The Massachusetts Miracle debate is back for its sixth round! Sol Stern returns to comment on other debaters' points. If you've missed part or all of this back-and-forth about teachers unions and education reform, you can catch up on it. Here's Sol:
Despite all of Jay Greene's nit-picking, the fact remains that when Diane Ravitch presented her Finland and Massachusetts counterfactuals to rebut a??widely held theory that teacher unions always depress student achievement, that??was (contra to Jay's assertion)??not the equivalent of presenting a full blown alternative theory of her own. I don't see Diane giving speeches, writing op eds, running to editorial boards, to press??a theory??that unions never do anything foolish or counterproductive. On the other hand I do see many in the school reform movement doing exactly that??to press??their claim that wherever we have public schools, unions are out there undermining reform and depressing student achievement. And they have been immensely successful, as any reading of the New York Post and other media outlets will attest. All??Diane was saying to the school reformers is give us??better proof?? (other than Caroline Hoxby's lone study) to support such an extreme claim and show us specifically how unions depressed student achievement in??two of their strongest bastions -- i.e. Massachusetts and Finland. I dispute??Jay's claim that good social scientists don't do exactly that on a wide range of research and policy questions.??I also don't agree with??Jay that there are no studies at all that come to more benign conclusions about the effect of unionization on student achievement. If we continue this dialogue I will??offer some cites.I must say, though, that I loved Stuart Buck's ingenious defense of the Greene-Hoxby thesis -- to wit that??"achievement in Massachusetts and Finland might be??even better without a powerful union protecting bad teachers from being fired." Yes, Stuart, and graduates of??MIT and Cal Tech??might be even better mathematicians if their professors didn't have tenure -- but I wouldn't suggest this as the greatest??argument for the??theory that??tenure for college professors is bad for students.