Collective bargaining and education policy

Michael Podgursky / May 23, 2002

Considerable attention has recently focused on a bill (AB 2160) working its way through the California legislature that would expand the scope of collective bargaining beyond wages and working conditions to include matters of education policy such as curriculum and textbooks. The bill has the strong support of the California Teachers Association, the state's largest teacher union. The bill's sponsor, LA Democratic Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, argues that teachers have inadequate input on matters of education policy and sees the bill as a remedy. Similar, although less sweeping, legislation is being considered in Tennessee and Maryland.

While few would quarrel with the notion that teachers should be involved in decisions about curriculum and textbooks, the relevant public policy question is whether the collective bargaining process is the right venue for such involvement. I don't believe that teachers will gain the input they want from this bill. And not only is there no evidence that expanding the domain of collective bargaining in this way would improve the performance of public schools, it is likely to raise costs and slow the process of school reform.

If education policy is placed in the domain of collective bargaining, teacher unions would have rights that no other education stakeholders currently enjoy. If a group of parents or members of the local business community approach the local school district with concerns about curriculum, textbooks, or education policy, school administrators are under no obligation to reach a legally binding, contractual

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Collective bargaining and education policy

Expansion of collective bargaining in doubt

May 23, 2002

After California Governor Gray Davis threatened to veto AB 2160 (discussed in the accompanying editorial by Michael Podgursky) if it included a provision expanding collective bargaining to cover curriculum and textbook decisions, the bill was amended by a legislative committee yesterday to prohibit any expansion of collective bargaining, but substituting a new process by which teachers and district representatives could negotiate academic matters. While Podgursky nicely lays out the reasons that expanding collective bargaining would be bad public policy, the Governor's veto threat seemed to be as much about politics as policy-the latest episode in the ongoing soap opera of a relationship between Davis and the 330,000 member California Teachers Association. Frustrated by Davis's education policy, the union has pushed its own ambitious policy agenda this year-including a bill to revamp the state's testing and school accountability programs-that has been backed by a $3 million ad campaign. The CTA gave $1.3 million to Davis' last campaign, but so far has only given $60,000 for his re-election bid, according to reporter John Simerman. In recent weeks, CTA President Wayne Johnson has bashed the governor for soliciting a $1 million donation from the union. "We're upset with people who come to us and say 'We want your support and we support union issues,' and then, when they don't support us, we're supposed to be ok with that?" Johnson said to a reporter. "We're not." Tim Hodson, the executive director of the Center

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Expansion of collective bargaining in doubt

Putting the memorial back in Memorial Day

May 23, 2002

Secretary of Education Rod Paige is asking teachers to help reclaim Memorial Day for its intended purpose of honoring those who have died in service to our country. He's asked educators to let students know about a National Moment of Remembrance to be observed on Memorial Day, May 27, at 3:00 pm, when Americans everywhere will pause to reflect on our fallen heroes and the freedoms guaranteed by the sacrifices of men and women who gave their lives. The idea of the National Moment of Remembrance was born in 1996, when children touring Washington were asked what Memorial Day means to them and responded, "That's the day the pools open." For more information, visit the official website at www.remember.gov.

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Putting the memorial back in Memorial Day

Teaching American students to hate America

May 23, 2002

In the belief that public understanding of the Middle East will strengthen American security, the government subsidizes the work of Middle Eastern studies programs at universities around the country. But while trying to encourage the study of foreign languages and areas of the world that pose a challenge to U.S. interests, Congress is inadvertently pouring millions of dollars into the hands of some of the most anti-American scholars in the academy, explains Stanley Kurtz in an article from National Review Online. And since some of these federal funds must go toward outreach programs that educate elementary and high-school students, the result is taxpayer-subsidized courses to train teachers about the Middle East prepared by authors who have made outrageously anti-American statements since September 11th. This list includes such figures as Tariq Ali (who says that George Bush and Osama bin Laden are two peas in a pod, violent fundamentalists each, and calls for an end to the U.S. presence in the Middle East), Arundhati Roy (who has called bin Laden Bush's twin and said that the Taliban's sins can't begin to compare to the genocidal actions of the coalition against terror), and Robert Fisk (who has denied that the war has anything to do with the struggle of democracy against terror), all included in a set of teacher-training resources assembled by the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Because Middle Eastern studies programs at

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Teaching American students to hate America

The pitfalls of value-added analysis

May 23, 2002

In recent months, policymakers and policy wonks alike have been singing the praises of value-added analysis, which focuses on the achievement gains that a school or teacher elicits rather than just looking at how high the students score, since high or low scores of students in a school may reflect the socioeconomic makeup of the student body (and other "input" variables) rather than the quality or effectiveness of the teaching staff. But those who look to value-added assessment as the solution to the problem of educational accountability are likely to be disappointed, as there are too many uncertainties and inequities, argues University of Massachusetts economist Dale Ballou in an article appearing in the Summer 2002 issue of Education Next. Ballou outlines three problems with today's value-added assessment techniques: current methods of testing don't measure gains very accurately; some of the gains may be attributable to factors other than the quality of a given school or teacher; and we lack a firm basis for comparing gains of students of different levels of ability.

In response to Ballou's article, Anita Summers (professor emeritus at Wharton (and mother of Harvard President Lawrence Summers)) writes that the findings of value-added analysis are robust in practice and can be used in many ways that respect the margin of error of the statistical techniques. In another response, the Manhattan Institute's Jay Greene argues that any flaws in the technique do not automatically lead to the conclusion

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The pitfalls of value-added analysis

A Decade of Charter Schools: From Theory to Practice

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / May 23, 2002

Katrina Bulkley and Jennifer Fisler, Consortium for Policy Research in Education
April 2002

This useful ten-page review of charter-school research literature was published by the University of Pennsylvania-based Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) and written by Katrina Bulkley and Jennifer Fisler of Rutgers University. It's straightforward and fair-minded, useful to anyone seeking a fast overview of what's been learned to date by umpteen studies of charter schools. Be warned, though, that, on just about all the important issues, the evidence they've gathered is ambiguous, inconclusive or simply mixed. You can find it on the web at http://www.cpre.org/Publications/rb35.pdf. A longer version (which I've not had the opportunity to review) will be available next week at http://www.cpre.org.

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Baltimore City Community College at the Crossroads

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / May 23, 2002

Abell Foundation
March 2002

The ever-useful Abell Foundation has just issued this blunt, alarming report on the education disaster at the intersection of Baltimore's moribund school system and the troubled community college that receives a large fraction of that system's graduates. Anybody concerned about the reform of urban education at either the K-12 level or the postsecondary level and, especially, at the difficulties where they're supposed to mesh, will do well to read this bleak, hard-hitting account. You can find both a short version and a long version on the Foundation's website at www.abell.org. (Both are in PDF format.)

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Building a Plane While Flying It: Early Lessons from Developing Charter Schools

Terry Ryan / May 23, 2002

Noelle C. Griffin and Priscilla Wohlstetter, Teachers College Record
April 2001

Through a series of focus groups-including charter school founders/directors, administrators and teachers-the authors investigated 17 charter schools and the key instructional and organizational practices that they established in their start-up phase. Specifically, the authors looked at the experiences of these schools-six schools each in Boston and Los Angeles; and five schools in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area-in developing an instructional/curricular program, an accountability system, and school management/leadership processes. According to the authors (scholars at the University of Southern California), the charter school personnel interviewed found it difficult to develop coherent instructional programs. Many struggled with the "make versus buy" dilemma-should the school create its own instructional program from scratch or buy a pre-existing package that could be implemented quickly? The schools in the study tended to have a "pioneer" ethos that led them to create their own. This was time-consuming of course, and often collided with the realities of running a charter school: budget issues, relevant district, state, and federal policies, insurance, meals, security, custodians, substitutes, special education issues, and bus companies. As one school administrator lamented, "The logistics can kill you. The smallest part of my time goes to teaching and learning issues." As a result, many of these schools lacked a well-developed structure. "We limped through the first year in our approach to math-we had no textbook, no formal curriculum, and no one in charge of making those decisions," observed

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Building a Plane While Flying It: Early Lessons from Developing Charter Schools

Children as Pawns: The Politics of Educational Reform

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / May 23, 2002

Timothy A. Hacsi
March 2002

This new book by Harvard ed school researcher Timothy A. Hacsi tours the reader through five contentious education policy questions (does Headstart work, does bilingual education work, does class size matter, is social promotion a good or bad thing, will spending more on schools make them better) and comes to the earth-shattering conclusion that politicians wrestling with these matters have not always based their decisions on what Hacsi would judge to be the best social science evidence. In fairness, he acknowledges that much of that evidence isn't really very good, that many education program evaluations are flawed, and that in many cases the best available answer isn't yes or no but, rather, "depends on how it's done." For the most part, however, he places greater faith in experts than in public opinion or the priority judgments of elected officials, and on several of these contentious issues he comes down firmly on the higher-spending side of the debate. While he doesn't quite finger a "great right wing conspiracy" for manipulating the other side, he comes close. I doubt that this book will put an end to any of these arguments, but by reading it you can at least get a sense of what's being argued about. Published by the Harvard University Press, the ISBN is 0674007441, it's 260 pages long, and you can get it through a bookseller or obtain additional information from http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/HACCHI.html.

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Children as Pawns: The Politics of Educational Reform

No Child Left Behind Act: A Description of State Responsibilities

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / May 23, 2002

Council of Chief State School Officers
April 2002 (draft)

The Council of Chief State School Officers recently produced this 45-page draft paper on states' responsibilities under the new NCLB legislation. Addressing Titles I, II and III of the Act, it sets forth in a clear, factual and detailed way what states must do by when to comply with these multitudinous and complex requirements. You'll find a PDF version at http://www.ccsso.org/pdfs/NCLB2002.pdf.

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No Child Left Behind Act: A Description of State Responsibilities