Three years after Barack Obama’s election signaled a seeming resurgence for America’s unions, the landscape looks very different. Republican governors in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio have limited the reach of collective bargaining for public employees. The moves, especially in Wisconsin, set off a national furor that has all but obscured the underlying debate as it relates to schooling: Should public-employee collective bargaining be reined in or expanded in education? Is the public interest served by public-sector collective bargaining? If so, how and in what ways? Arguing in this forum for more expansive collective bargaining for teachers is Richard D. Kahlenberg, senior fellow at The Century Foundation and author of Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy. Responding that public-employee collective bargaining is destructive to schooling and needs to be reined in is Jay P. Greene, chair of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and author of Education Myths.

 

Richard D. Kahlenberg: Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s campaign earlier this year to significantly curtail the scope of bargaining for the state’s public employees, including teachers, set off a national debate over whether their long-established right to collectively bargain should be reined in, or even eliminated.

If you’re a Republican who wants to win elections, going after teachers unions makes parochial sense. According to Terry Moe, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) gave 95 percent of contributions to Democrats in federal elections between 1989 and 2010. “Collective bargaining is the bedrock of union well-being,” Moe notes, so to constrain collective bargaining is to weaken union power. The partisan nature of Walker’s campaign was revealed when he exempted two public-employee unions that supported him politically: those representing police and firefighters.

But polls suggest that Americans don’t want to see teachers and other public employees stripped of collective bargaining rights. A USA Today/Gallup poll found that by a margin of 61 to 33 percent, Americans oppose ending collective bargaining for public employees. A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll discovered that while Americans want public employees to pay more for retirement benefits and health care, 77 percent said unionized state and municipal employees should have the same rights as union members who work in the private sector. Is the public wrong in supporting the rights of teachers and other public employees to collectively bargain? I don’t think so.

The NEA has existed since 1857 and the AFT since 1916, but teachers didn’t have real influence until they began bargaining collectively in the 1960s. Before that, as Albert Shanker, one of the founding fathers of modern teachers unions, noted, teachers engaged in “collective begging.” Educators were very poorly compensated; in New York City, they were paid less than those washing cars for a living. Teachers were subject to the whims of often autocratic principals and could be fired for joining a union.

Some teachers objected to the idea of collective bargaining. They saw unions as organizations for blue-collar workers, not for college-educated professionals. But Shanker and others insisted that teachers needed collective bargaining in order to be compensated sufficiently and treated as professionals.

Democratic societies throughout the world recognize the basic right of employees to band together to pursue their interests and secure a decent standard of living. Article 23 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides not only that workers should be shielded from discrimination, but also that “everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”

Collective bargaining is important, not only to advance individual interests but to give unions the power to serve as a countervailing force against big business and big government. Citing the struggle of Polish workers against the Communist regime, Ronald Reagan declared in a Labor Day speech in 1980, “where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost.”

The majority of Americans believe that citizens don’t give up the basic right to collective bargaining just because they work for the government. In free societies across the globe, from Finland to Japan, public school teachers have the right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining.

In the United States, only seven states outlaw collective bargaining for teachers. Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia authorize collective bargaining for such employees, and another nine permit it. It is no accident that the seven states that prohibit collective bargaining for teachers are mostly in the Deep South, the region of the country historically most hostile to extending democratic citizenship to all Americans.

Terry Moe finds that collective bargaining for teachers has strong support among candidates for school boards. He writes, “the vast majority of school board candidates, 66 percent, have positive overall attitudes toward collective bargaining. Even among Republicans—indeed, even among Republicans who are not endorsed by the unions—the majority take a positive approach to this most crucial of union concerns.”

Nonetheless, some (including Moe) would prefer that collective bargaining for teachers be severely curtailed, or even outlawed. Ironically, one argument advanced by critics is that collective bargaining is undemocratic. The other major argument is that teacher collective bargaining is bad for education. Both claims are without basis.

Those who argue that collective bargaining for teachers is stacked, even undemocratic, say that, unlike in the private sector, where management and labor go head-to-head with clearly distinct interests, in the case of teachers, powerful unions are actively involved in electing school board members, essentially helping to pick the management team. Moreover, when collective bargaining covers education policy areas, such as class size or discipline codes, the public is shut out of the negotiations, some assert. Along the way, they conclude, the interests of adults in the system are served but not the interests of children.

But these arguments fail to recognize that in a democracy, school boards are ultimately accountable to all voters, not just teachers, who often live and vote outside the district in which they teach, and in any event represent a small share of total voters. Union endorsements matter in school board elections, but so do the interests of general taxpayers and parents and everyone else who makes up the community. If school board members toe a teachers union line that is unpopular with voters, those officials can be thrown out in the next election.

Indeed, one could make a strong argument that any outsized influence that teachers unions exercise in school board elections provides a nice enhancement of democratic decisionmaking on education policy because teachers, as much as any other group in society, can serve as powerful advocates for those Americans who cannot vote: schoolchildren. The interests of teachers and their unions don’t always coincide with those of students, but on the really big issues, such as overall investment in education, the convergence of interests is strong. Certainly, the interests of teachers in ensuring adequate educational investment are far stronger than they are for most voters, who don’t have children in the school system and may be more concerned about holding down taxes than investing in the education of other people’s kids.

American society consistently underinvests in children compared with other leading democratic societies. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the child poverty rate in the United States is 21.6 percent, the fifth-highest among its 40 member nations. Only Turkey, Romania, Mexico, and Israel have higher child-poverty rates. Put differently, we’re in the bottom one-eighth in preventing child poverty. By contrast, when the interests of children are connected with the interests of teachers, as they are on the question of public education spending, the U.S. ranks close to the top one-third. Among 39 OECD nations, the U.S. ranks 14th in spending on primary and secondary education as a percentage of gross domestic product.

Some critics argue that strong teachers unions make for inefficient spending and bad education policies in the instances when teacher and student interests diverge. For example, it is frequently claimed that teachers unions, through collective-bargaining agreements, protect incompetent members and prevent good teachers from being paid more.

This sometimes occurs, and when it does, it is troublesome. But a number of reform union leaders, going back to Al Shanker, have embraced “peer review” plans, which weed out bad teachers in Toledo, Ohio; Montgomery County, Maryland; and elsewhere. These reform plans put the lie to the notion that the average teacher has an interest in her union protecting incompetent colleagues. To the contrary, dead wood on the faculty makes every other teacher’s job more difficult. Likewise, numerous local unions have adopted pay-for-performance plans, when the measurement of performance is valid and incentives are in place to encourage good teachers to share innovative teaching techniques rather than hoarding them.

Moreover, many of the things that teachers collectively bargain for are good for kids. The majority of students benefit when teachers can more easily discipline unruly students, for example. (Principals, by contrast, often want to take a softer line so the school’s suspension rates don’t look bad.) Higher compensation packages attract higher-quality teacher candidates and reduce disruptive teacher turnover.

If collective bargaining were really a terrible practice for education, we should see stellar results where it does not occur: in the American South and in the charter school arena, for example. Why, then, aren’t the seven states that forbid collective bargaining for teachers (Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia) at the top of the educational heap? Why do charter schools, 88 percent of which are nonunion, only outperform regular public schools 17 percent of the time, as a 2009 Stanford University study found? Why, instead, do we see states like Massachusetts, and countries like Finland, both with strong teachers unions, leading the pack?

Opponents of collective bargaining will immediately point out that poverty rates are high in the American South, and low in Finland, which is an entirely valid point. But doesn’t that suggest that the national obsession with weakening teachers unions may be less important than finding ways to reduce childhood poverty?

Moreover, scholarly studies that seek to control for poverty find that collective bargaining is associated with somewhat stronger, not weaker, student outcomes. Sociologist Robert Carini’s 2002 review of 17 studies found that “unionism leads to modestly higher standardized achievement test scores, and possibly enhanced prospects for graduation from high school.” Even Terry Moe, an outspoken opponent of collective bargaining for teachers (see “Seeing the Forest Instead of the Trees,” book reviews, page 77), suggests that research on the impact of collective bargaining on student outcomes “has generated mixed findings (so far) and doesn’t provide definitive answers.”

For a variety of reasons, collective bargaining for teachers should not be constrained, much less eliminated. Indeed, if teachers are to be partners in innovative education reform (see “A Different Role for Teachers Unions?” features, page 16), the scope of collective bargaining should be expanded. When the United Federation of Teachers first began to bargain collectively in the early 1960s, Albert Shanker was distressed that the New York City school board was willing to discuss only traditional issues like wages and benefits and rejected the idea of bargaining over broader policies that the union proposed, such as the creation of magnet schools.

Shanker saw that by reducing the scope of collective bargaining, critics created a political trap for unions. Union leaders were told they could only address bread-and-butter issues and then were criticized for caring only about their own selfish concerns rather than student achievement or larger policy issues. Moreover, Shanker believed that teachers had a lot of good ideas that could be incorporated into collective bargaining agreements, such as teacher peer review, suggestions for the types of curricula that work best in the classroom, and what sorts of programs would lure teachers into high-poverty schools. He also knew that reforms that draw on teacher wisdom are more likely to be effectively implemented when the classroom door closes.

In the end, Shanker’s frustration with the traditional constraints of collective bargaining spurred him to propose, in a 1988 speech at the National Press Club, the creation of “charter schools,” where teachers would draw upon a wealth of experience to try innovative ideas. Much to Shanker’s dismay, the charter school movement went in a very different direction, becoming a vehicle for avoiding unions and reducing teacher voice (and thereby increasing teacher turnover). And charters still educate a very small fraction of students.

Expanding collective bargaining for teachers to more states and to more education issues will give educators greater voice, and in so doing, indirectly strengthen the voice of students. Overall, the evidence suggests that Scott Walker has it exactly wrong, and the American public, which overwhelmingly supports the right to collective bargaining, has it right.

Jay P. Greene: Asking if teachers unions are a positive force in education is a bit like asking if the Tobacco Institute is a positive force in health policy or if the sugar lobby is helpful in assessing the merits of corn syrup. The problem is not that teachers unions are hostile to the interests of students and their families, but that teachers unions, like any organized interest group, are specifically designed to promote the interests of their own members and not to safeguard the interests of nonmembers. To the extent that teachers benefit from more generous pay and benefits, less-demanding work conditions, and higher job security, the unions will pursue those goals, even if achieving them comes at the expense of students. That is what interest groups do. Unfortunately, a public education system that guarantees ever-increasing pay and benefits while lowering work demands on teachers, who virtually hold their positions for life regardless of performance, harms students.

Collective bargaining is the primary vehicle through which the unions enact their preferred policies regarding pay, benefits, job security, and work conditions. It is also the mechanism by which unions collect fees from teachers that provide them with the resources to prevail politically. Until the ability of teachers unions to engage in collective bargaining is restrained, we should expect unions to continue to use it to advance the interests of their adult members over those of children, their families, and taxpayers.

Teachers unions only won the privilege of engaging in collective bargaining in the last 50 years, about when student achievement began to stagnate and costs to soar. A return to the pre–collective bargaining era may be the tonic our education system needs to return to growth in achievement and restraint in costs.

The nature and function of organized interest groups is widely known and understood. Of course, there is nothing wrong with people organizing interest groups to advocate for themselves. That is an essential part of the freedom of assembly, protected by the U.S. Constitution. If people dislike what an interest group is advocating, they can organize other interest groups to compete in the marketplace of ideas and advocate for other concerns. The normal process of checks and balances among competing interest groups, however, has failed when it comes to education.

There are three factors that have contributed to the failure of other groups to check the power of teachers unions. First, there is an asymmetry in the ability of groups to organize in education, significantly favoring the teachers unions. Teachers unions have a huge advantage in organizing and advocating for their interests. Employees of the public school system are physically concentrated in school buildings, making it easier for them to organize. And because current employees are in a good position to know how they can benefit from the system, they can be mobilized relatively easily to advocate for those policies. Parents, taxpayers, and members of the general public are geographically dispersed, making it harder for them to organize. And because they are not immersed in education matters, they cannot easily envision how policy changes might help or hurt, making it harder to mobilize them on those issues. It is hardly unique to education that concentrated interests have an advantage over diffuse interests, but this is one factor contributing to teachers union dominance.

Second, teachers unions have fooled a large section of the general public and elites into thinking of them as something other than a regular interest group advocating for their own concerns.

The teachers unions have worked hard to convince people that they are a collection of educators who love our children almost as much as the parents do. They’re like the favorite aunt or uncle who dotes on our children. This image of the teachers unions as part of our family is facilitated by the fact that virtually every college-educated household (the households with the greatest political influence) has at least one current or former public school teacher sitting at the dining table when they gather for Thanksgiving. This impression is also fostered by ad campaigns featuring teachers buying school supplies out of their own pockets and movie portraits of heroic teachers believing in students, even as their parents have abandoned them.

Of course, some teachers really do buy school supplies with their own money (which should make people wonder what kind of education system would make that necessary after spending an average of more than $12,000 per student each year). And some teachers really are like the doting aunt or uncle who sticks with kids, even when the parents have given up. But loving children and being part of the family is certainly not what teachers unions are about. They are about accumulating the power necessary to advocate for the interests of their members. In a moment of candor, Bob Chanin, former general counsel of the National Education Association, explained the key to the union’s effectiveness: “Despite what some among us would like to believe, it is NOT because of our creative ideas. It is NOT because of the merit of our positions. It is NOT because we care about children, and it is NOT because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.”

The disarming image of teachers unions as Mary Poppins has begun to morph into that of a burly autoworker, as teachers union advocacy has become more militant in recent years. As states attempt to trim very generous benefit packages for teachers, the unions have organized large demonstrations, occupied state capitols, and chanted angry slogans. The public image of teachers unions fighting like autoworkers for the benefit to retire at 55 with full medical coverage and 66 percent of their peak salary while the economy is in shambles and the quality of their industry stagnates has done much to undermine the doting aunt or uncle meme. The angry slogans emanating from Diane Ravitch’s and Valerie Strauss’s Twitter feeds may soothe disgruntled teachers, but they are eroding the public perception that teachers unions are somehow different from other interest groups. Media and policy elites are increasingly treating teachers union claims with the same skepticism that they used to apply only to other interest groups.

A third factor is that unions have significant influence over who is elected or appointed to negotiate with them over pay, benefits, and work conditions. In the private sector, the power of unions is constrained by the competing organized interests of management. When they sit down to negotiate pay, benefits, and work conditions, members of management are inclined to represent the interests of shareholders, not those of employees. But in education, as in other public-sector collective bargaining, the interests of employees are represented on both sides of the table. The employees, as citizens, can organize, finance, and vote for elected officials who favor the union’s interests. It is precisely for this reason that public employees historically did not have collective bargaining rights.

But didn’t the lack of collective bargaining rights sometimes leave teachers vulnerable to arbitrary and discriminatory treatment by school administrators? Yes, but unionization and collective bargaining were neither necessary nor efficient means of correcting those abuses. We can look to other public employees, such as members of the armed forces, who still do not have collective bargaining rights, to see how progress could have occurred without unionization. The military, like public schools, was once racially segregated. African American servicemen and servicewomen were treated horribly. And sometimes officers treated all soldiers in an arbitrary and unfair manner. These abuses were not corrected by unionization and collective bargaining in the military. They were corrected by executive orders and changing legislation governing those public employees. The same path could have been taken with public school employees without the political distortions that public employee unions introduce by virtue of having their interests represented on both sides of the bargaining table.

It may have taken longer than many would like to integrate the military, expand the roles of women in the armed forces, and end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but we were able to achieve all of those through an open, public process of changing laws and regulations. Unionized collective bargaining might also have addressed those issues, but it would have been done mostly behind closed doors and would have been accompanied by provisions to protect the narrow interests of the unions at the expense of the public interest. Perhaps the use of drones would have been restricted because it displaces jobs for Air Force pilots; perhaps there would be caps on the hours soldiers could engage in combat. Who knows what else a unionized military might have produced? The point is we rightly restrict the ability of members of the armed forces from unionizing and engaging in collective bargaining, just as we once did and could again for teachers. The claim that public employees have a “right” to unionize and collectively bargain and that exercising this “right” necessarily advances the public interest is obviously false.

The proper mechanism for improving compensation and work conditions in the public sector is through changes in law and regulation. The salary, benefits, job security, and work conditions of public employees are just as much a matter of public policy as the work that those employees are supposed to do. We don’t allow smoky backroom deals arrived at in collective bargaining to dictate the goals, structure, or existence of the public education system, so neither should we use that process to determine compensation and work condition policies.

What evidence is there that teachers unions have actually had negative effects on students and the education system? The research literature generally finds that unionization is associated with higher per-pupil costs and lower student achievement, but those findings are not very large and are sometimes inconsistent. A 1996 article by Caroline Hoxby in the Quarterly Journal of Economics is widely considered the most methodologically rigorous analysis of the issue. Claremont Graduate University professor Charles Kerchner described Hoxby’s study in a literature review prepared for the National Education Association as “the most sophisticated of the econometric attempts to isolate a union impact on the student results and school operations …” Hoxby finds that unionization is associated with higher student dropout rates as well as higher spending.

But the reality is that it is very hard to produce rigorous research on the effects of teachers unions on education. For one thing, teachers unions are powerful and active almost everywhere. Even in states without collective bargaining, the unions push state legislatures to put into law what is normally put into collective bargaining agreements. This is less than ideal for the unions, because they don’t collect dues in exchange for pushing through legislation like they can for representing members to achieve the same ends through collective bargaining. Unions operate these money-losing operations in right-to-work states to make sure that there is no meaningful policy variation on their key issues. They’d rather that we not discover that the world does not end without a mandatory step-and-ladder pay scale, fair dismissal procedures, and favorable work rules. The lack of policy variation hinders researchers, because outcomes are not likely to be very different where the policies are not very different.

But we don’t need a wealth of evidence on teachers unions specifically as long as we know about the effects of interest groups and recognize that teachers unions are indeed interest groups. Seeking to produce evidence on the effects of each interest group separately, especially when there are empirical challenges to doing so, is a bit like trying to prove that gravity operates in every room of a house. We could drop a bowling ball in each room to see if it hits the floor, but sometimes there are tables, couches, or beds in the way. If we don’t get the result we expected, it doesn’t mean that gravity only applies in certain places; it just means that research constraints prevent us from seeing in a particular situation what we know to be true in general.

In general, we know that interest groups advocate for the benefits of their members, even if it comes at the expense of others. We know that teachers unions are interest groups. And we know that the interests of teachers unions are not entirely consistent with the needs of students and taxpayers. Thus, teachers unions are likely to be negative forces for the education system and certainly should not be seen as helpful. The most rigorous research that does exist bears this out, but we also know this from our more general knowledge of how interest groups affect policy.

It is not currently practical to forbid the unionization of teachers, as we forbid the unionization of members of the armed forces. But if we want to limit the ability of teachers unions to advance their own interests at the expense of children, their families, and taxpayers, we need to consider ways of restricting their ability to engage in collective bargaining. Restricting collective bargaining would force teachers unions to pursue their interests through the legislative process, where competing interests might have a better chance to check their power. And forcing unions to operate through legislation rather than backroom collective-bargaining negotiations would improve transparency, which could also place a check on the unions’ ability to satisfy their own interests at the expense of others.

RDK: Jay Greene’s opening line, comparing teachers unions to the Tobacco Institute, is very telling about his overall analysis. He’s right, of course, that both are “interest groups,” but does he not see a massive difference between an entity that is devoted to getting more kids addicted to deadly cigarettes so they’ll be lifelong clients and a group representing rank-and-file teachers whose life’s work is educating children?

Greene complains that teachers unions have become “more militant in recent years.” But teacher strikes, which were quite common in the 1960s and 1970s, dropped 90 percent by the mid-1980s and are now, as one education report noted, essentially “relics of the past.” To the extent that teachers have rallied, it’s in response to unprecedented attacks on them in places like Wisconsin, where a half century of labor law was radically rewritten. Astonishingly, Greene would go further than Wisconsin Republicans and “return to the pre–collective bargaining era.”

Greene says providing teachers with better pay and benefits is bad for kids, but where is his evidence? Don’t better compensation packages attract brighter talent, or are the laws of supply and demand suddenly suspended when it comes to teachers?

Finally, Greene is correct to suggest that teacher and student interests are not perfectly aligned, but who are the selfless adults who better represent the interests of kids? The hedge fund managers who support charter schools and also want their income taxed at lower rates than regular earned income, thereby squeezing education budgets? Superintendents who sometimes junk promising initiatives for which they cannot take credit? I’d rather place my faith in the democratically elected representatives of educators who work with kids day in and day out.

JPG: Richard Kahlenberg places his faith in “democratically elected representatives of educators,” that is, the teachers unions, to safeguard the interests of children. Note that he does not say the democratically elected representatives of the people, or the voters. Kahlenberg is perfectly comfortable with a school system whose policies and practices are dominated by its employees, not by the citizens who pay for it or by the families whose children are compelled to attend it. Rather than seeing a system controlled by its employees as one characterized by self-interested adults maximizing their benefits at the expense of children, Kahlenberg sees it as the ideal.

In my ideal vision, we would put our faith in parents, not teachers unions, to represent the interests of children. If we had a robust system of parental school choice, I would have no problem with teachers unions and collective bargaining. In the private sector, if unions ask for too much, at least they experience the natural consequences of destroying their own companies or industries (to wit, the auto industry). But in the public sector, unions are almost entirely insulated from the consequences of making unreasonable demands, since governments never go out of business. Public sector unions can drive total revenue for their industry higher without any improvements in productivity simply by getting public officials to increase taxes.

Unfortunately, we lack a robust system of school choice and instead have to rely on democratic institutions, like school boards and state legislatures, to determine most school policies and practices. But unless we also restrict the collective bargaining rights of school employees, teachers unions will dominate the decisions of those democratic institutions, given their advantages in funding and organization, to distort elections and policy decisions.

Teachers unions almost certainly raise salaries and benefits, as Kahlenberg suggests, but that doesn’t necessarily attract better teachers if the salary schedule does nothing to reward excellence. Similarly, union-imposed dismissal procedures make it virtually impossible to fire ineffective teachers. The alignment that Kahlenberg sees between teachers unions’ desire to increase education spending and the interests of students would only be a real concordance if the unions facilitated the use of those funds in ways that actually improved outcomes.

Predictably, cuts in state spending coming with the economic downturn have spurred litigation. New Jersey has been ordered to restore funds for urban schools, while in Florida a class action brought by the state’s teachers union seeks to protect state employee pensions from the budget knife, a fresh field of litigation.

New Jersey’s supreme court in May restored $500 million in added spending for the state’s poor, urban schools, known as the “Abbott districts” (31 out of 591 districts in total), which particularly benefit from nearly 40 years of its constitutional rulings. Otherwise, a divided court left intact school spending cuts in the budget of Republican governor Chris Christie, an outspoken critic of the court, who promised to abide by its decision.

In deciding how to rule, New Jersey’s court was guided by earlier decisions on behalf of the Abbott districts, stating, “Like anyone else, the State is not free to walk away from judicial orders enforcing constitutional obligations.” We are guessing that other courts that receive petitions asking for restoration of funds will attempt a similar approach and will seek to defend positions staked out on grounds of equity or adequacy, but will avoid picking fresh fights with governors and legislatures if they can.

Budget cutting has precipitated another issue: the pension rights of public employees, among whom are this country’s heavily unionized teachers.

In June, the Florida Education Association (FEA), the state’s teachers union, filed suit in a circuit court in Tallahassee against the governor and other officials on behalf of the more than 550,000 state employees, among them 140,000 FEA members, who participate in the Florida Retirement System (FRS), charging that changes in the system made by a Republican legislature violated Florida’s constitution in three ways: They impaired the employees’ contract with the state, took private property without compensation, and impaired the employees’ right to bargain collectively.

Participation in the FRS is mandatory for state employees. Underlying the union’s complaint were revisions that would take effect on July 1, 2011. Although the FRS was created in 1970 as a contributory system, it had been noncontributory since 1974. The legislature now returned to a contributory plan under which 3 percent of a member’s pay would be deducted monthly and credited to an account with the FRS. A second change addressed provisions for cost-of-living adjustments following retirement. Under the plan of 1974, retirees were to receive an annual cost-of-living increase of 3 percent without regard to the number of years of credited service or when the service had occurred. Under the revised plan, the 3 percent adjustment would be subject to a fractional reduction for years of service after July 1, 2011. The union’s petition objected that these changes had been made unilaterally rather than having been the subject of collective bargaining. It asked for temporary and permanent injunctions, and that the funds at issue be segregated and placed in an interest-bearing account until the lawsuit was settled.

“This pay cut was used by legislative leadership to make up a budget shortfall on the backs of teachers, law enforcement officers, firefighters, and other state workers,” FEA president Andy Ford said. “It is essentially an income tax levied only on workers belonging to the Florida Retirement System,” he added, apparently hoping to cast as hypocritical Republicans who are opposed to tax increases.

Florida is one of only five states with a constitutional protection for collective bargaining rights, though the language is strangely ambiguous. Without specifically granting the right, the law guarantees against its abridgement. This invites discretion from a supreme court that has a pro-union past but today is composed of a narrow majority of Republican appointees.

More or less simultaneously with the filing of Florida’s suit, state district judges in Minnesota and Colorado threw out public employees’ suits against governments that had reduced cost-of-living adjustments to their pensions, ruling that they were not contractually protected. The Florida plaintiffs, citing both statutes and the constitution, assert such protection. The state, citing past supreme court decisions in support of its position, asserts that the FRS is entirely prospective and must allow for modification of future benefits by the legislature.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors: Fighting for the Soul of America’s Toughest High School

By Alexander Russo

Jossey-Bass, 2011, $24.95; 232 pages.

Reviewed by Nathan Glazer

Neither “stray dogs” nor “saints” play any role in Alexander Russo’s account of how Green Dot, a nonprofit organization that creates new charter high schools, managed to take over Locke High School in the Watts area of Los Angeles, and what it achieved in its first year managing it.

Stray dogs are occasionally found on Locke’s substantial campus, and the “Saints” are its athletic teams, which on occasion have had great success. Alain L. Locke High School was built after the Watts riots of 1965. It opened in 1967 and was part of a substantial effort to improve conditions in Watts. For some years it was the pride of the area. But it was an inner-city high school, initially primarily black, in later years increasingly Hispanic, with all the attributes common to such: poor scores on the various tests, district, state and national, that have come over the years to evaluate schools; poor attendance; low graduation rates; and serious student discipline problems.

But Locke has received much more attention than any other inner-city high school. It was the subject of an earlier book, Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach For America by Donna Foote, which tells us that President George H. W. Bush visited it in 1988, President Bill Clinton in 1999. Tipper Gore, wife of former vice president Al Gore, Senator John McCain, Ice Cube, Muhammed Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and James Olmos, the star of Stand and Deliver, have all been visitors. Green Dot’s takeover of Locke was covered in great detail in the Los Angeles Times and in an article in the New Yorker.

Margaret Spellings, then secretary of education, visited a Green Dot school in Los Angeles in 2007, and the principal of Locke at the time, Frank Wells, then in his third year (he had lasted longer than his recent predecessors), spoke up about his frustrations. He had effected some improvement in school discipline and in academic tests, “but the district kept on sending him ineffective tenured teachers who were  extremely difficult to remove.” (In Relentless Pursuit, we learn of the final successful removal of one teacher, after three years of effort and a great mass of documentation.)

Reporters covered Spellings’s visit, and Wells’s intervention. “It sounded as though Wells was calling out his employers in public, proposing a Green Dot takeover of the school—and committing professional suicide.” Green Dot had already established some small charter high schools, which were attracting the better students of the neighborhood, a source of frustration to Wells. Steve Barr, a progressive political activist who had founded Green Dot, had his eye on taking over and remaking a large urban high school. Some teachers at Locke were interested in Green Dot and had met with Barr. And California law makes it possible for a vote of teachers in a school to turn that school into a charter. One would like to know more on how that law works, and what the state provides to such charters, but Russo is skimpy on these details, as on so many others.

After initial skepticism, Wells came to support the teachers pressing for a Green Dot takeover. A majority of teachers voted for it, at which point Wells was summarily removed from the principalship. Coming out of a meeting at 6 p.m., he was met by the area director, who told him “he was being reassigned to the district office and asked for Wells’s keys…. There was no opportunity for [Wells] to tell his teachers or explain to the kids. He never went back into the building. It was less than a week after he’d publicly voiced support for Green Dot.” One would like to know more about how this happened to a rather successful principal, one who had been doing better than his predecessors.

Despite union and district efforts to overturn the vote, the Green Dot supporters succeeded, and after a year of transition, in which there was a good deal of disorder, Green Dot took over the school, with a new principal and new teachers. (One distinction of Green Dot among charter school organizations is that its teachers are unionized, but we are not told anything more about the union except that it is not the one that had represented the Locke teachers.)

One would like to know more about Green Dot’s philosophy, practices, model, if any, but all one manages to learn is that, as one teacher explained to the students, “at the new Locke, teachers cared about their students, wanted to help them pass their classes, and would not abandon that effort [implying the former teachers did not ‘care,’ etc.?]. ‘I’m going to shake your hand every day, no matter what [one teacher tells her new class]…. Don’t worry about germs—I’ve got lots of hand sanitizer.’” There are no details about Green Dot’s recruitment of teachers, training, etc. The new teachers, as one of the holdovers notes, were much more white than the old Locke staff, “despite all efforts to recruit minorities.”

Wells was not selected by Green Dot for the principalship of the new Locke. He is African American, came out of San Francisco housing projects, and has been in military service. Veronica Coleman, his replacement, “is the product of a childhood on a Michigan farm and years playing sports.” Russo is rather sparse on details about race. One does not learn until well into his book that Wells is black.

What is clear about Green Dot is its commitment to small high schools, and so the reorganized Locke consisted of six schools. Efforts at creating smaller schools within Locke had already taken place, in response to No Child Left Behind prescriptions, but we are told little about these: their problems, successes, failures. In the new Locke there were to be a number of small baby Lockes, each beginning with one class of ninth graders, but scheduled to add an additional grade each year until they became full four-year high schools. The old Locke students were organized into two subschools, one called “white” and one “black,” with appropriate uniform dress requirements, and these were slated to disappear, losing a grade a year as the baby Lockes added new grades.

Russo, an experienced education journalist, received a Spencer Foundation Education Journalism Fellowship at Columbia to write this book, which covers the story of Green Dot, of its efforts to take over an inner-city high school, and of its first year managing Locke, with briefer coverage of its second year. Predictably, attendance, academic achievement, and the rate of graduation improved. Locke had a new teaching body, one likely more enthusiastic, harder working, and perhaps better qualified in some respects than the old, and a new administrative .team. It saw the effects of this new effort: the Hawthorne effect, it has been named, after famous experiments on productivity in the 1930s.

Donna Foote, in her book on Locke written a few years before the takeover, focuses on four teachers who came through Teach For America (TFA), which had sent a good number of young teachers to the school. They made up for years a large percentage of Locke’s teaching force. It is not clear whether they still do under Green Dot’s management; Russo does not mention the TFA influence at Locke. One learns a great deal in Foote’s book about the remarkable effort TFA puts into recruiting the best possible students for its enterprise, the energy and resources it devotes to evaluating its recruits, and the awesome effort these young people put into their teaching. They get good results—no wonder. Some of those who feature in Russo’s book, we learn from Foote, came to Locke through TFA. One wishes Russo had told half as much as Foote does about how Green Dot recruits, trains, and evaluates its teachers.

The first year of Green Dot management of Locke was 2008–09, the second 2009–10; we are now past the end of the third year, at which point the old Locke fully disappeared, absorbed into the new smaller Lockes. One wonders how things are going. It is the unfortunate fact about school reform stories that by the third or fourth year many of the reformers are off doing other things: they have gone on to graduate school, become administrators and consultants, and the like. This is true of the TFA recruits, too, whose contract is only for two years. One wonders how well Green Dot holds its teachers. Perhaps a book on the third or fourth year of a successful reform would teach us something about how initial gains can be maintained.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of sociology and education at Harvard University.

Faced with a $30 million shortfall in its $295 million budget for the 2011–12 school year, the Adams 12 school district in north Denver laid off custodians, furloughed teachers, trimmed programs, reduced benefits—and then took its budget scalpel to student activities.

The district dropped middle-school sports, cut back on travel for its high-school teams, and pared $500,000 from the $2 million budget that supports afterschool activities like the Math Olympiad and spelling bee at Centennial Elementary, the technology and drama clubs at Rocky Top Middle School, and the anime (Japanese animation) and Knowledge Bowl clubs at Mountain Range High.

Christopher Gdowski, superintendent of the 42,000-student district, talks hopefully of volunteers stepping in to fill some of the gaps. The YMCA has approached him about taking over some of the sports teams, even offering to buy the used school uniforms and the licensing rights to the school mascots. But some activities may have trouble finding sponsors, he concedes, and teachers union contracts may preclude others from turning to the community for advisors.

“We’re hoping for the best, but we’re fearing the worst,” Gdowski told me.

With school districts struggling to keep their noses above choppy budget waters and voters howling about taxes, should schools really be funding ping-pong and trading-card clubs? Swim teams, swing dancing, moot court, powder-puff football? Latino unions, gay-straight alliances, the Future Business Leaders of America, the French Honors Society, the jazz band, the knitting club? The barbell club at Adams 12’s Niver Creek Middle School?

As it turns out, maybe they should. There’s not a straight line between the crochet club and the Ivy League. But a growing body of research says there is a link between afterschool activities and graduating from high school, going to college, and becoming a responsible citizen.

“Honestly, the place that best prepared me for college was the hardwood court of men’s varsity basketball” in high school, Andrew Snow, a University of Michigan senior and pre-law major, e-mailed me recently. “That court taught me hard work, sacrifice, teamwork, humility…and leadership,” he added, plus, “how to deal with people in social situations” and “responsibility off the court [because] if you made a bad decision, someone would see it.”

Cause or Effect?

The U.S. Department of Education last compiled data on extracurricular activities a decade ago, when it reported that more than half the country’s high-school sophomores participated in sports, that one-fifth were in a school-sponsored music group, and that cheerleading and drill teams, hobby, academic, and vocational clubs each involved about 10 percent of kids.

At affluent suburban schools, the choice of activities can be dizzying. Walt Whitman High School in Montgomery County, Maryland, a Washington, D.C., suburb, offered 89 clubs (equestrian, Persian, unicycle…), 26 sports, seven choral ensembles, seven bands or orchestras, a newspaper, a literary magazine, and a yearbook last year.

Whitman’s feeder school, Thomas W. Pyle Middle School, offered even more: 100 activities, including a stock market club, cooking, a math team, and a magic club.

Whitman says that 96 percent of its students go to college; its SAT scores in math and critical reading are 250 points above the national average. That isn’t because it has an equestrian team and a Shakespeare club, of course. The education department data show that kids from families in the top third by income and education are half again as likely to take part in sports and almost twice as likely to participate in music as kids from the bottom third. Almost 80 percent of the adults in Whitman’s zip code are college graduates, and the median household income is three times the U.S. average.

The data also show that kids with the highest test scores are the most active in afterschool activities. Two-thirds of kids in the top quarter of test takers played sports, for example, compared to less than half in the lowest quarter.

So, is there a link? Did kids who joined afterschool activities become good students, or did good students join afterschool activities?

As with a lot of social science research, the findings about extracurriculars aren’t always consistent or conclusive: You can’t randomly assign kids to soccer, after all. But some researchers insist there is a cause-effect relationship between activities and academic success, not just the other way around.

Margo Gardner, a research scientist at Columbia University’s National Center for Children and Families (NSCF), is among them—and certainly not alone. Using data from the 1988 National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), and controlling for poverty, race, gender, test scores, and parental involvement, Gardner has calculated that the odds of attending college were 97 percent higher for youngsters who took part in school-sponsored activities for two years than for those who didn’t do any school activities.

The odds of completing college were 179 percent higher, and the odds of voting eight years after high school, a proxy for civic engagement, were 31 percent higher.

Gardner repeated the analysis using propensity-score matching, that is, comparing kids whose profiles suggested they had a similar propensity either to join or sit out afterschool activities. Even within those groups of similar kids, those who participated in activities had better school success rates than those who didn’t.

The National Center for Education Statistics, in its own analysis of the longitudinal or NELS data, found that high-school seniors who were involved in school activities were less likely to cut class and play hooky than kids who weren’t involved. Three times as many had a GPA of 3.0 or higher; twice as many scored in the top quarter on math and reading tests. And 68 percent expected to get a college degree, compared to 48 percent of kids who weren’t involved in school activities.

Other researchers have approached the question differently, but come up with complementary results. Angela Duckworth, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, looked at college activities as a predictor of success. She rated the résumés of recent graduates who were applying for their first teaching jobs. She gave the highest scores to those people who had been in a college activity for several years, any college activity, and who had attained a level of leadership or achievement (say, MVP on the softball team).

Those with the highest “grit” scores, as she calls them—with the most persistence—turned out to be the best teachers, based on the academic gains of their students. As an added bonus, the “grittiest” scorers also were more likely to stay in their jobs rather than quit midyear.

Duckworth attributes the difference to perseverance rather than talent: There wasn’t any significant difference in teacher effectiveness based on the SAT scores and college GPAs of the job applicants, she calculated. This isn’t just about whether teachers are new, Duckworth told me: People who are persistent and passionate about something, whether cross-country or baton twirling or spelling bees, will carry over that enthusiasm to other parts of their lives.

Similarly, Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of business and currently the chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, has found a link between high-school sports and girls’ success. Stevenson compared the college-going and labor-force rates between girls who attended high school before the 1972 passage of Title IX and those who attended after. Title IX, an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, required high schools and colleges to offer girls and boys the same opportunities to play sports.

Again controlling for age, race, and their state of residence, Stevenson calculated that for every 10-percentage-point rise in the number of girls playing high-school sports in any state there was a 1-percentage-point increase in those going to college and a 1- to 2-point rise in those with jobs. Title IX led to a 30-percentage-point rise in girls’ sports participation, she adds.

Engaging Students

Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg, whose book, You and Your Adolescent: The Essential Guide for Ages 10–25, discusses afterschool activities. He suggested two more reasons for what he believes is a causal link between activities and academic success.

Kids who are involved in clubs and sports spend an extra couple of hours a week with an adult, usually a role model like a drama director or a football coach. “They don’t want to disappoint the coach,” Whitman’s principal, Alan S. Goodman, told me. All he has to do to straighten out a misbehaving athlete is to threaten to talk to the coach, he said: “‘Oh no, don’t talk to the coach,’ they tell me.”

Extracurriculars also make school more palatable for a whole lot of kids who otherwise find it bleak or unsatisfying, Steinberg said. Grades improve not because of what kids are learning in the video club, but because the video club is making them enjoy school more, so they show up more often, find a circle of like-minded friends, and become more engaged in school.

Christopher Gdowski, Adams 12’s superintendent, echoed Steinberg when I asked him what he meant by “fearing the worst” if some afterschool activities are canceled. His district polled thousands of taxpayers as part of its budget process: A huge majority opposed eliminating all activities, but most agreed on trimming the number of activities each school could offer.

Gdowski said he worries that for “some meaningful number of kids,” those activities are what brings them to school. “That’s the hook,” he said, and budget cuts could leave that hook unbaited.

Penny-wise?

After years of steady increases in education spending, and with the expiry of federal stimulus funds, school districts are facing some unaccustomed belt-tightening this year. K–12 spending rose 39 percent between the 1989–90 and the 2007–2008 school years, according to the U.S. Census bureau, and hit $605 billion in 2009, the latest year for which it has reported numbers.

But the National Business Officers Association has calculated that spending is expected to be off $2.5 billion this year from a year earlier. Florida’s 2012 budget cut K–12 spending by 8 percent, or about $540 a student. Arizona cut $183 million from K–12; New York cut more than $1 billion, and Colorado cut $250 million, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The Center on Education Policy surveyed districts in the spring and found that 46 percent expect funding decreases of 5 percent or more in the 2011–12 school year (the poll asked districts about their “total funds available” for the year, excluding federal stimulus monies).

Staff salaries and benefits are taking much of the hit. But as bus routes, textbook purchases, and even cleaning supplies come under budget scrutiny, it’s no surprise that extracurriculars are in for some pain, too.

Diane M. Place, superintendent of the 1,700-student  Towanda, Pennsylvania, school district, told me she received hate mail and “horrendous calls” when she recommended a $30-a-household tax increase to close a $2.2 million gap in her $24 million budget. Instead, she cut the instruction budget by 9 percent and then went after extracurriculars. She eliminated the rifle and junior robotics clubs, JV soccer, majorettes and one cheerleading squad, and halved the funding for the forensics team and Future Business Leaders.

The 1,000-student Salida, Colorado, school district, facing at least a $500,000 budget gap, moved to a four-day week, and then announced plans to cut Key Club, Math Counts, jazz, and weight lifting. Coos Bay, Oregon, planned to let go a Knowledge Bowl coach in the middle school and a forensics coach in high school after the district chopped $44,000 from its activities fund. Cincinnati is thinking of shifting all of its extracurriculars onto a community group, a move it predicted will save $250,000 a year, largely in teacher coaching stipends.

Or Pound-Foolish?

There’s no ready estimate of how much districts spend for extracurriculars: Districts account differently for teachers’ afterschool pay (it can be lumped in with merit pay, says Stephen Frank of Education Resource Strategies), whether they include team buses in the extracurricular budget, how much they depend on parents and booster clubs for field maintenance and stage-set construction, if and how much they charge students to participate, whether they use federal Title I funds for afterschool enrichment, and so on.

Marguerite Roza, who studies school finance at the University of Washington, calculates that districts spend about the same to suit up a youngster to play a sport as to enroll her in a semester of, say, history. A difference is that there are three seasons for sports, but two semesters for history.

Districts increasingly are depending on kids and their parents to fund extracurriculars. State laws, not national policy, determine which school expenses must be taxpayer-funded and which can be charged to students as user fees. California recently settled a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against dozens of Golden State schools that levied fees for classroom materials, lab fees, and afterschool activities.

But elsewhere, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association counts 33 states where at least some school districts charge athletes anywhere from $25 to $1,500. The band fee at Medina Senior High in Ohio is $200. Arlington, Massachusetts, public schools charge youngsters $405 to join the cheerleading squad and $480 to wrestle. Lakeville, Minnesota, charges $190 to join the debate team and $110 for the chess club.

Many of the best student-athletes, musicians, actors—even cheerleaders and debaters—already are paying lots more than that for private lessons. And some of the most talented spurn their school’s programs in favor of club soccer teams and community orchestras, arguments that budget cutters sometimes cite for trimming extracurriculars.

But Steinberg counters that no one suggests eliminating math classes for mediocre students, or depending on private tutors for calculus. “You could extend that argument out to its illogical extreme,” he said.

At Whitman High, where kids pay a $40 district-wide activities fee, Goodman told me he would rather increase class size than eliminate activities. “You can cope with an extra kid in your class, but at 2:10” when school lets out and intramural basketball is canceled, “what do they do?”

Police statistics offer one answer: Juvenile crime peaks between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. Education department data offer another: 31 percent of high-school seniors watched three or more hours of television every weekday in 2004, the last time the department ran the numbers, up from 9 percent in 1992.

Lessons That Last

Tony Wagner, codirector of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me he did a focus group a decade ago with college students who graduated from a leading public high school in New England. He asked them what “important things” they remembered about high school, three to five years after leaving.

“They described all their experiences in extracurricular activities and sports. This went on for an hour,” he said. But about what the remembered from their academics, “they said, ‘you basically start over.’”

The takeaway, Wagner said, is that extracurriculars “teach a lot of the skills you need as an adult: time management, leadership, self-discipline, and persistence for doing work that isn’t extrinsically motivated.” That dovetails with Wagner’s academic work, which defines the “skills of the future” as including adaptability, leading by influence, and initiative.

“Kids who have a significant involvement in an extracurricular activity have a capacity for focus, self-discipline, and time management that I see lacking in kids who just went through school focused on their GPA,” he told me. Like Gardner and Duckworth, he doesn’t single out football players over the engineering team, or vice versa. The kind of activities “seems not to matter; what matters is the level of engagement,” he said.

I tested Wagner’s conclusion using an updated version of the focus group: I posted a question on the Facebook pages of my college-going sons. I asked their friends what they learned in high school that best prepared them for college, and received answers that were carbon copies of Wagner’s.

No one dumped on high school—“It’s not that I didn’t have fine teachers,” Andrew Snow e-mailed me—but no one credited AP chemistry with preparing them for college, either. In fact, no one mentioned classes at all. Instead, they wrote that extracurriculars introduced them to new ideas and interests, taught them to study more efficiently, developed their social skills, and exposed them to caring adults. “Coach was a maker of honorable men,” wrote Snow.

Justine Mrosak, a first-year medical student at the University of Minnesota, wrote that high school taught her “how to balance my academics with other passions.” Basketball and choir took time, she wrote. “But I didn’t want to give up doing the things that I loved just to get good grades, so I really learned how to schedule my time, prioritize my activities, and make my studying [as] efficient as possible.”

Steven Zuckerman, a pre-law major at the University of Michigan, wrote that “the most valuable thing” he learned was “to challenge my inhibitions by trying new things.” That meant playing sports “I had never tried before,” joining clubs “about things that I never thought would interest me,” and, inevitably, meeting “people with whom I never saw myself connecting.” That curiosity has followed him into college, where he has worked on political campaigns, he says.

I’d rise to the defense of Algebra I any day, and I assume any social scientist would, too. But, leadership, adaptability, social skills? Try a couple years on the school newspaper to learn that.

June Kronholz, a contributing editor, spent four years on her high-school newspaper and 30 years at the Wall Street Journal.

It’s sunset over Manhattan, and from the 35th floor of a Park Avenue skyscraper the vista is pure gold. The soaring buildings are bathed in the deep rich colors of, well, money. As visitors take their seats in the sedately cavernous room, a slim, middle-aged man is pacing in front of a large projector screen with a picture of a black child and the words, “A Right Denied: The Critical Need for Genuine School Reform.” (www.arightdenied.org)

If it is a jarring juxtaposition, it is meant to be. The slim man in the gray suit is there, at a meeting of the New York chapter of the Young Presidents’ Organization, to talk about something that many of these financiers and business people don’t often talk about because they can afford not to: fixing public schools.

“I’m Whitney Tilson,” he says, as if the 60-plus individuals in the standing-room-only meeting didn’t know. The 46-year-old hedge-fund manager (he has a Harvard MBA and is the founder and managing partner of T2 Partners LLC and the Tilson Mutual Funds) writes a regular column on value investing for Kiplinger’s, is a CNBC contributor, and in 2007 was named one of 20 “Rising Stars” by Institutional Investor. In his “free time” (his words), he has become one of the education-reform world’s most prolific gadflies, creator of an infamous and widely read e-mail shout-out about education reform. Tilson was also a cofounder of Democrats for Education Reform, is a board member of KIPP NYC, and is friend and champion of education reform glitterati from Joel Klein to Wendy Kopp.

With very little fanfare, and none of that introduction, Tilson launches into a PowerPoint presentation that might best be described as bringing rich people to the Jesus of school reform. It is at times riveting, at times scary. “Spending for education has skyrocketed,” he says, throwing a chart on the screen with lines running at decidedly different trajectories, “driven mainly by a tripling of the number of teachers.” But despite all this money, he tells his audience, our various performance indicators—he quickly explains NAEP, ACT, SAT—are all flat.

“We’ve stalled,” Tilson says. “Teacher quality has been falling rapidly. Our school systems are dysfunctional.” The “scary part,” Tilson tells them, is that “the longer kids stay in school the farther behind they fall.” It’s “terrifying,” he says. “Game over by age 10.” The audience is with him, transfixed, if unnerved, by one devastating fact after another. “We have spent trillions of dollars and we have almost nothing to show for it,” says Tilson, who moves through the show quickly, with a practiced gait. “All of this dysfunction comes with enormous costs and horrible consequences,” he says, “Over $260,000 is lost for each high school dropout.” These are numbers that this crowd gets.

All the News…

It is fascinating to see Tilson in action. His soft-spoken manner and easy smile bear little resemblance to the passion of his words, especially his e-mail blasts. “Hedge Fund Guy Single-Handedly E-Mails Obama to Victory” was a headline on Alexander Russo’s blog in September of 2008. “Reformy Cheerleader Sends Massive Emails” wrote Russo last year. Tilson’s e-mails, which began as something he sent to a few friends, now arrive in some 4,000 digital mailboxes two or three times a week, with 8 to 12 education-reform news items each. He is famous for his breathless “STOP THE PRESSES!!!” to announce good news, which means anything good about charter schools, vouchers, teacher evaluations, reform superintendents, mayors, senators, or presidents—as in “Mathematica just released the most comprehensive and rigorous study of KIPP ever…and the results are STUNNING!” (June 25, 2010). Or “GRADING THE TEACHERS: Who’s teaching L.A.’s kids?” (August 18, 2010). They get your attention, but there’s also plenty of substance behind these headlines. Tilson is as much a shrewd news aggregator as he is an opinionator. If the New York Times runs an education story, he will tell you about it, but not without also telling you exactly what he thinks about it. Tilson is education reform’s gonzo journalist; “Kooks” is a favorite term. As are “hatchet job” and “insane” (as in “what’s best for kids always takes a back seat to bureaucratic rules/imperatives, no matter how insane” [October 16, 2009]). Randi Weingarten is a preferred target (“Kudos to the Washington Post for holding Randi’s feet to the fire,” [February 3, 2010]), as is Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond. But no one has earned as much consistent enmity from Tilson as Diane Ravitch, to whom he has devoted a separate section on his A Right Denied web page called “Rebutting Ravitch.”

Maniac or Messiah?

“I’m often asked why I spend so much time on this issue,” says Tilson, in a recent post, writing about his education reform obsession. And he answers, “certainly not because I have any direct self-interest—no…I’m not profiting from my involvement in charter schools (in fact, I shudder to think of how much it’s cost me), and I have little personal experience with the public school system because I’m doubly lucky: my parents saw that I wasn’t being challenged in public schools, sacrificed (they’re teachers/education administrators), and my last year in public school was 6th grade; and now, with my own children, I’m one of the lucky few who can afford to buy my children’s way out of the NYC public system [in] which, despite Mayor Bloomberg’s and Chancellor Klein’s herculean efforts, there are probably fewer than two dozen schools (out of nearly 1,500) to which I’d send my kids.”

When I speak with Tilson, in person, I note that he talks almost as fast as he seems to write, though with fewer exclamation points. He is, after all, a Harvard man, though he should have been a Yalie. In fact, Tilson was born in the New Haven hospital where his father and grandfather were born, and would have been fourth-generation Yale had he not gone crimson. “Broke my grandfather’s heart,” he says.

But the crusading education gene is not hard to detect, as Tilson’s father, Thomas, took two years off after his junior year at Yale and joined the Peace Corps, where he met, at training camp in Hawaii, a graduate from the University of Washington. “My dad, Thomas, was 19, and my mom, Susan, was 20,” he says. “They fell in love and got engaged within three weeks of meeting each other…. [They] married in the Philippines, neither family having met the other.”

Tilson’s dad went on to graduate from Yale, then got his PhD in international education from Stanford, specializing in what were then called third world countries. His mother was a teacher until the kids arrived, Whitney and a younger sister. They lived in Africa, Central America, and various American towns until settling in Northfield, Massachusetts, where Thomas was academic dean at the prestigious and private Northfield Mount Hermon School, and where his son and daughter would get their world-class educations. (Tilson’s parents are now 69 and 70 and living in Kenya, where Thomas still consults on education.)

Whitney didn’t follow his father to Yale or into education; he graduated from Harvard with a degree in government, then got his MBA from Harvard Business School. But the times they were a-changing, and during his undergraduate days at Harvard, Tilson met a Princeton student named Wendy Kopp, who was then running an organization called the Foundation for Student Communication. Kopp, recalls Tilson, “organized conferences for Fortune 500 company CEOs to get together for a few days and talk with college kids from around the country.” When he later heard that Kopp was starting a nonprofit to bring Ivy League students into inner-city schools as teachers, he immediately volunteered to help. “Ordinarily, I would have said, ‘some pie-in-the sky, Birkenstock, fuzzy idea,’” Tilson recalls. “But I saw what Wendy did with those CEOs and knew that if there was one graduating student in the country who could pull this off it was Wendy.”

He also recognized the Peace Corps provenance in Kopp’s Teach For America (TFA) idea. “They’re very analogous,” he recalls. “A two-year commitment after college to try to make a difference in the world.”

Tilson spent several months in New York helping Kopp launch TFA, in 1989 and 1990. (“I take no credit for what TFA has become,” he says, “but I take full credit for identifying a great idea and a great entrepreneur.”) The rest is history, of course, and Tilson was there as TFA celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this year.

Factors, Not Excuses

So what does motivate Tilson? “OUTRAGE!” he writes. “Almost every day, I read and hear stories that shock and infuriate me.” Interestingly, the “OUTRAGE” of his writings is not apparent when you meet Tilson. The passion is, however. He believes that “there is still no school district in America that is doing an adequate job of educating low-income children.” That doesn’t mean he thinks it’s easy to do so. Schools face “extraordinary difficulty.” But he believes that “the great majority of these kids, the vast majority of these kids, can be put on a different trajectory, so they have a really good shot in life, they can go to a four-year college and with that you have a pretty good chance in life.”

And why does he care? “I believe very deeply in the promise of this country,” he explains, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But there is nothing more fundamental about what America stands for than equality of opportunity. That it doesn’t matter who your parents are or what color your skin is or what neighborhood you were born in—every kid in this country should get a fair shot at the American dream. And there’s nothing more important to that than getting a decent education.… The outrage comes from the fact that we have a public education system in this country that systematically delivers a massively inferior education to low-income and minority kids. The kids that most need a good education, to escape the disadvantages of the life they were born into, are systematically given a lousy education. That violates every sense of fairness, every belief I have about this country and thus the outrage.”

He acknowledges “the massive deficits kids face outside the schools” and says, “I’m not a ‘It’s all the teacher unions fault’ guy. I’m very cognizant of how difficult it is to educate these children who come from poverty, single-parent households, little or no support from home.” But he doesn’t buy the argument that you can’t fix schools until you get rid of poverty.

“It’s exactly the opposite,” he says defiantly. “You can’t cure poverty until you have good schools.”

And do you think you can have good schools for poor kids?

“I don’t think, I know,” he says, “with 100 percent certainty, because I’ve been to dozens, if not hundreds, of such schools that are successfully educating these kids to a very high level. The most disadvantaged kids. I’m not saying it’s easy. It is incredibly difficult, but there’s no question that it’s absolutely possible. And it’s possible at scale, not just one classroom.”

That, Tilson admits, is not something he thought possible 15 years ago. And he’s bullish about the future.

Peter Meyer, former news editor at Life Magazine, is currently senior policy fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and contributing editor at Education Next.

Is the high opinion affluent Americans have of their local schools unwarranted? Jay Greene and Josh McGee suggest just that in their pathbreaking report comparing the performance of students in 13,636 school districts in the United States with students in other industrialized countries.

Students in many of this country’s most affluent school districts—Beverly Hills, California; Fairfax County, Virginia; and Montgomery County, Maryland, for example—are per- forming at only a mediocre level when judged against students in countries throughout the industrial world.

In their presentation of these startling results, Greene and McGee argue that the affluent have an inaccurate sense of the quality of their schools, in part because state testing systems encourage comparisons between students attending suburban schools and those in urban centers rather than comparing students with their peers in other advanced industrial nations. They worry that, as a result, the school reform effort lacks energetic support from a segment of the population that is politically active and thought to be particularly powerful.

Some of the results from the 2011 Education Next poll (see “The Public Weighs In on School Reform”, features, Fall 2011) lend empirical support to this line of thinking. My colleagues and I found that 54 percent of college-educated Americans whose incomes fall within the highest income decile in their state give their local schools an A or a B on the five-point scale teachers use to grade students. Only 15 percent of the affluent give one of these two grades to the nation’s schools as a whole.

Of course, the affluent are not the only ones to grade local schools less harshly than the nation’s schools. Among the general public, 46 percent give local schools an A or a B, even though just 22 percent give the nation’s schools equally high grades. And teachers prove themselves to be the most generous graders of all: 64 percent of them give their local schools an A or a B, and 37 percent give the nation’s schools an equally high grade.

Yet the disparity between the national and local evaluations is greater among the affluent than among the public as a whole. Does that mean the affluent oppose school reforms? The Education Next survey doesn’t provide much evidence for that inference. If anything, a larger portion of affluent Americans than of the public as a whole favors reform. For example, 64 percent of the affluent favor the formation of charter schools, compared to 53 percent of the general public. Similarly, 52 percent of the affluent lend their support to merit pay—basing teacher salaries in part on student test performance—compared to 47 percent of the public. Two-thirds of the affluent oppose teacher tenure, but just 49 percent of the general public does. And 80 percent of the affluent would have students pass a statewide test if they are to be given a high school diploma, a view held by 72 percent of the public.

It is the teachers whose opinions most clearly deviate from those of the public as a whole. Thirty-seven percent of teachers oppose the formation of charter schools, compared to just 19 percent of the affluent. When it comes to merit pay, 72 percent of teachers are opposed, but only 36 percent of the affluent are. When it comes to tenure, 53 percent of the teachers support the idea, compared to 20 percent of the affluent.

Still, satisfaction with local schools does dampen enthusiasm for school reform, among the affluent and the public alike. If the Greene and McGee findings disturb this complacency, the study could have an impact on school districts around the country.

— Paul E. Peterson

View the Global Report Card
View the Methodological Appendix
Video: Jay Greene discusses the study
Podcast: Marty West interviews Jay Greene about the Global Report Card

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American education has problems, almost everyone is willing to concede, but many think those problems are mostly concentrated in our large urban school districts. In the elite suburbs, where wealthy and politically influential people tend to live, the schools are assumed to be world-class.

Unfortunately, what everyone knows is wrong. Even the most elite suburban school districts often produce results that are mediocre when compared with those of our international peers. Our best school districts may look excellent alongside large urban districts, the comparison state accountability systems encourage, but that measure provides false comfort. America’s elite suburban students are increasingly competing with students outside the United States for economic opportunities, and a meaningful assessment of student achievement requires a global, not a local, comparison.

We developed the Global Report Card (GRC) to facilitate such a comparison. The GRC enables users to compare academic achievement in math and reading between 2004 and 2007 for virtually every public school district in the United States with the average achievement in a set of 25 other countries with developed economies that might be considered our economic peers and sometime competitors. The main results are reported as percentiles of a distribution, which indicates how the average student in a district performs relative to students throughout the advanced industrialized world. A percentile of 60 means that the average student in a district is achieving better than 59.9 percent of the students in our global comparison group. (Readers can find all of the results of the Global Report Card at http://globalreportcard.org. The web site contains a full description of the method by which we calculated the results. For a summary, see the methodology sidebar.)

For the purposes of this article, we focus on the 2007 math results, although the GRC contains information for both math and reading between 2004 and 2007. We focus on 2007 because it is the most recent data set, and we focus on math because it is the subject that provides the best comparison across countries and is most closely correlated with economic growth. Readers should feel free to consult the GRC web site to find reading results as well as results for other years.

The Example of Beverly Hills

It is critically important to compare exclusive suburban districts against the performance of students in other developed countries, as these districts are generally thought to be high-performing. The most wealthy and politically powerful families have often sought refuge from the ills of our education system by moving to suburban school districts. Problems exist in large urban districts and in low-income rural areas, elites often concede, but they have convinced themselves that at least their own children are receiving an excellent education in their affluent suburban districts.

Unfortunately, student achievement in many affluent suburban districts is worse than parents may think, especially when compared with student achievement in other developed countries. Take for example Beverly Hills, California. The city has a median family income of $102,611 as of 2000, which places it among the top 100 wealthiest places in the United States with at least 1,000 households. The Beverly Hills population is 85.1 percent white, 7.1 percent Asian, and only 1.8 percent black and 4.6 percent Hispanic. The city is virtually synonymous with luxury. A long-running television show featured the wealth and advantages of Beverly Hills high-school students (as well as their overly dramatic personal lives). If Beverly Hills is not the refuge from the ills of the education system that elite families are seeking, it’s not clear what would be.

But when we look at the Global Report Card results for the Beverly Hills Unified School District, we don’t see top-notch performance. The math achievement of the average student in Beverly Hills is at the 53rd percentile relative to our international comparison group. That is, one of our most elite districts produces students with math achievement that is no better than that of the typical student in the average developed country. If Beverly Hills were relocated to Canada, it would be at the 46th percentile in math achievement, a below-average district. If the city were in Singapore, the average student in Beverly Hills would only be at the 34th percentile in math performance.

Of course, people don’t think of Beverly Hills as a school district with mediocre student achievement. This is partly because people assume that affluent suburbs must be high achieving and partly because state accountability results inflate achievement by comparing affluent suburban school districts with large urban ones. According to California’s state accountability results, the average student in Beverly Hills is at the 76th percentile in math achievement relative to other students in the state. But outperforming students in Los Angeles, which is only at the 20th percentile in math relative to a global comparison group, should provide little comfort to Beverly Hills parents.

Los Angeles Unified is not the main source of competitors for Beverly Hills students, so the state accountability system encourages the wrong comparison. If Beverly Hills graduates are to have the kinds of jobs and lifestyles that their parents hope for them, they will have to compete with students from Canada, Singapore, and everywhere else. Beverly Hills students have to be toward the top of achievement globally if they expect to get top jobs and earn top incomes.

Results from Affluent Suburbs Nationwide

We can repeat the story of Beverly Hills all across the country. Affluent suburban districts may be outperforming their large urban neighbors, but they fail to achieve near the top of international comparisons (see Figure 1). White Plains, New York, in suburban Westchester County, is only at the 39th percentile in math relative to our global comparison group. Grosse Point, Michigan, outside of Detroit, is at the 56th percentile. Evanston, Illinois, the home of Northwestern University outside of Chicago, is at the 48th percentile in math. The average student in Montgomery County, Maryland, where many of the national government leaders send their children to school, is at the 50th percentile in math relative to students in other developed countries. The average student in Fairfax, Virginia, another suburban refuge for government leaders, is at the 49th percentile. Shaker Heights, Ohio, outside of Cleveland, is at the 50th percentile in math. The average student in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, is at the 66th percentile. Ladue, Missouri, a wealthy suburb of St. Louis, is at the 62nd percentile. And the average student in Plano, Texas, near Dallas, is at the 64th percentile in math relative to our global comparison group.

All of these communities are among the wealthiest in the United States. All are overwhelmingly white in their population. All of them are thought of as refuges from the dysfunction of our public school system. But the sad reality is that in none of them is the average student in the upper third of math achievement relative to students in other developed countries. Most of them are barely keeping pace with the average student in other developed countries, despite the fact that the comparison is to all students in the other countries, some of which have a per-capita gross domestic product that is almost half that of the United States. In short, many of what we imagine as our best school districts are mediocre compared with the education systems serving students in other developed countries.

Pockets of Excellence

While many affluent suburban districts have lower achievement than we might expect, some districts are producing very high achievement even when compared with that of students in other developed countries. For example, the average student in the Pelham school district in Massachusetts is at the 95th percentile in math. That means that if we were to relocate Pelham to another developed country in our comparison group, the average student in Pelham would outperform 95 percent of the students in math. That’s very impressive.

Of course, Pelham is a small district that is home to Amherst College, among other institutions of higher learning, and serves a rather select group of students. But not all college-town school districts are equally high achieving. As we have already seen, Evanston, Illinois, is at the 48th percentile in math in a global comparison. Palo Alto, California, the home of Stanford University, is at the 64th percentile. And the average student in Ann Arbor, Michigan, home to the University of Michigan, is at the 58th percentile in math relative to students in other developed countries. So, the 95th percentile math achievement in Pelham is outstanding, even for college towns.

Spring Lake, New Jersey, has a similarly impressive record of having the average student at the 91st percentile in math. It is a very small and affluent community on the New Jersey shore that has somehow escaped the influence of Snooki and The Situation. Waconda, Kansas, a small rural community, also is at the 91st percentile. Highland Park, Texas, an affluent community near Dallas, is at the 88th percentile.

Interestingly, of the top 20 U.S. public-school districts in math achievement, 7 are charter schools (some states treat charter schools as separate public-school districts). And most of the 13 traditional districts remaining are in rural communities rather than in a large suburban “refuge” from urban education ills.

Pools of Failure

In total, only 820 of the 13,636 public-school districts for which we have 2007 math results had average student achievement that would be among the top third of student performance in other developed countries. That is, 94 percent of all U.S. school districts have average math achievement below the 67th percentile. There aren’t that many truly excellent districts out there.

Of the 13,636 districts, 9,339, or 68 percent, have average student math achievement that is below the 50th percentile compared with that of the average student in other developed countries. Most of our large school districts are well below the 50th percentile. This is especially alarming, because these lower-performing large districts comprise a much greater share of the total student population than do the relatively small higher-performing districts.

The average student in the Washington, D.C., school district is at the 11th percentile in math relative to students in other developed countries. In Detroit, the average student is at the 12th percentile. In Milwaukee, the average student is at the 16th percentile. Cleveland is at the 18th percentile. The average student in Baltimore is at the 19th percentile in math relative to students in other developed countries. In Los Angeles, the average student is at the 20th percentile. The average student in Chicago is at the 21st percentile in math. Atlanta is at the 23rd percentile. The average student in New York City is at the 32nd percentile in math. And in Miami-Dade County, the average student is at the 33rd percentile in math.

Not 1 of the largest 20 school districts is above the 50th percentile in math relative to other developed countries. Those districts contain almost 5.2 million students or more than 10 percent of the country’s schoolchildren. The rare and small pockets of excellence in charter schools and rural communities are overwhelmed by large pools of failure.

Previous Research

The Global Report Card is not the first analysis to compare the performance of U.S. students to international peers. Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011) used a very similar method to compare the performance of students in each state to students in other countries and arrived at similarly gloomy conclusions. Using state NAEP results for 8th-grade students and PISA results for 15-year-olds internationally, the researchers focused on the percentage of students performing at an advanced level in math. In almost every state, they found that we had far fewer advanced students than most of the countries taking PISA. They also narrowed the comparison to white students in the U.S. and to students whose parents had a college education to show that even advantaged students in the U.S. failed to achieve at an advanced level in math relative to their international peers. More recently, Hanushek et al. updated their analysis to examine the percentage of students in each state and across countries performing at the proficient level in math and reading.  The results were similarly disappointing.

The main difference between the GRC and the Hanushek et al. analyses is that in our study we push the comparison down to the district level. By focusing on white students and children of college-educated parents, Hanushek et al. clearly mean to convey that even students in elite suburban districts have mediocre achievement. Our contribution with the GRC is to name the districts so that people do not indulge the fantasy that their suburb’s record is somehow different from the disappointing performance of others with advantaged students in their state.

There are other important differences between the GRC and the Hanushek et al. analyses. We incorporate test results for U.S. students in all available grades (typically grades 3 through 8 and grade 10) rather than focusing on the grade closest to the 15-year-olds in the PISA sample. We could have focused only on 8th-grade results, as Hanushek et al. did, but in doing so we would have greatly reduced the number of test results on which we were doing the calculations for school districts. We preferred to gain precision in estimating the achievement in each district by increasing our sample size rather than restricting the sample to 8th graders in order to gain comparability in the age of the students under review.

The GRC analysis also differs from those of Hanushek et al. in that the latter focus on students performing at the advanced or proficient level, while we focused on the average student performance in both math and reading. Hanushek et al. concentrated on advanced or proficient performance because they were trying to compare our best students with the best abroad to show that even our best are mediocre. We did the same by highlighting the results for elite suburban school districts. Focusing on the average also avoids any dispute about how “advanced” or “proficient” are defined across different tests.

Gary Phillips at the American Institutes for Research has also conducted a series of analyses comparing state achievement on NAEP to international performance on a different international test, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Phillips arrives at somewhat less gloomy conclusions about U.S. performance, but that is because the countries included in TIMSS differ from those covered by PISA. Hanushek et al. rightly note that PISA provides a much more appropriate comparison for the U.S.: “Put starkly, if one drops from a survey countries such as Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, and New Zealand, and includes instead such countries as Botswana, Ghana, Iran, and Lebanon, the average international performance will drop, and the United States will look better relative to the countries with which it is being compared.”

This has sparked a debate among researchers about whether TIMSS or PISA provides a better set of countries against which we should compare the U.S. The Global Report Card circumvents this dispute by developing its own set of countries against which we compare U.S. students. The comparisons provided by TIMSS and PISA depend on which countries decide to take each test each time it is administered. And PISA scales its scores against the results for members of the OECD, which excludes countries like Singapore while including countries like Mexico. Our comparison group depends on PISA results, but it is also based on objective criteria, like per-capita GDP, to identify a set of developed economies that can be reasonably compared with that of the U.S. Our comparison group is a significant improvement on the self-selection of countries that choose to take a test as well as an improvement upon arbitrary membership in an organization like the OECD.

No Refuge

The elites, the wealthy families that have a disproportionate influence on politics, clearly recognize the dysfunction of large urban school districts and have sought refuge in affluent suburban districts for their own children. But the reality is that there are relatively few pockets of excellence to which these families can flee.

In four states, there is not a single traditional district with average student achievement above the 50th percentile in math. In 17 states, there is not a single traditional district with average achievement in the upper third relative to our global comparison group. And apart from charter school districts,  in over half of the states, there are no more than three traditional districts in which the average achievement would be in the upper third.

The elites in those states have almost nowhere to find an excellent public education for their children. But state accountability systems and the desire to rationalize the lack of quality options have encouraged the elites to compare their affluent suburban districts to the large urban ones in their state. These inappropriate comparisons have falsely reassured them that their own school districts are doing well.

This false reassurance has also perhaps undermined the desire among the elites to engage in dramatic education reform. As long as the elites hold onto the belief that their own school districts are excellent, they have little desire to push for the kind of significant systemic reforms that might improve their districts as well as the large urban districts. They may wish the urban districts well and hope matters improve, but their taste for bold reform is limited by a false contentment with their own situation.

But the elites should not take comfort from the stronger performance of affluent suburban districts relative to large urban districts. As the Global Report Card reveals, even our best public-school districts are mediocre when compared with the achievement of students in a set of countries with developed economies.

Of course, the Global Report Card does not isolate the extent to which schools add or detract from student performance. Factors from student backgrounds, including their parents, communities, and individual characteristics, have a strong influence on achievement. But the GRC does tell us about the end result for student achievement of all of these factors, schools included. And that end result, even in our best districts, is generally disappointing.

Jay P. Greene is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute. Josh B. McGee is vice president for public accountability initiatives at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

American teachers unions are increasingly the target of measures, authored by friends and foes alike, intended to limit their power, or even eviscerate them. Looking at this scene, one would never guess that the countries that are among the top 10 in student performance have some of the strongest teachers unions in the world. Are those unions in some way different from American teachers unions? Do unions elsewhere behave differently from American teachers unions when challenged to do what is necessary to improve student performance? To explore these questions, I compare teachers and their unions in Ontario, Canada and Finland with their U.S. counterparts.

In the United States, the modern labor union grew out of bitter strife between workers and owners in the early years of the 20th century. The Wagner Act, passed in 1935, guaranteed workers the right to organize and strike. Modern labor relations date from the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which modified the Wagner Act mainly by defining the rights of employers in the framework it had provided. These laws applied only to workers in the private sector.

The Wagner and Taft-Hartley Acts reflected the mass-production systems that the United States embraced more fully than any other industrial nation. In this arrangement, management figured out how the work was going to get done; workers were regarded as interchangeable; and skilled craftsmanship was minimized. The “skill” was in the machine, not the person operating it. And because the work was largely unskilled, pay was low.

The Wagner and Taft-Hartley Acts gave workers the right to organize to bargain for wages and working conditions. They also obligated the unions to defend their members against management when conflicts arose. The assumption was that the relationship between the union and management would be adversarial; the laws provided the rules under which that adversarial relationship would be conducted. Courts later ruled that the unions and management could not collaborate.

In northern Europe at that time, the mass-production system was not so widely embraced, the era of the craftsman did not abate, and work was less routinized and rule-bound than in the United States.

After World War II, management and owners in many Western European countries wanted to deny communism any opportunity to gain ground among workers, and so they gave labor a seat at the table. Thus three “social partners”—government, labor, and management—would frame social policy together, as equals. In many countries, the law also provided for work councils made up of workers elected by their peers at the firm level to adjust the national agreement to local conditions.

Indeed, in countries with labor parties in Europe today, it is not unusual for the labor party, when in power, to put a brake on wage growth in order to forestall inflation, or to resist calls for more benefits when productivity growth does not justify increased benefits.

In many European countries, by law, workers sit on the boards of directors of major firms. When that happens, workers sometimes offer to hold wages steady or even reduce them if management agrees to invest the savings in capital or in research and development. Workers understand that if the firm cannot make the investments required to be more competitive, it may resort to layoffs.

Senior European executives are often puzzled when their American counterparts talk about a desire to greatly weaken or even eliminate trade unions. The Europeans, while often eager to acquire more power vis-à-vis their unions, do not generally talk about eliminating them. They view the unions as an instrument for giving a voice to a key sector of the society. They generally believe that if labor were not provided a voice through the union, it might eventually become a direct threat to democratic capitalism.

The Case of American Teachers

Prior to the 1960s, the National Education Association (NEA) was an alliance of educators, not a teachers union. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), founded in 1916, had always been a union, but it was much smaller, and not particularly militant. But, during the ’60s, teachers’ compensation declined significantly relative to that of other occupations requiring a similar level of education. In the racial battles of the era, teachers were sometimes made the target of public anger in a way that was unprecedented and seemed quite threatening. As a result, the AFT became appealing to many teachers to whom it had not been before. The NEA shed those members who were not classroom teachers and traded its identity as a professional organization for a new one as a trade union.

The newly energized teachers unions appealed to the AFL-CIO for help in getting state legislatures to pass laws that put teachers on much the same footing as those in unions representing workers in the private sector. The AFL-CIO was stronger then than it is now, and the teachers could put more feet on the ground in legislative political campaigns than any other single constituency. This was particularly true in the northern part of the country, where organized labor was strongest at the state level.

In the beginning, the lawyers that management hired were happy to negotiate contracts that closely followed common practice in the industrial sector. Some of these provisions simply made a teacher’s life a little easier, like lunchtime free of student responsibilities. But others had major consequences for the quality of teachers and for instruction. Among the most important of these provisions were those defining the hours of work, using seniority to determine who could transfer to jobs within the system as they opened up, and the order in which people would be laid off when staff size was reduced.

Many now think of these seniority-based rules as the result of collective bargaining. But such practices began in other industries in the 1920s—before there was any national legislation mandating collective bargaining—and were part and parcel of the mass-production workplace. Management wanted rules that were easy to administer, and, in a world in which all workers were treated as interchangeable, such a system worked well for managers in most industries.

In the case of the schools, management’s attorneys, like management’s attorneys everywhere, saw these demands as reasonable, because they were easy to administer and cost the district no money. But the organizational costs were substantial. Although the unions knew this, the school boards’ attorneys apparently did not. Thus, school boards and management gave away control over who could be hired in a school, who could fill leadership positions, how much time was available for professional development, and much, much more.

Few citizens were aware of the significance of the concessions that school boards made to unions over the years. Both school boards and the unions greatly feared teacher strikes, knowing that there were few things that could anger parents as much as not being able to put their children in school when they had to go off to work in the morning. While the teachers unions could seek higher compensation at the negotiating table, they quickly discovered that they would lose public support if the school board sought the authority to pay for raises by floating new bonds, for example. So the unions and the boards often settled their differences by negotiating changes in “working conditions,” thereby avoiding teacher strikes.

When times were tough, it was often easier for both management and labor to negotiate increased benefits, particularly retirement benefits, than increased cash compensation, because, again, the public focused on current costs rather than on obligations that would not have to be paid for many years. The unions typically negotiated benefits that would be most attractive to their longest-serving members. Over time, the compensation package got more and more expensive but less and less attractive to talented young people making decisions about which occupation to pursue.

Over the course of several decades, teachers unions in the United States progressively constrained management’s ability to select staff, promote staff, deploy staff, discipline staff, train staff, and let staff go when they were not doing the job. In the context of American-style labor relations, and the politics of American schooling, this was probably inevitable. The adversarial model of labor relations embodied in the national labor laws initially applied only to the private sector, but when President Kennedy, in an executive order, allowed members of the federal workforce to organize, state legislators adopted the private-sector model for public employees. Public-sector unions were told by their attorneys that their members could sue if they did not defend the teachers in court against school district management seeking to deprive them of their jobs. So the union lawyers routinely made it as difficult as possible to fire teachers, even those widely regarded as incompetent. Given the adversarial nature of the relationship, there was never any real possibility of teachers accepting joint responsibility for student performance outcomes, as was the case with unions in northern Europe, where the relationship has never been hostile. In the United States, student performance was the responsibility of management, not labor.

Today, American teachers want to be viewed as professionals, but their experience tells them they need their membership in the union and the clout that they have in the state legislature, even in states that do not allow them to organize. Without the unions, they might lose ground economically and be at the mercy of management that often does not treat them as professionals.

The Collaborative Model

These dynamics set the stage for the current confrontation in the United States between the unions and the teachers on one side and, increasingly, school district management, legislatures, governors, and the public on the other.

The unions are perceived to be standing in the way of badly needed reforms, protecting incompetent teachers, and putting up barricades to prevent the erosion of pension benefits the public can no longer afford. But as the unions come under increasing assault, teachers see themselves being blamed for system failures that should be attributed to others, including school boards, parents who are not supporting their children’s learning, and politicians who preside over a society in which an ever-greater number of students come to school unprepared to learn. It is hardly surprising that teachers and their unions are circling the wagons to salvage as much as possible of what they have gained since the 1960s.

It does not have to be this way.

Finland is famously a world leader in student performance. It also has some of the strongest unions in the world, and that includes its teachers unions. More than any other advanced industrial nation, Finland’s education strategy is to give teaching the highest status and make it the most desirable job in the country. The winning combination is top-quality recruits, first-rate training, and teachers with the kind of autonomy—read trust—typically accorded to other professionals but rarely to teachers. There are no top-down accountability systems in Finland, with their implied distrust of teachers, of the sort that dominate the discussion in the United States. It is hard to say which came first, the trust in the teachers or their quality, but they clearly go hand in hand. Finland’s teachers and their unions have not engaged in confrontational politics; the unions have been at the reform table for years as essential social partners.

In Ontario, Canada, one of the great PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) success stories, the current provincial administration took over from one that had instituted a province-wide curriculum and matching assessments, along with a tough accountability system. But the Conservative government that put these policies in place had gone to war with the teachers and their unions, cutting funding, reducing professional development by half, and taking out television ads demonizing teachers. The result was a highly polarized environment, with teachers resorting to strikes and lockouts to defend what they could of their prerogatives, and no improvement in student performance.

The administration that took office in 2003 reversed course. Premier Dalton McGuinty took the view that he was not going to get the kind of student performance he was looking for if he did not have the trust and confidence of the teachers, and he would never gain their trust by continuing the war that the previous administration had begun. He and his top aides spent a lot of time to talking with teachers in classrooms and school lunchrooms. They brought teachers and their unions to the table for discussions of education reform strategy and won their trust by listening hard to what the teachers had to say and then providing the needed support. The reform strategy that they adopted assumed that teachers wanted to do the right thing but lacked the capacity to do it. So the McGuinty government focused on building that capacity. By trading trust for manifest distrust, the McGuinty government laid the base for the collaborative relationship with teachers and their unions that it saw as the prerequisite for improving student performance.

American Translation

What can one reasonably conclude from this comparative description of the development of unions in the United States and northern Europe and the approaches taken to reform in Canada and Finland?

My conclusion is that the current impulse to curtail the influence of the teachers unions may return some powers to management that over the years have gravitated to the unions. But that victory is likely to come at the price of deeply alienating many teachers from the larger cause of education reform.

Teachers know that if they lose their unions during a fiscal crisis, they will have no protection at all as long as state and local officials face enormous pressure to cut teaching jobs, compensation, and benefits. A determined, widespread effort to weaken or destroy the institution teachers are counting on to protect them economically will force them into retirement or to hunker down and wait in brooding resentment for a change in the political weather.

As we have seen, this is precisely what happened when they came under a similar attack in Ontario, Canada. That is hardly a formula for successful education reform.

The alternative is the one taken by Ontario’s premier McGuinty: convince the teachers that they have the trust of government and enlist their unions in seeking to improve student performance. As the Ontario case shows, this does not mean that government has to give the unions whatever they want. McGuinty certainly did not do that: He made it clear where his bottom lines were. He insisted on a strong curriculum, competitive standards, and new assessments that matched them. And he was not about to break the bank.

But he invited the teachers and their unions to the table. He listened to them with respect. Where they told him that they needed support to improve outcomes for students, he supplied it wherever he could. The mutual trust that grew out of this relationship persuaded the teachers and unions to make concessions that they would never have willingly made under savage attack.

Reforming the Contract

Management will have to revisit the provisions of the contracts that school boards have negotiated over the years. Concessions will be necessary on unfunded retirement plans and on the use of seniority to govern many aspects of school-district operations. The more-or-less-unexamined move to apply the structures of the Wagner Act and the Taft-Hartley Act to the public sector needs to be reassessed. State labor legislation that mimics national labor law in its insistence on a confrontational stance between management and labor should be rewritten.

Getting to where these issues can be productively addressed requires first a relationship of trust between government and labor. Each side says that experience has taught them not to trust the other party, and so each states that trust depends on the other side making the first concessions. Someone has to go first.

Some will argue that the possibilities represented by the European model are simply not available in the United States. But our politics are not so different from those of Canada. The idea of American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States is so different from the rest of the world that lessons learned elsewhere do not apply here—had a certain allure when we were far ahead of our competitors. But it is very dangerous for a country that is falling further and further behind.

Marc Tucker is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy and editor of Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems (Harvard Education Press, November 2011).

Undoubtedly, the United States has much to learn from education systems in other countries. Once the world’s education leader, the U.S. has seen the percentage of its high-school students who are proficient trail that of 31 other countries in math and 16 countries in reading, according to a recent study by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) (see “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” features, Fall 2011). Whereas only 32 percent of U.S. 8th graders are proficient in math, 50 percent of Canadian students and nearly 60 percent of Korean and Finnish students perform at that level. It may be misleading to point out that 75 percent of Shanghai’s students are proficient, as that Chinese province is the nation’s most advanced, but in Massachusetts, the highest-achieving of the states, only 51 percent of the students are proficient in math.

Given these performance disparities, it is only natural to think that there is something to be learned from practices elsewhere. Yet it is not easy to figure out what institutions and practices will translate into a different cultural milieu or how to do it. In the larger world of governmental constitutions, efforts to insert U.S. arrangements into distant political cultures have failed more often than not. Much the same could happen in reverse if the United States attempted to fix its schools simply by copying something that seems to work elsewhere.

It is tempting to undertake an in-depth study of those places that are performing at the highest levels—China’s Shanghai province, Korea, Finland, Singapore, Japan, the Netherlands, and Canada, for example. But a proper comparison requires that one contrast what successful countries do with the mistakes made by the less successful ones. International comparisons should look at information from all countries and adjust for factors that affect student performance, even though such rigorous studies typically face their own challenges, including collecting the requisite data. Moreover, countries are different across so many dimensions (from the political system to the cultural prestige of the teaching profession) that it is typically difficult to attribute differences between countries to any specific factors.

For these reasons, learning from international experience can be a bit like reading tea leaves: People are tempted to see in the patterns whatever they think they should see. But for all the hazards associated with drawing on international experience, the greatest risk lies in ignoring such information altogether. Steadfastly insisting that the United States is unique and that nothing is to be learned from other lands might appeal to those on the campaign trail. But it is a perilous course of action for those who wish to understand—and improve—the state of American education. If nothing else, reflection on international experience encourages one to think more carefully about practices and proposals at home. It is not so much specific answers that come from conversing with educators from around the world, as it is gaining some intellectual humility. Such conversations provide opportunities to learn the multiple ways in which common questions are posed and answered, and to consider how policies that have proved successful elsewhere might be adapted to the unique context of U.S. education.

That, perhaps, is the signal contribution of the August 2011 conference on “Learning from the International Experience,” sponsored by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Many who attended said the conference had sparked conversations well beyond the usual boundaries on thinking about U.S. education policy, whether the issue was teacher reforms, school choice, the development of common standards and school accountability, or the promise of learning online.

Need to Take Action

The conference opened with an urgent call from U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education Anthony Miller that action be taken. He highlighted two aspects of Harvard’s PEPG study in his remarks. First, by showing the dismal performance of students from families in which a parent has a college education, “the findings…debunk the myth that the mediocre performance of U.S. students on international tests is due simply to the presence of large numbers of disadvantaged students.” Indeed, the study shows that the percent proficient among U.S. students whose parents are college-educated or who are white is significantly less than the percent proficient among all students in countries such as Korea, Singapore, and Finland. Second, by breaking out results for every state, it shows that “the U.S. education system is comprised of 50 state systems, and therefore we must look at our performance on a state-by-state basis.”

Hoover Institution scholar Eric Hanushek built on Miller’s remarks by reporting that, according to work he did with University of Munich economist Ludger Woessmann, the United States could boost its annual GDP growth rate by more than 1 percentage point annually by raising student math performance to levels currently attained in countries such as Canada and Korea. That kind of increase in economic productivity could, over the long run, boost the U.S. economy by trillions of dollars. According to Hanushek, “the impact of the current recession on the economy is dwarfed” by the magnitude of the loss in wealth that has at its root subpar U.S. education performance.

Hanushek was careful to state that the goal was not to strengthen U.S. performance at the expense of other nations: The creation of well-educated citizens does not constitute a “a zero-sum game that countries or states are playing against each other,” but one in which every country and state can become more productive, and create more wealth for one another by boosting and sharing their talents. The United States can welcome the higher Canadian, Finnish, Korean, and Chinese performances even as those accomplishments make a compelling case for “changing the direction the United States is going.”

Further developing the case for reform, University of Arkansas scholars Jay P. Greene and Josh P. McGee (see “When the Best Is Mediocre,” features, page 34) provided conference participants with a glimpse of their new report, which identifies the international standing of nearly every school district in the United States. “People tend to think their own districts are OK,” even when the United States as a whole appears to be doing badly, Greene said. “But they really are not.” Even in expensive suburbs, student performance does not look very good from an international perspective, they said. “There is no refuge for ‘elite’ families in this country.” Greene and McGee reported that in 17 states they were unable to find a single district that performed at levels comparable to those reached by students in the world’s leading countries.

Teachers and Teaching

Offering hope that urgent action can be taken, Mona Mourshed told the conference that she and her colleagues at McKinsey & Company have shown that “systems can achieve significant gains in as short a time as six years.” Mediocre systems can become much better, and “those that are good can become great.” In her view, there are “clusters of interventions” that are appropriate for each stage of system development, and for each one, the key driver of change is teachers. The most important factor for every system’s journey of transformation, she said, is to develop teachers’ capabilities to their full potential. And others agreed. As New Jersey’s chief education officer Christopher Cerf put it, “The single greatest in-school variable driving [learning] outcomes is the quality of the teacher.”

But how can we ensure high-quality instruction? According to Mourshed, much depends on the stage a school system has reached. If a system is mediocre and has only low-performing teachers, then it can make the most progress through strong administrative actions that identify clear expectations for teachers and are fairly prescriptive. This may involve scripted teaching materials, monitoring of the time teachers devote to each task, and regular visits by master teachers or school inspectors. But, as the performance of the system rises and the teaching force reaches a higher level of quality, it can move “from good to great” by giving those teachers both greater autonomy and support. Among other things, great school systems decentralize pedagogical methods to schools and teachers, and put in place incentives for frontline educators to share innovative practices across schools. “Teacher teams” collaborate to push the quality and customization of classroom materials even further, and the educators rotate throughout the system, spreading peer learning and enriching mentorship opportunities.

Fernando Reimers of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education said that most teachers are trained in academic programs that have low prestige and are far removed from the activities of the classroom. Students in these programs are asked to think about sociological, psychological, and policy issues rather than to discuss what it takes to teach a particular lesson effectively. In this regard, schools of education are unlike other professional schools. He gave the example of business schools, which are increasingly asked to link instruction directly to the work future managers will be expected to do. Reimers urged that education-training programs combine mastery of the subject matter, needed especially today in math and science, with the ability to adapt teaching to different learners, to use technology effectively, and to enable project-based learning and teamwork.

In making these points, Reimers built on the presentation on Finnish training programs given by Jari Lavonen of the University of Helsinki. Advanced training at an education school in Finland is “more popular than medical school,” Lavonen told conference participants. Those admitted are a select group, and acceptance virtually guarantees a well-compensated and prestigious career. Rigorous training programs expect future teachers to demonstrate content knowledge in both a major and a minor subject, research competence, and classroom effectiveness. He admitted that the pedagogical research component was often contested by students (“we are teachers, not researchers”), but, he says, alumni later tell him that it was one of the most valuable parts of their educational experience. In his view, it is this component that enables them to tackle complex classrooms situations effectively later on. But, Lavonen cautioned, the system works in Finland only because the political situation was stable enough that the country was able to take “consistent decisions over the course of 40 years.”

Gwang-Jo Kim, former education vice-minister in Korea and current head of UNESCO in Thailand, also stressed the quality of those entering the teaching profession. Koreans are known for their “high regard for teachers and for the teaching profession.” Primary-school teacher-training programs receive many more applicants than there are spaces. There are multiple routes to certification as a secondary-school teacher, but the chances of getting a job are as low as 5 percent, as positions are avidly sought. Similarly, in Singapore, applicants to teacher-training programs are carefully selected, with a large proportion coming from the top 30 percent of the college population.

Kim said the Korean and Singapore success stories could not be understood apart from deep-seated cultural factors. The demand for teacher excellence comes from parents, who want their children to do well on national examinations that determine future education and occupational opportunities. As a result, teachers are under a lot of pressure. With unionization of the teaching profession in Korea, Kim wonders whether the current model can be sustained.

Building on these insights, White House education adviser Roberto Rodríguez reported that the Obama administration is developing models of teacher mentorship and induction that will support new recruits into the profession and renew teacher-preparation programs. “We don’t have a system that recruits talent. There is not a high bar for ed schools,” Rodríguez said. In addition, he emphasized the current lack of high-quality professional development for teachers and adequate mentorship for new teachers. Rodríguez confirmed the administration’s intention to create differentiated tracks for master teachers, administrators, and specialist teachers, in which teacher compensation is tied to progress on those tracks. Currently, he stated, “we lose too many good teachers to administration.” Underlining a point made by Deputy Secretary Miller, Rodríguez reminded the conference that, to be effective, change must come not only from the federal government but from “high levels of energy at the state and local level.”

Agreeing that state action is vital, New Jersey’s Christopher Cerf told conference participants that successful education systems do the same thing high-quality businesses strive to do: recruit from the very best, maximize the productivity of employees, evaluate responsibly and helpfully, deploy its workforce where it can be most helpful, and have a clear talent-retention strategy. But in the United States, he said, “We do all of these things badly in education. We recruit from whatever the ed schools give us, there is no productivity angle and no pay for results. We have taken the view that doing teacher evaluations is so hard that we should do nothing at all, and our retention strategy amounts to saying to high-performing teachers, ‘please stay.’” To change that system and lift the quality of the teaching force to international levels won’t be easy, cautioned Gerard Robinson, Florida’s chief education officer. “It is all about brute political force; the rest is a rounding error.”

Jason Glass, director of the Department of Education for the state of Iowa, reminded the audience that “we cannot take the challenges one at a time if they refuse to stay in line.” Glass said his priority is to alter the “one-minute interviews” used to make decisions on teacher hiring in too many school districts. He also seeks to improve the mentorship that teachers receive in their first year of teaching, which he says is virtually nonexistent in parts of his state. He plans to introduce more sophisticated systems that will identify—and retrain or remove—the state’s least-capable teachers. In reforming Iowa’s public school system, he intends to get beyond the prevalent false dichotomies, such as “cash for test scores versus step-and-lane compensation” and “due process versus random firing.” Performance measures able to identify the least capable teachers can and should be found. He concluded with a hopeful warning: “Watch out for Iowa over the next few years.”

Choice and Autonomy

Hindering the conversation on school choice was the fact that the mechanisms for choice in the United States do not resemble the choice mechanisms elsewhere. In the United States, private schools receive little government aid (except for transportation, lunch programs, and, in a few places, school vouchers), whereas in most other countries governments fund private schools at levels close to those for state-run schools. Charter schools are privately operated schools that are funded by the government, but they may not teach religion, while government-funded private schools in most other countries may do so.

Avis Glaze, former superintendent of the Ontario education system, correctly observed that Canada does not have charter schools, but others mentioned that the large number of religious schools that are both government-funded and subject to state regulation give Canadians even more choice than exists in the United States.

The conversation was also shaped by the recent release of a study by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the same agency that collected the international data on which the PEPG report was based. According to the PISA study, international experience suggests that nothing is to be gained from expanding the private sector in education. Students in private schools do no better than students in public schools, once differences in family background characteristics are taken into account.

That finding, said Martin West, assistant professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, is both misleading and, paradoxically, exactly what one should expect. When undertaking an international analysis of school choice, he argued, one should not compare the effectiveness of the public and private sectors but should instead look at the extent to which competition between the two sectors affects the achievement of all the students in the country, regardless of whether they go to public or private school. In countries such as high-achieving Netherlands, a large percentage of students attend private schools, with government paying the tuition. In countries such as low-performing Spain, only a few students attend private school. Other countries fall in between these two extremes. Using a sophisticated statistical technique, West showed that all students in a country learned more when the private sector was larger. Specifically, the study by West and his colleague found that an increase in the share of private school enrollment of 10 percentage points was associated with better than a quarter of a year’s worth of learning in math, though somewhat less in reading. Moreover, this increase in performance takes place within school systems that spend 6 percent less overall.

A degree of choice can be introduced in the state sector if decisionmaking is shifted to the school level, as has been done in Ontario, Glaze said. The U.S. Department of Education should provide support and oversight to local decisions and push specific “nonnegotiable” programs, such as the literacy program Ontario implemented in the 2000s. Paul Pastorek, Louisiana’s former chief education officer, agreed that the Ontario experiment had been successful but said the United States needed a different approach. The story of school reform has too often been one of a strong district or state leader driving reform until the end of her tenure, with stagnation afterward. Only the powers of competition embedded within a system can lead to sustained improvements. “The problem is that we don’t know how to leverage competitive forces in the multibillion-dollar business that is education in this country,” said Pastorek. “Our education system is a communist system; we don’t have anything that relates what we pay for resources to the economic value they generate.”

The introduction of competition in New Orleans, where 85 percent of the schools are now charter schools, said Pastorek, provided a foundation for continued reform and improvement. But choice works only if choice systems are equitable, schools are held accountable by the state or school district, and parents are given readily understandable information about school quality. In the view of many, a great system would be one in which through the power of competitive forces, as Pastorek described, states create a system that “self-corrects, self-challenges, and self-innovates” to achieve better results for children.

State Standards and Accountability

Common standards and tests that evaluate performance against those standards are to be found in most of the countries that are performing better than the United States, whether they be in Europe or Asia. Shengchang Tang, principal of the Shanghai High School (the leading high school in China), said that the standards and examinations in the Shanghai province are a powerful tool that parents use to exert pressure on their children as well as on teachers and principals. (These particular standards and exams do not extend to the whole of China, which is deemed too large to have a single set of exams.) In his view, that pressure focuses attention in schools and fuels the drivers of the successful Shanghai education system, including higher investments, a high-caliber teaching force, and a strategy tailored to the specific situation faced by each school.

Tang questioned whether common standards would be effective in the very different U.S. context. Specifically, he was skeptical that such standards would catalyze more effective parent pressure on U.S. schools, given parents’ comparatively low expectations of their children and their schools. In contrast, in a recent poll in Shanghai, 85 percent of parents declared that they expected their children to be in the top 15 percent of their age cohort. Standardized exams, in Tang’s view, serve as a necessary tool to measure reality against these high expectations. For Angus MacBeath, former school commissioner in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, however, setting high standards in his home province allowed him to “tell the ugly truth,” and it was the necessary first step toward Alberta’s journey of educational improvement. Common standards allow parents, educators, and policymakers to be clear about current achievement levels so they can act on that knowledge.

This is perhaps the reason the Obama administration has lent its support to the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which has been embraced as a reform solution by 44 states and the District of Columbia. Still, many wondered with James Stergios of the Pioneer Institute in Boston whether one can set standards capable of driving high performance nationwide in a country that has great regional disparities in student achievement and a decentralized governmental system (where schools are “radically local,” as one panelist put it). Declaring himself “a massive opponent of common standards,” Stergios argued that the excellence achieved by Massachusetts so far could not be sustained if nationwide standards were substituted for state ones.

Gerard Robinson began his comments by acknowledging that he was chief education officer in Virginia while that state was opposed to common standards and is now chief in Florida, which is committed to common standards. He offered two reasons for embracing common standards: 1) students must compete with those in other states and, indeed, with students all over the world, and 2) companies need common standards in order to compare job applicants. “The difficult part is not to have consensus on having common standards,” he observed, “but on how to work on the political process to achieve them.”

In the end, the standards issue seemed to turn on the questions raised by Shanghai’s Shengchang Tang. Could the United States create common standards that were high enough to spur high achievement? While “having high state standards makes a big difference to underprivileged people,” as Christopher Cerf put it, common standards might be set too low and so, contrary to what the PEPG report showed, may not serve to raise standards of achievement when U.S. students are compared to their peers in high-achieving countries. He reminded the group that the same political context exists today as existed when No Child Left Behind was crafted. As prescribed in that legislation, every child was supposed to be proficient, but to comply with federal expectations many states “dumbed down” their definition of student proficiency.

Digital Learning

In her opening remarks for the panel on digital learning, New Mexico’s chief education officer Hanna Skandera stressed that the new technologies provided new opportunities to address together all the reforms under discussion. Digital learning that exploits online courses and broadband capabilities can expand choice for students, ensure transparency and accountability for courses offered online, and create opportunities for many more students to come into contact with the very best teachers. Further, it can serve as a catalyst for higher standards and can do all this without driving up the cost of education.

Shantanu Prakash, of Educomp Solutions, informed the audience about the business he started and now heads in India. Educomp serves more than 12 million students in India alone and operates in a number of other developing countries where traditional schools have limited resources and set low standards for instruction. Educomp targets schools with products it says are not only inexpensive but user-friendly and easily combined with traditional classroom instruction. “The whiteboard can be used with millions of modules that are very good, that will support any teacher,” he noted. Prakesh expects the demand for his products to grow rapidly, as “the pressure of parents will make the introduction of digital materials into the learning of children in a meaningful way inevitable.” It is an obvious means for parents with high expectations all over India to ensure that their children receive high-quality instruction, in a context of scarce resources and low teaching standards.

Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association for K–12 Online Learning (iNACOL), agreed: “Education is no longer a cottage and local industry,” but one in which true competition can thrive, improving standards and driving productivity gains. Digital learning can give students greater choice, even down to the specific instructor for a particular course. Digital learning is a growing reality in many other countries. Citing numerous references, Patrick told of its widespread adoption across the world. In Singapore, for example, all schools blend online learning with classroom instruction, and the country’s schools of education have made online instructional techniques an integral part of the curriculum. South Korea is once again a leader, and virtual education has become a rapidly growing industry, partly to reduce the cost to parents of the “cram schools” that families expect their adolescent children to attend.

Also participating in the conference was Julie Young, president and CEO of the Florida Virtual School (FLVS), the leading example of digital learning in the United States. Since its beginnings in 1996, FLVS has grown steadily and currently has nearly 200,000 course enrollments. The reasons for its success, according to Young, include student access to teachers seven days a week and beyond the regular school day, choice in assignments, and a constantly improving curriculum and instruction that is transparent to administrators, parents, and outsiders.

The main barrier to the spread of digital learning in the United States, iNACOL’s Patrick noted, are “policies that were created 30 to 40 years ago for a different world. Digital teachers cannot easily be qualified in multiple states, funding follows student and sometimes physical attendance, and there are no common standards across states that would reduce the costs of development.” Only when those policies are upgraded purposefully to accommodate and encourage a different kind of classroom environment will digital learning become an integral part of the American education system.

Tea Leaves or Tea?

So what did the conference brew? No one can make the case that the conference provided secret bullets for school reform in the United States, and most every conference participant would agree that the particulars of the United States make it difficult to introduce wholesale many of the practices that have been successful abroad. Popular culture shows little appreciation for the educated citizen; a decentralized government arrangement with multiple veto points precludes rapid innovation; and education politics is marked by antipathy between teachers unions and school reformers. But a nuanced assessment of the conversation allows for at least preliminary conclusions that go beyond a simple call for urgent action:

• Teacher selection, teacher training, teacher evaluation, and teacher retention in the United States can be done much better than it is being done today. While no country has exactly the right model for the United States, none of the successful systems leave good teaching simply to chance the way the United States does.

• School choice plays a bigger—and perhaps more successful—role in the world’s educational experience than is usually recognized. It should not be seen as a threat but rather as an incentive for improvement for the public education system.

• Standards and testing systems that hold students accountable for their performance are part and parcel of most, if not all, of the world’s top education systems. If the United States has a heterogeneity that precludes the adoption of a uniform examination system as those found in Korea, Singapore, and in many parts of Canada, that provides no reason not to set clearer, and higher, expectations for students than is commonly the case.

• Digital learning has yet to prove itself fully and to develop into an integrated paradigm-shifting approach, but early stories of success are promising, provided digital learning respects the principles of transparency, accountability, and choice for students.

More than reaching any specific conclusion, the conference was most successful in inspiring participants with a renewed understanding of and dedication to their common commitment to a better system of education. The commitment is now informed by the experience of other countries with similar challenges that have managed, through sustained and consistent policies (as the Finnish representative, Jari Lavonen, insisted) to find solutions.

Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón is a research fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance. Paul E. Peterson is director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools
by Terry M. Moe
Brookings Institution Press, 2011, $34.95; 513 pages.

Reviewed by Jeffrey R. Henig

Some 10 years in the making, this book comes at such a propitious time that one might wonder whether author Terry Moe held it waiting for this moment to arrive. For years Professor Moe has been pointing out the teachers unions’ tendency to use what he considers to be their vastly disproportionate powers to benefit their members at the expense of schoolchildren. Now, with Republican governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin and John Kasich in Ohio publicly taking on collective bargaining for public school teachers, replacing strict salary schedules with merit pay, and introducing value-added measures into decisions about salaries and tenure, events have caught up to his message. It seems Moe’s time has come.

When someone has been as prominently identified with an issue and a perspective as Terry Moe has been vis-à-vis teachers unions, potential readers might be prone to shrug off the announcement of a new book, assuming they know what’s inside. Let me dispose of that concern first. Whether you agree with its key themes or not—and I do not—this is an important book and one well worth reading.

Those familiar with Moe’s other books, journal articles, and various opinion pieces will recognize the trademarks: a strong dose of institutional theory, original empirical analysis, crisp writing, and sharp thinking. They’ll find a central argument that has not changed and some data they’ve seen before, but enriched by more historical context, new data, and a comprehensive view on unions not previously available from Moe and rarely approached by others.

Perhaps the distinguishing element of Moe’s perspective, one I find alternately appealing and exasperating, is his unrelenting refusal to let what he sees as trees distract from what he sees as forest. Moe understands that we live in a multicausal world and that serious efforts to disentangle “all the myriad, inter-related factors” that affect schools “would inevitably conclude with something like ‘it’s complicated.’” But “this isn’t very enlightening,” and so he sees his role to be one of filtering out less important considerations. “The task is not to capture everything of any relevance. It is to get to the heart of the matter.”

Despite this mission to simplify, Moe is too intellectually honest to hide all the complexities, and as a result there is much in the book that tugs against its central themes. The strongly critical view of unions that prevails when Moe steps back to look at the forest lives in tension with the more complex, nuanced, and interesting picture that emerges when he allows himself to step in amongst the trees.

Let me be clear here. Moe is neither contradicting himself nor softening his view. Rather, he’s wrestling with two anomalies. First, even the data and analysis that he compiles himself provide a cloudier image than do his theory and policy stance. Second, the obvious facts that teachers unions are being powerfully challenged, often defeated, and led to pragmatic and tactical compromise work against the air of crisis and indignation that Moe still wants to cultivate.

Moe’s institutional theories lead him to account for the power and behavior of political actors by zeroing in on laws and the incentives they create. In his historical narrative, the game changers are mid-20th-century laws about collective-bargaining rights and mandatory dues: “The key to the spectacular growth of public sector unions is that the laws changed. And what the laws did was to make union organizing and collective bargaining much easier, largely by setting up legal frameworks that allowed for elements of coercion.” If laws are indeed responsible for the creation of union power, the policy message for reducing union power would seem straightforward: one only need undo the offending laws. Yet, when he turns to the data, Moe’s own analyses show that union membership is high in states without pro-union laws, and that teacher support for unions is high whether or not they are legally forced into paying dues. “It seems to be a mistake, then, to think that somehow the great majority of teachers are forced to join the union because the laws push them into it.” When existing research, “warts and all,” does not converge on his expectation that collective bargaining lowers achievement, he writes that off to how difficult it is to empirically disentangle complex causal chains and reasserts his faith that “whether the exact effects of collective bargaining on achievement can be well estimated or not, rules that keep bad teachers in the classrooms are still bad for kids.” In an appendix, Moe presents a regression analysis that apparently confirms his expectation that state laws mandating union fees affect membership levels. But when his probit analysis, which he admits is more appropriate, does not produce the same results, his “inclination is to think that…the probit results are off track and misleading.”

Moe’s indignation about what he sees as union arrogance and his frustration with progress that is slower than he would like force him to downplay evidence that non-union forces have gained the upper hand in many arenas where education policies are shaped. He does not deny that unions are losing battles at all levels of government. Chapter 7 discusses New Orleans, New York City, and Washington, D.C. (at least while Michelle Rhee was in charge) as places where unions have had to acquiesce to reforms they initially opposed, but tellingly titles the chapter “Small Victories for Sanity” [emphasis added]. He chronicles the expansion of charters despite union opposition, but insists that when considering this “modicum of progress,” that “it is important to recognize, as a political baseline, that the union’s ideal—if they can get it—is to have no charter schools at all, with the possible exception of unionized charter schools.” He notes the prominent role of the Gates, Broad, Walton, and other foundations that decidedly do not toe the union line, but insists that they are only “at the periphery of power.” And while concluding that the union’s days of dominance are numbered, he emphasizes that this is only due to the confluence of “fantastically powerful” forces, a “lining up of the stars,” and an “accident of history.” The redeeming forces are the Obama-Duncan team and the unfolding effects of education technologies that will weaken the central power of labor. Lest reformers get complacent, he urges them on: “Just consider this sobering question: ‘What if Hillary Clinton had been elected president?’”[emphasis in original]…because “it easily could have happened.” And he tempers his story about the healing powers of technology by noting that its full impact is “many years down the road.”

Important as this book may be, I’m left to conclude that the timing may be off in the end. The growing muscle of non-union forces, the more pragmatic stances of progressive union leaders (whether sincerely felt or tactically adopted), and roughly 25 years of education reform that has gone against the traditional union vein leave Professor Moe sounding a bit like a tardy Paul Revere, sounding the cry that “the British are coming” when it is not redcoats in formation that he is hearing but the drumbeat around the wedding of Kate and William. Teachers unions retain considerable power, to be sure, and for this reason I think they necessarily must be drawn in to the reform movement if it is to make a serious and lasting mark. But unions are just one among several key players these days, and there are whiffs of anachronism around this larger-than-life portrait of their dominant role.

Jeffrey R. Henig is professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.