The Education Gadfly Weekly

This timely study represents the most comprehensive analysis of American teacher unions’ strength ever conducted, ranking all fifty states and the District of Columbia according to the power and influence of their state-level unions. To assess union strength, the Fordham Institute and Education Reform Now examined thirty-seven different variables across five realms:

1) Resources and Membership

2) Involvement in Politics

3) Scope of Bargaining

4) State Policies

5) Perceived Influence

The study analyzed factors ranging from union membership and revenue to state bargaining laws to campaign contributions, and included such measures such as the alignment between specific state policies and traditional union interests and a unique stakeholder survey. The report sorts the fifty-one jurisdictions into five tiers, ranking their teacher unions from strongest to weakest and providing in-depth profiles of each.

Download the state profiles (Click your state to download):

Last Friday, I laid out policy scenarios that might result from the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Harris v. Quinn. To recap, the case involved plaintiff Pam Harris and other Illinois home-healthcare workers whom public-employee unions had successfully organized (with the help of their allies in the Democratic political establishment). The problem was that Harris and others didn’t want to subsidize the union, didn’t think they were even public employees, and simply wanted to go back to providing healthcare services to their patients, who were often sick family members.

I theorized that the Court would either (a) side with the unions and tell healthcare providers to take it up with the state legislature, (b) side with the healthcare providers but limit the decision to them alone, or (c) extend the decision broadly to say that all public employees needn’t pay union dues or “fair share” payments if they did not want to subsidize the union’s activities. Option “c” is a doomsday scenario for public unions (the unions’ “gravest threat” in the eyes of one commentator) and would effectively prohibit “fair share” payments for workers nationwide.

Why this would cripple the unions isn’t hard to figure out. Last year, the Wisconsin Education Association Council reported a nearly 30 percent drop in membership in the two years since the Act 10 collective-bargaining law took effect. (Act 10 eliminated “fair share” payments, though it also limited collective bargaining, which the doomsday scenario would not do.)

On Monday, the Court ruled decidedly in favor of Harris in a 5–4 decision along ideological lines. The justices decided that part-time home-healthcare workers were not public employees and could not be required to pay “fair share” payments—a big loss for unions looking to grow their ranks. The decision was narrow, however (essentially, the justices went with option “b”) and may not have immediate implications for education, though it might dissuade the AFT or NEA from attempting to organize part-time providers of education services (say, course-choice providers) down the road.

The most interesting part of the ruling, however, was the discussion of Abood, a 1977 precedent that underpins much of the public-employee unions’ legal justification for charging nonmembers for their services. The majority opinion, written by Justice Alito, spent a good amount of time questioning the logic of that “anomalous” precedent. Alito also brought up the Knox case from 2012 with a stern warning that “preventing nonmembers from freeriding on the union’s efforts” is a rationale “generally insufficient to overcome First Amendment objections.”

So while there was no sweeping ruling this week, stay tuned—because there certainly could be one in the future. In particular, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association is a case to watch. The objections raised in that case are similar to Harris but involve full-time teachers, not part-time, home-based workers. The case, which is moving through the courts with the help of the Center for Individual Rights, is currently before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

With Knox and Harris, the Court is slowly chipping away at the ability of public unions to extract funds from workers who do not wish to associate with them. Assuming the majority of the Court remains conservative, it’s not unthinkable that a huge chunk of union power could soon fall away. While some were expecting the cascade to begin today, Friedrichs seems like the next most likely opportunity. Until then, it might be good to keep your hard hat handy.

This post was edited slightly on July 2, 2014, for inclusion in the Education Gadfly Weekly.

The early-childhood folks didn’t much like it when I faulted NCES for relying on the Rutgers-based National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) as the source for federal data on “the state of preschool”—and for subsidizing the advocacy work of that organization, which just so happens to be aligned with President Obama’s preschool initiative.

NIEER’s Steve Barnett insisted that the sole-source federal contract pays only for data gathering, not advocacy. And the Department of Education noted that when it had announced its intention of awarding such a contract to NIEER, nobody objected at the time. So why, it implied, was I grumping after the fact?

Talk about splitting hairs. At the receiving end—I speak as the long-time head of a fundraising-dependent nonprofit organization not so very different from NIEER—all money is green, even federal contract dollars that must be accounted for. At minimum, they offset costs that would otherwise be borne elsewhere in one’s budget, thereby freeing up funds for other activities, in this case including advocacy, which is what NIEER is best known for. (OK, data-based advocacy, but limited to the data they want you to see because those are the data that buttress their views and advance their goals.) I don’t know what NIEER’s total budget is—we couldn’t find it in any public source—but the $1.5 million it will receive via this contract (over five years) isn’t chickenfeed. And they can charge to this contract the costs of gathering data they would otherwise have had to use other funds to pay for.

As for the government assertion that anybody with palpitations about this arrangement should have objected ahead of time, that simply fails to address the core problem, which is using an advocacy group as the source of data, analysis, and authorship for a federal report that is supposed to be policy neutral.

This, however, is a topic where the White House is far from neutral, and one must conclude that its political and policy agendas have trickled down into the Institute for Education Sciences and National Center for Education Statistics, which is precisely what isn’t supposed to happen. Imagine the ruckus if anything similar happened at the Census Bureau or Bureau of Labor Statistics. There would be an outcry over possible interest-group contamination—or at least spinning—of key government data, as there was back when NCES got its teacher-salary data from the teacher unions.

Universal preschool is a big deal for President Obama—and for NIEER. They are perfectly aligned on this topic. NIEER chief Steve Barnett is known to be a key administration advisor and strategist on this issue and has appeared with the president at public events (e.g., Decatur, Georgia) designed to advance this agenda. (He is rumored to have arrived via Air Force One, though I haven’t been able to confirm that.)

The president is entitled to his agenda, although personally I’m no fan of universal preschool. (It should be tightly targeted on school readiness for very needy kids—and the feds should start by turning Head Start into the education program that it has never been.)

NIEER is, of course, entitled to its agenda, too. The issue is whether a federal statistical agency—intended to be immune to every sort of policy agenda and political interest—should outsource its data-gathering efforts to advocacy groups.

In this case, NCES outsourced more than the gathering of data. It also hired NIEER to do some of the interpretation. Compare the almost-back-to-back reports recently issued by the two entities. You might start with the fact that both carry exactly the same title: “The State of Preschool 2013.”

Then there’s the fact that tables 1, 2, and 3 in the federal document are essentially identical to tables 1, 2 and 6 in the NIEER document, the difference being that NIEER rank-orders the states according to its advocacy priorities, whereas NCES lists them alphabetically.

True, the federal report doesn’t contain a great deal of explicit policy “spin,” save for repeating the usual stuff about the miraculous results of the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program, even though that differed in almost every conceivable way from the state-financed programs that are tabulated in the data tables.

But the implicit spin just happens to align, once again, with both NIEER’s and President Obama’s policy agendas.

Consider the focus of both reports on state-funded preschool. Why not all preschool? Why exclude the huge Head Start program? (Answer: it’s not an education program, even though it should be.) What about the Census Bureau–generated data on what they call “nursery school” enrollment of kids aged 3 and up? Might it weaken the Obama (and NIEER) policy argument if it were acknowledged that approximately half of American three- and four-year-olds are already enrolled in preschool or nursery school programs of some sort and that many more are in “day care” programs? In fact, in 2006, fewer than one-fifth of four-year-olds and one-third of three-year-olds were cared for solely by their parents—and today, those fractions are surely smaller.

What would it do to the Obama/NIEER policy agenda of “universality” if NCES announced that the overwhelming majority of preschool-aged kids are already participating in something of the sort? What’s the magic of “state-funded” programs? How do we know that they are true Kindergarten-readiness programs and are effectively producing the desired results for kids who need it most?

On reflection, the implicit spin is worse than the explicit kind when it comes to this collaboration between NCES and NIEER. State-funded, state-operated preschools are what President Obama and Mr. Barnett want. But they may not be what the country needs. And the job of a statistical agency is to provide people with data by which they can judge these things for themselves. On this front, NCES has let the country down—and NIEER has profited.

Egged on by viral posts and comedians mocking confusing homework assignments, parents are becoming increasingly leery of the Common Core–aligned approach to mathematics instruction. As goes the frequent refrain, “I tried to help my kids with their first-grade homework—and I couldn’t!” In many cases, their concerns about individual materials are valid; sometimes materials that purport to be teaching to the Core are, in fact, not at all aligned and/or unnecessarily confusing. Kathleen Porter-Magee wrote in May that supporters of the standards “should be more exacting critics than the opponents, taking pains not to explain away implementation challenges, mistakes, and missteps.” And schools ought to look for textbooks and other materials, such as those from Singapore Math, that teach Common Core concepts in a straightforward, elegant way.

Mike and Brickman talk poor-quality math instruction and the ramifications of this week’s Supreme Court decision on union dues. Mike pitches a new bumper sticker: “Keep NCES boring.” And Amber is psyched about New York’s tenure reforms.

Amber's Research Minute

“Performance Screens for School Improvement: The Case of Teacher Tenure Reform in New York City,” by Susanna Loeb, Luke C. Miller, and James Wyckoff, Working Paper 115 (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, June 2014).

Richard Whitmire’s forthcoming book, On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools are Pushing the Envelope, is “the best account yet of what is happening with charters,” says the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews. But big questions still abound: Can Rocketship and other high-performing schools scale up quickly, a la the “Fibonacci sequence”? Can charters do so without falling into the pitfalls of the past? Will struggling urban areas embrace this form of school choice? And what about smug suburbs?

Join the Fordham Institute for a conversation with Whitmire and a panel of experts about his book, the Rocketship network, and the future of charter schooling. 

Founded in 1998, Houston-based YES Prep has set the pace for college completion among graduates of so-called “no excuses” charter schools. Among its 1,700 alumni, 72 percent are either still persisting in college or have graduated. YES Prep’s six-year college-graduation rate has reached 41 percent—five times the rate for low-income Houston students and more than four times the national average. The best may be yet to come: the class of 2010 has reached the end of its fourth year of college, with 73 percent of its members either earning a diploma or still working toward graduation. The network’s most extraordinary accomplishment may be its graduates’ the high level of academic preparation. While more than one in four of all college students nationally and half of college-bound Texans take remedial classes in college, fewer than 15 percent of YES Prep graduates need extra help (the report, it should be noted, does not include including student attrition rates. “No excuses” schools including YES Prep have been criticized, fairly and unfairly, for “counseling out” students). However YES Prep insists academic readiness alone is not the “x factor” underlying its impressive college-completion rate. “Non-academic skills were often the determining factor in our students’ success,” says the report, which also stresses the importance of college partnerships. “When our graduates matriculate to schools outside of Houston and receive university-based social and academic support, over 70 percent graduate within six years.” YES Prep admits its approach to supporting graduates through college was, at first, almost entirely experimental. Without an established research base or complimentary models to follow, the charter network assumed college access would be a stumbling block, but college affordability has been a significant issue. Such early misperceptions came with a price: the schools’ six-year graduation rate fell as low as 34 percent for the Class of 2007. “With this paper,” the report notes, “we aim to share provable methods for changing what have for too long been tragically static outcomes in hopes of increasing college access and graduation rates for all students across the U.S.” As college-prep charters send more “first generation” students to college, supporting alumni to and through college has become an increasingly common page in the “no excuses” playbook. And as YES Prep’s experience shows, high schools that want to help the low-income kids succeed in college need to keep at it long after their students leave the nest.

SOURCE: YES Prep Public Schools, College Initiatives Redefined: A Responsive Approach to College Counseling and Alumni Support (Houston, TX: YES Prep Public Schools, June 2014).

This very timely new study out of CALDER examines whether a tenure-reform policy initiated in New York City in 2009–10 impacted the rate at which tenure was awarded and the composition of the teaching force. The study tracked the tenure review process for all probationary teachers in NYC public schools between 2007–08 and 2012–13. (In New York state, teachers are eligible for tenure after completing their third year in the classroom.) The gist of the reform was this: starting in 2009, principals had to provide a rationale of why they were recommending or denying tenure for a probationary teacher if the evidence ran counter to the principal’s recommendation. Such evidence included value-added data, student and teacher work products, classroom-observation data, colleagues’ feedback, etc. Further, principals received “guidance” from the district that suggested under which conditions a teacher’s tenure approval might be in jeopardy, including having an unsatisfactory annual rating or persistently low value-added scores. What happened as a result? Three things: First, the rate of tenure approval dropped from 94 percent in the two years prior to the policy’s introduction to 56 percent three years after it was implemented. Yet nearly all of the decrease was because teachers’ tenure decisions were extended. (An extension allows a teacher to keep her job, sans tenure.) Those denied tenure increased just marginally from 2 percent pre-policy to 3 percent post-policy. Second, being “extended” significantly increased the likelihood that a teacher would transfer schools or exit the NYC system altogether. Further, extended teachers who actually transferred or exited were less effective than those likely to replace them. Third, and finally, schools with more black students were more likely to extend tenure—and given that those teachers are also more likely to leave and be replaced with more effective teachers, this is a good thing for kids. So in short, prodding principals to make evidence-based tenure decisions pays off—and it doesn’t require a change in state law (or a Vergara-style lawsuit)!

SOURCE: Susanna Loeb, Luke C. Miller, and James Wyckoff, “Performance Screens for School Improvement: The Case of Teacher Tenure Reform in New York City,” Working Paper 115 (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, June 2014).

One often hears anecdotes of teachers feeling undervalued and, at times, isolated in their profession. The most recent OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey—a study that homes in on the working conditions of teachers and learning environments of schools, focusing on lower secondary education—confirms the narrative. The survey, which queried approximately 100,000 lower secondary school teachers and 6,500 lead teachers in thirty-four OECD countries, found that less than one-third of all teachers felt that teaching is a valued profession in their society. (However, there was significant variation: In France and Sweden, for example, just 5 percent of teachers felt that society valued their work. Meanwhile, 83.8 percent of Malaysian teachers felt valued, with South Korea, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi also scoring well.) Additionally, four in ten teachers reported that they never taught jointly or observed other teachers’ classes to provide feedback, even though a plethora of studies have argued that well-structured cooperative practices help educators improve their classroom practice. Overall, though, teacher job satisfaction was high: roughly 90 percent of those surveyed felt positively about their work, and 80 percent said that if given the option to restart their career, they would choose teaching again.

SOURCE: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, TALIS 2013 Results: An International Perspective on Teaching and Learning (OECD Publishing, 2014).

When it comes to educational options, there are sundry open doors available to the nation’s more affluent kids—and far fewer for their poorer peers to walk through. In her new book, journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley follows the trajectories of ten children from less-than-ideal circumstances who are given the opportunity to attend private schools via in the Children’s Scholarship Fund, a nationwide initiative founded in 1998 (and funded by Ted Forstmann and John Walton, both now deceased) that offers tuition assistance to low-income students in grades K–8. Each of the ten kids are given their own chapter, and the stories are peppered with asides on education-policy topics like college and career readiness, private school diversity, and the monetary value of a high school diploma. These uplifting, journalistic stories are a perfect summer read and make a compelling argument for expanding parental choice in education. (For a complementary look at how private schools adjust to an influx of scholarship students, see Fordham’s Pluck and Tenacity: How five private schools in Ohio have adapted to vouchers.)

SOURCE: Naomi Schaefer Riley, Opportunity and Hope: Transforming Children's Lives through Scholarships (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014).