Guest blogger Diane Ravitch responds to Mike Petrilli's recent post, "The Massachusetts Miracle and the Teachers Union"
At the Philanthropy Roundtable conference a few weeks ago, I was a "judge" of a series of presentations that were supposed to showcase the best idea for education reform. The first one was by Richard Berman of the Center for Union Facts, who described his plan to launch a media campaign to "demonize" the teachers' unions; he gave examples of video and billboards in New Jersey.
I responded to Mr. Berman that if I were designing an ad campaign to counter his, I would point out that the highest-scoring state in the nation is Massachusetts, which has a strong teachers' union, and that the highest-scoring nation in the world on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is Finland, which is virtually 100% unionized, and that the lowest scoring districts and states in this nation have weak unions or no unions. So I judged that his entry would not improve education. He said something about being in the PR business and did not respond.
So I assume that this exchange was the genesis of the current effort to show that teachers' unions were no help to education reform in Massachusetts or anywhere else.
As a judge in this round, I conclude that none of the respondents was able to demonstrate that the presence of teachers' unions blocks??school improvement and that the absence of teachers' unions permits school improvement.
The fact is that Massachusetts became the highest-performing state in the nation and it does have a unionized workforce in the schools. So, while eyewitnesses may complain that the union got in their way, the bottom line is that the education reform program was very successful in a highly unionized state.
Not one of the critics pointed to a state or even a district that has achieved equivalent educational success and that does NOT have a teachers union. To persuade me that I am wrong, show me a state or a group of states or even a district??that is non-unionized and that is leading the way in academic achievement.
Teachers' unions do not themselves raise or lower academic achievement.??That is not their purpose; their purpose is to provide teachers with rights and dignity.
Massachusetts and Finland demonstrate, at least to me, that unions do not block academic improvement.??And that is why I conclude that an effort to demonize teachers unions will not improve American education.