Please see our previous posts about the Massachusetts Miracle and related issues -- Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. After you're all caught up,??take a look at the latest addition, from reader Stuart Buck in response to Sol Stern.
In Part 4, Sol wrote:
Here are two of the highest performing school systems in the world, yet both have strong teacher unions. Ravitch was not presenting her own theory about the effects of teacher unions, merely challenging the validity of the reformers' grand theory about the wholly negative effects of the unions. She did this by pointing to specific cases where the theory doesn't seem to explain the empirically observed outcome. Isn't that what social scientists do all the time?
Stuart Buck responds in the comments of that post:
No one is trying to contend that unions are so powerful and so awful that wherever a union exists, it will be impossible for any school to attain high achievement. If someone made such a strong claim, then, and only then, would it be relevant for Ravitch to point out that in a few locations, unionized districts manage to have high achievement.But the contention here isn't that unionization makes achievement completely impossible, but that teachers' unions often create an obstacle to hiring good teachers and firing bad ones, or try to prevent low-income parents from having any choice about where to send their children to school, and that these efforts make achievement somewhat lower than it otherwise would be.
To THAT contention, it is irrelevant to bring up a couple of cherry-picked locations. If it's true that unions depress achievement - as a social scientist did find - then achievement in Massachusetts and Finland might be??even better without a powerful union protecting bad teachers from being fired, and Alabama would be slightly worse if unions became more powerful there. Ravitch does nothing to disprove that claim. That's why social scientists try to control for other factors, after all: to isolate the impact of unionization (or whatever else is being measured).