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):

The most interesting story coming out of the landmark Vergara and Harris decisions is the coming irresistible-force-immovable-object collision of reformers’ aggressive new litigation strategy and teachers unions’ growing stout-defense approach to their own leadership.

These cases provide the nation’s unions an opportunity to produce next-generation leaders who strengthen labor’s long-term position through new rhetoric and priorities. But the unions’ recent orientation—elevating increasingly confrontational individuals wedded to longstanding ways—may be a path to their political marginalization or worse.

Most observers interpreted the Vergara-Harris tandem as an anti-union one-two combination. The Vergara decision was a repudiation of California’s longstanding policies on tenure and seniority. Harris chipped away at unions’ ability to extract dues from nonmembers. The Court emphasized the right of individuals to refuse to financially support organizations with which they disagree, which could have major implications for mandatory-dues policies.

Nobody expected the unions to roll over; this is an admirably doughty gang. But their reaction has been positively martial. The first paragraph alone in the NEA’s statement included “privatizing public education and attacking educators,” “ultra-rich cronies,” and “deep-pocketed corporate special interests.” The California Federation of Teachers declared, “The judge fell victim to the anti-union, anti-teacher rhetoric.” The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) announced that it will “stand in solidarity in this fight for economic and social justice.”

The conventional wisdom is that this is simply proportionate-response behavior: Since these cases represent an existential threat, nothing less would be appropriate.

But I think something bigger is afoot. The unions aren’t just counterpunching; they’re escalating this fight. In recent months, some in their ranks have been disturbed by what they see as their leadership’s too-timid reaction to educator-hostile policies and contracts. These disaffected members were energized by Chicago’s strike (which humbled an imperious mayor), and some have self-organized into more militant groups.

One critical upshot has been the ascension of increasingly combative union leaders. A Politico article quoted NEA members as saying their outgoing president had been “too nice” and that his replacement must “play hardball.” That new leader, Lily Eskelsen García, according to Education Next, “portrays teachers as hardworking heroes who are under attack by wealthy, implacable, money-hungry foes” and has called value-added measures “the mark of the devil.”

Karen Lewis, head of the Chicago Teachers Union, helped orchestrate the Windy City’s teacher strike and accused “venture capitalists” of using “little black and brown children as stage props.” The new leader of the Massachusetts Teachers Association unseated the incumbent by charging him with failing to fight evaluation reform and Common Core. She denounces charters, wants a testing moratorium, and believes there is a “general assault on public education by people who are looking to privatize it, to profit off the public dollar, and to bust our unions.” The new leader of the United Teachers Los Angeles also recently defeated the incumbent, and he has threatened a strike, and promises to “fight against LAUSD’s cynical teacher jails and the broader climate of fear and school destabilization they promote.”

Even as reformers promise to copy Vergara with kindred lawsuits in other states, union leaders aren’t just promising to appeal in California and fight vigorously elsewhere; they seem committed to doing so with relish. Randi Weingarten declared, “This will not be the last word.” The CTA vowed to appeal because the decision to “strip teachers of their professional rights hurts our students and our schools.” Diane Ravitch wrote that Vergara will “be appealed until there is no higher court.”

In one sense, this reaction is understandable. These fights would serve as catharsis for beleaguered unions—opportunities to release resentment over testing, evaluation, NCLB, VAM, and more. They’re also a sort of proxy war against the superpower of maddening economic conditions—stagnant wages, stubborn unemployment, the credit and housing crises.

But the forcefulness of this response may prove counterproductive for union morale, membership, and credibility—and certainly will do so if they continue to lose battles. They might do more for themselves and their members by taking a more reform-oriented approach.

The Vergara ruling was important, but in the long run the trial itself may prove more so. The public narrative was that low-income kids had filed a bill of particulars against organized labor. The plaintiffs assembled a devastating case, convincing the court that state laws cherished by unions “impose a real and appreciable impact on students’ fundamental right to equality of education and impose a disproportionate burden on poor and minority students.” District superintendents explained the real-life injurious influence of these policies. The judge wrote that the evidence “shocks the conscience.”

As the unions appeal, these facts will continue to be splashed across front pages. Taking a last-stand approach to similar suits elsewhere will invite a deluge of heartrending anti-tenure and anti-seniority stories. Unions will be forced to respond to grim statistics (e.g. in Vergara, as many as 8,000 teachers having “a direct, real, appreciable, and negative impact” on students). Judges will likely continue to side with plaintiffs. Even where unions do win, these could be pyrrhic victories.

It is in this context that a federal appeals court (and in time possibly the U.S. Supreme Court) will hear Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which takes on compulsory teacher-union dues directly. Informed by sobering anecdotes about the consequences of today’s tenure and seniority policies, conservative and liberal judges alike may nod in agreement when the plaintiff’s attorney asserts, “My client shouldn’t be forced to fund an organization that advocates such laws.”

There is an alternative, though my recommending it probably makes it dead on arrival. But perhaps elements within the unions will recognize that some reformers would welcome the opportunity to galvanize public opinion against organized labor in a series of Vergara-like suits. Perhaps some union members with the long view are concerned about a potential flood of negative PR. Maybe they can stop this defiant, unnecessary march to Waterloo.

The alternative path has two parts: First, drop the Vergara appeal, and instead work with the California legislature to rewrite the challenged laws. Second, work to amend tenure and seniority rules in other states so Vergara-inspired lawsuits don’t get off the ground.

But is this kind of dramatic about-face even thinkable? Yes, if we see the unions’ recent direction as a temporary diversion from their longer-term reform-oriented evolution. We might think of this period as being bracketed by the “Emanuel Bookends.”

Rahm Emanuel’s mishandling of teacher issues in Chicago and the CTU’s subsequent strike set off this era. But one of his most famous quotes reminds us that extraordinary circumstances (say, two major court decisions) enable extraordinary changes in direction, like ending an era through inspirational new leadership.

“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” 

An earlier version of this piece appeared in the Flypaper blog.

I’ve never been to the annual conference of the National Education Association and I’ve never regretted it, but it would have been fun to be a fly on the chandelier at last week’s shindig in Denver.

For starters, the delegates voted to ask Education Secretary Arne Duncan to resign. Similar resolutions had been introduced at previous NEA conferences but never passed. Media coverage indicates that it was Duncan’s (muted, even ambivalent) response to the Vergara court decision in California that “broke the camel’s back.” Education Week’s ace journalists note that Duncan has for some time served as flak catcher for the NEA’s mounting unease with various Obama administration policies, enabling the union to “shoot the messenger” rather than denouncing a President that it ardently supported in both 2008 and 2012. (Duncan scoffed at the resolution.)

Then Dennis Van Roekel, outgoing from the NEA’s presidency after six long, slow, boring years, gave a long, rambling valedictory speech. It wasn’t surprising that he attacked Michelle Rhee—but the other “corporate reformers” whose “onslaught” he described include Democrats for Education Reform!

Do you share my sense that perhaps the historic coupling of the NEA and the Democratic Party is loosening a bit?

Which sense was reinforced by a third event at this year’s convention: accompanying her overwhelming election as the next NEA president, Lily Eskelsen Garcia has made clear in interviews that among her missions—above all, “winning back public trust” for teachers—is loosening the partisan bonds and beginning to support whichever candidates will do the most for teachers, even including Republicans!

That impulse is apt to strengthen after Monday’s announcement by the Education Department that it will begin to “enforce” the long-standing but widely ignored NCLB mandate that every student be provided with an “effective” teacher. States will have nine months to develop and submit “comprehensive educator equity plans.” Although the feds have so far been coy as to exactly what these must contain, how they will be reviewed and judged, and what exactly will be done to assure compliance, the concept is that states must henceforth ensure that their best teachers are placed in schools with their neediest students. No, not a new concept. Groups such as Education Trust and the Center for American Progress have argued for years that states and districts must find ways to get their most effective teachers in front of their poorest and most disadvantaged pupils, and it’s evident that the Obama administration is finally responding.

But the unions won’t like this move one bit, either, because among their most prized victories via legislation and collective bargaining has been the right of many of their members to decide which school they will teach in. Seniority, tenure, bumping rights, LIFO—all of these policies make it easier for teachers to choose (and remain in) the schools they want and harder for administrators to assign them—especially the most senior and likely most effective among them—to schools where they might do more good in classrooms with more challenging (but needier) kids.

In short, another policy collision is at hand between teacher unions and the Obama team. Whether one is looking at executive actions like this, statutory moves (such as we’ve seen at the state level in Wisconsin and Indiana), or courtroom holdings such as Vergara, hard-won union victories are being undone.

How will Ms. Eskelsen Garcia respond? She’s a formidable individual with a colorful, varied past many talents. Indeed, it’s hard to think of anyone more different from the colorless Mr. Van Roekel. She’s outspoken, quotable, energetic, and generally impressive. She cannot abide the use of test scores to evaluate teachers. She’s an ardent fan of the Common Core State Standards. She’s savvy and strategic. She’s almost certainly going to rival Randi Weingarten as a public figure—and to give palpitations to all (regardless of party) who don’t advance what she sees as the rightful—and, in her view, inseparable—interests of teachers and kids.

Following the watershed Vergara case in California, last week an advocacy group filed the first “copycat” lawsuit, this one challenging teacher-tenure laws in New York City. According to the complaint, firing a teacher in New York can take eighteen months and cost taxpayers upwards of $250,000—and when layoffs become necessary, they are done with consideration for seniority rather than job performance. All of this, they argue, violates the Empire State Constitution’s guarantee of a “sound and basic education.”

A San Francisco–based design company called Ideo (best known for designing the first laptop computer) has been hired to design a network of low-cost private schools in Lima, Peru—which, in the three years since it was first tasked with the project, has grown to serve 13,500 students in twenty-three schools (at which 61 percent of second graders scored “proficient” in math, compared with 17 percent for the nation as a whole). Design companies are increasingly being asked to revamp complex systems for governments, nonprofits, and businesses, and this trend has gained a foothold in education. And indeed, there exists precedent for introducing private schooling into developing nations to serve poor families (see, for example, James Tooley’s excellent book The Beautiful Tree.) Interestingly, rather than being asked to design individual parts of systems as is more common, Ideo has been tasked with creating a holistic design for the entire system of schools, which is rather novel.

NEA saber rattling, a teacher-quality decree from the White House, and balanced literacy crawls from the grave yet again in NYC. Amber spills about TFA spillover effects.

Amber's Research Minute

Examining Spillover Effects from Teach For AmericaCorps Members in Miami-Dade County Public Schools by Michael Hansen, Ben Backes, Victoria Brady, and Zeyu Xu (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, June 2014).

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.

Teach For America (TFA) is growing. In 2013–14, some 11,000 corps members reached more than 750,000 students in high-need classrooms around the land. Yet TFA-ers remain a drop in the bucket of 3 million teachers. This raises the question of how best to allocate them. Should corps members be dispersed widely across a district’s schools or “clustered” in targeted schools? Would a concentration of TFA members in high-need schools provide positive learning benefits even for students with non-TFA teachers (“spillover” effects)? This new study analyzes the impact of clustering TFA members in Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS), using district level data from 2008–09 to 2012–13. TFA altered its placement strategy in M-DCPS in 2009–10 and began to cluster members in a smaller number of turnaround schools. For example, among middle schools with a TFA member, the proportion of TFA teachers increased from four percent in 2008-09 to, on average, 18 percent in 2012-13. The researchers found, however, that the higher density of TFA members in targeted schools yielded no significant “spillover” benefits—as measured by test-score gains—for students with non-TFA teachers. Too bad. But this study also replicates the earlier finding that TFA teachers contribute significant value-added gains relative to the average schoolteacher, at least in math. The analysts estimate that Miami’s TFA members added the equivalent of three additional months of math learning. (The gains in reading were statistically insignificant.) Bottom line: TFA members aren’t contagious. The gains they produce in pupils don’t necessarily rub off on other teachers. But they’re doing a heck of a job teaching math.

Michael Hansen, Ben Backes, Victoria Brady, and Zeyu Xu, Examining Spillover Effects from Teach For America Corps Members in Miami-Dade County Public Schools (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, June 2014).