someone unpopular always seems like such a better idea than problem-solving.

It seems to me that the difference between "good" and "bad" unions is based upon how much of a gradient of selfishness they employ?

It strikes me as a valid argument, but I would propose that one man's selfishness is another man's self defense?

It's striking that Germany and Japan have much more social-friendly government policies.

That likely makes it far easier for their unions to uncircle their wagons and get themselves out of the vicious cycle of trying to defend and expand their mere existence from the assumption of the other side that they should be abolished entirely.

Solving "the union problem" seems to really rely on solving the deeper contentious issues that remain in American society. As do many of our other problems, I'm afraid.

Both Mr. Lemiux and M.S.'s reasoning and methodology leave much to be desired.

Follow the link http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2010/06/how_does_your_hi...
and you will see Jay Mathews link to the most recent rankings of individual high schools.

It is interesting that Mr. Mathews writes "The list ranks schools based on participation in college-level tests, such as Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge exams. Many people prefer rating schools by average test scores, but I consider that a measure of the student family incomes, not the quality of the schools, because test averages correlate so strongly with parental affluence."

When you look at the lists published in Newsweek, the results are interesting: the best schools in Wisconsin rank only in the middle of the pack nationally (the best ranks only #324), but the best of Virginia's schools all rank in the top 10% of the index. Texas truly shines in this list -- it has the #1 and #4 schools in the nation, and its top 20 are all near the top of the national index.

The Newsweek lists can be found here: http://www.newsweek.com/feature/2010/americas-best-high-schools.html

Thus, it seems clear to me that whether teachers are unionized or not, that factor is not necessarily correlated in any meaningful way with school quality or student opportunity. Moreover, a measure as crude as standardized test score averages may be a useful data point, but it is not necessarily relevant in the unions versus non-union discussion, especially when "test averages correlate so strongly with parental affluence."

Typical.

Probably one of the few indices where Wisconsin is in the top 3 and the politicos want to legislate it away.

Watching America steadily cripple and hamstring itself is like watching an auto accident in slow motion

First there's the problem with combining SAT and ACT scores. Looking at ACT alone Virginia beats Wisconsin. If you look at SAT scores alone, you notice something very odd. The poorer states outperform the more affluent states. This is due to varying participation rates. Only 3% of students (the very brightest) in South Dakota take the SATs and as a result their scores are far above average. Contrast that with Maine which has 100% participation and ranks dead last.

So now that we've disposed of that, on to MS's remaining point about foreign unionization. Conservatives would love if the US adopted Japanese style unions. Unfortunately, they're illegal in the US. Conservatives would also love to roll back labor laws to German levels and let unions protect workers instead. But liberals insist on more and more labor laws which end up diminishing the role of unions.

RR, that's kind of a good point. It hadn't occurred to me that one explanation for declining unionism was the high degree of labor regulation. I thought it was just the change in the make-up of the economy.

RestrainedRadical,

"Conservatives would also love to roll back labor laws to German levels and let unions protect workers instead. But liberals insist on more and more labor laws which end up diminishing the role of unions."

I think it is pretty disingenuous to claim that conservatives want to roll back labor laws so that powerful unions can enforce similar requirements instead.

Seems more like conservatives want to roll back labor laws so that management doesn't have to comply with them at all and can then increase profits at the expense of workers.

Find me an example of a popular conservative politician who is in favor of dramatically expanding union powers in private corporations and then maybe your point will make sense. Otherwise it's just a strangely twisted way of blaming liberals for the decline of their own support.

I have my doubts about whether these rankings are reliable or meaningful in terms of assessing educational quality, but even if they are, it tells us nothing about causation. If 45 States allow collective bargaining by teachers and 5 do not, where do you think the most qualified teachers will go? Where will the least qualified teachers have to go if they can't get a job in the unionized States?

hey then, let's make a deal. un-suck america's unions to the point of japan's and you can keep them.

this is like a child who gets D's so his parents don't let him play ball in the park with the other kids, but he complains that jimmy can play ball and he gets A's. the parental response is start not sucking and you can play ball again.

@Bernardo, actually conservatives usually want to roll back labor laws to lower unemployment. But my point was that if given a choice between labor laws and unions, conservatives would probably pick the latter evil. I'd distinguish here between conservatives and libertarians. Libertarians are hostile to unions. Conservatives tend to be more sympathetic to unions, at least private sector unions.

LexHumana, you have nailed the underlying fallacy of Federal education policy. Test scores at individual schools can be very misleading. You must take a systematic approach. Take Texas for example, average test scores are low, particularly in elementary schools, because so many students enter kindergarten and first grade as English language learners. So what you want to evaluate is how well a school district does in teaching students English while accelerating their academic learning in order to close the achievement gap. So what you want to do is look at the high school. if a school district has elementary schools that are "failing", because standardized tests are given in English and the kids are not yet proficient in it, but the high school is on Newsweek's list of best high schools and the dropout rate is relatively low you can bet that the school district is doing a pretty good job.

Wisconsin is 91.5% white. Here are the bottom 5 states from above: South Carolina: 69% white, North Carolina: 75% white, Georgia: 68% white, Texas: 48% white, Virginia: 69% white.

It is well known that white students, on average, academically outperform (non-Asian) minority students, by a pretty big margin. The interesting comparison would be each state's ACT/SAT ranking when only considering white students' scores. If Wisconsin was still highly ranked, then the "collective bargaining --> good academic results" argument might hold some water. Until then, it isn't very convincing.

@RR
Point well taken. You are right that the conservative rationale for rolling back labor laws is lower unemployment (true lefties will be unconvinced that this is also the reason, but I'm not always feeling so cynical). And yes, I see that most conservatives would rather not have the government involved in just about anything, hence the theoretical preference for unions over OSHA.

However, I'm not really convinced that there is a practical difference in conservative vs. libertarian ideas in this area of American politics, at least at the level of elections and legislation. Our two-party system does not leave a lot of space for a politician to respect the ideological difference between conservative desires to roll back labor laws and libertarian desires to roll back unions. What we seem to get in the Republican party is a desire to roll back both.

@ Lex,
Good post, but I think you are inadvertantly supporting MS's real conclusion- that the complicated relationships that define collective bargaining in both the private and public sectors transcend simple policy-based solutions. So much of American political rhetoric feeds into the partisanship by trying to convince the population that the problems are not complex and that there are simple solutions.
Both sides can easily man their trenches of legitimacy.

@Turkey Vulture:

"I have my doubts about whether these rankings are reliable or meaningful in terms of assessing educational quality, but even if they are, it tells us nothing about causation. If 45 States allow collective bargaining by teachers and 5 do not, where do you think the most qualified teachers will go? Where will the least qualified teachers have to go if they can't get a job in the unionized States?"

Aren't you arguing for causation there? Lack of collective bargaining leads the best teachers to avoid the state, which leads to lower educational quality.

@ Lex

Oh common, you can't compare Magnet schools to other schools. They are the all star schools, they choose who gets in. And they are in affluent areas.
And to backup what Milo said, you are inadvertently supporting MS here.

Anyways, in framing this debate about ALL teacher unions we are missing the point. There are many affluent public middle-upper class school districts that do well where almost everyone has no problem with teacher unions. People have problems with poor performing (and really just poor in general) school districts with unions. By making the good districts with unions and the bad districts with unions inseparable , you lose credibility that your intention is to do anything other than destroy the *concept* of unions.

"Scott Walker and the modern Republican Party, are not in fact interested in collaborating with them on solutions, and are instead trying to destroy their existence as institutions."

It seems to me that Gov. Walker's goal is not to destroy the existence of unions as institutions so much as it is to destroy the financial base of the Wisconsin Democratic Party.

M.S. wrote: "In the particular case of unions, it's pretty clear from all the research that the existence of unions in a workplace can either increase or decrease productivity, depending on how unions and management interact."

Is there even a facially plausible argument that the AFT increases productivity or leads to be better educational outcomes? I'm serious here. I've never read a single argument to that effect.

RR said it better than I could have; the collaborative union models used in Germany, Scandinavia, and Japan are far preferable to the adversarial model that prevails in America. I doubt a government or company who wanted to adopt such a model could do so successfully, simply because the adversarial model is so entrenched here, both culturally and statutorily.

I think that would be a better subject to debate. Most everyone agrees that the union status quo is unsustainable, so how should it be changed? Will posed a similar question, but he asked what should *replace* unions. Perhaps we should be asking how to change our current union model.

@GUI
"If Wisconsin was still highly ranked, then the "collective bargaining --> good academic results" argument might hold some water. Until then, it isn't very convincing."

You're right on the complexity of the statistics here, but you're arguing against something the post explicitly declines to claim. MS writes "this doesn't show that collective bargaining makes school systems better. But it makes it pretty hard to argue the converse."

So there is no "collective bargaining --> good academic results" argument in the post. All the post says is that these figures make it difficult to argue that the LACK of collective bargaining makes school systems better (or, as a more exact converse, that collective bargaining makes school systems worse).