GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Cross-posting my findings as described on the Perimeter Primate blog: Unionized states correlate with higher student achievement. Bring on the “forced unionization” and watch our students do better, Newsweek! From the blog:

Education historian/commentator Diane Ravitch points out that the states with non-union teachers (who thus have little or no job security) tend to have lower academic achievement than the states with strong teachers’ unions.

That should put to rest the myth that bad teachers with ironclad job security are the cause of the challenges facing public education.

As Ravitch adds, the state reported to have the consistently highest academic achievement is Massachusetts — a strong union state. (It’s also widely called “Taxachusetts” by the right — could there be a connection?) Ravitch emphasizes that she’s not necessarily saying that unionization and job security LEAD TO higher academic achievement, but the facts show that unionization and job security clearly don’t work AGAINST higher academic achievement. They are correlated.

I thought it was worth looking for some data. But not officially being a statistician, I wasn’t really sure of the best measure of state-by-state academic achievement.

So I decided to look at one measure that interests me. That’s the list of “cut scores” for National Merit semifinalists. National Merit recognition is based on the PSAT scores of 11th-graders. The cut score for recognition varies from state to state. That’s explained this way on Wikipedia:

“The minimum Selection Index for recognition as a Semifinalist … is set by the NMSC [National Merit Scholarship Corporation] in each state at whatever score yields about the 99th percentile.”

The organization FairTest has posted a list of the cut scores for the high school graduating class of 2010, which range from 201 (Wyoming) to 221 (Massachusetts, Maryland and New Jersey). California’s is 218.

The National Right to Work Legal Foundation posts a the list of Right-to-Work states (which don’t allow workplaces to require union membership, meaning unions are toothless) and what the Foundation calls Force Unionism states. I took those lists, added each state’s Class of 2010 National Merit cut scores and averaged.

The results:

* Right-to-Work states: average cut score 208.4545
* Forced Unionism states: average cut score 213.6897

That result seems to show that unionized teachers correlate with higher academic achievement, and non-union teachers correlate with lower academic achievement.

If I’m missing confounding factors, I can’t see what they would be. It’s true that not all 11th-graders take the PSAT, and the culture probably varies state by state as to whether taking the PSAT is more widely encouraged or less. But that wouldn’t seem to confound the basic finding.

By the way, the lowest-cut-score state — Wyoming at 201 — is a Right-to-Work state, and the three that are tied for highest — Massachusetts, Maryland and New Jersey –are strong labor states.

I disagree that the analysis is invalid, Stuart. I didn’t claim causation, just correlation.

To get into FRL, you then have to go into an elaborate economic analysis of how being a right-to-work state contributes to or results from poverty levels. I do agree that a law like Arkansas’, if that’s accurate (I think you have mentioned that you’re in Arkansas), is a genuine confounding factor. But is that an outlier? So a thorough study would need to determine the true extent to which teachers have job security in each state based on all relevant factors. There are many researchers who are paid to do this kind of study, so it’s not clear to me why it hasn’t been done. As an amateur volunteer mommy, I don’t have the resources or expertise to go deeper than I did. Those who do have the resources and expertise should be looking into this further

But the fact remains that my findings show that OVERALL, ON AVERAGE, states with right-to-work laws show lower academic achievement based on this particular gauge (which I find a rather revealing one) than do states with legislation that empowers unions.

You’re splitting hairs over Ravitch’s history of opinions on Massachusetts education policy. That doesn’t refute in the slightest her observation that Massachusetts shows the highest academic achievement in the nation and has strong union laws.

The only efforts to refute her comment, and my findings, so far, have been based on this kind of wriggling and hair-splitting. To which my retort is the charter forces’ favorite comment: NO EXCUSES. The fact is, the charter/privatization/anti-teacher/anti-public-education folks claim that the ability to fire teachers would improve achievement, and the facts show the opposite.

But again, it shows that the ability to fire teachers at will does not correlate with higher achievement — so it disproves that notion, promoted by Newsweek and other opponents of public education.

see newseek is right! fire bad teachers. if they do’nt wanna take no pay cut, cut them. look at what they doing in new jersey. chris chris is tryna get rid of all them teachers. bad teachers bad!

1. Stuart, those are the very details that you opponents of public education disdain as “excuse-making” in other contexts. Again, to quote you and your allies: NO EXCUSES!
2. But if you do want to keep up the hair-splitting: Is the fact that a state is a Right-to-Work state a causation factor in high poverty? Is the fact that academic outcomes are poorer in those states a causation factor in high poverty? This research could go very deep. To what extent does the lack of job security and the weak workers’ rights CONTRIBUTE to those pathologies (high poverty, low student achievement)?

In any case, none of this squirming, contorting and weaseling changes my basic point. Newsweek and other public education opponents insist that the ability to fire “bad” teachers is the key to improving education. If that were so, states with lower job security for teachers would show higher achievement than states in which teachers have higher job security. But the opposite is true: States with lower job security for teachers show lower student achievement. Sorry, that’s the fact. Newsweek and those other public education opponents are debunked.

Education reform advocates constantly use the “no excuses” snarl to blast public schools. I agree with you that it’s not really valid — but it’s sauce for the gander here. If you’re telling me it’s not valid, you need to say that whenever your colleagues in the the anti-public-education war forces use it too (I think they use it not because they’re uneducated but because they’re dishonest and unethical.)

Anyway, I’m just dealing with the big picture with this particular piece of research, and in that big picture, low job security for teachers correlates with lower academic performance for students, state by state, overall on average.

You’re right about the discussion of the Stanford-run charter school (which is 35 miles from me). My take on that is that the organizers of this school fell victim to the same reality that trips up other charter operators — it’s very hard to run a school, it’s very hard to improve the achievement of high-poverty, high-need, at-risk students, and if they thought they had some magical skills that would enable them to do what traditional educators struggle to do, they got a dash of cold water.

It’s really impossible to fairly compare charter schools to each other without knowing to what extent each charter school’s admission process self-selects, depending on the demands of the process (or even pro-actively selects) — and without knowing to what extent each charter school pushes out unsuccessful students. And since that information is not readily available, comparisons are meaningless.

In San Diego, UC San Diego educators run the Preuss charter school, which is famously on all lists of the nation’s top schools. However, the Preuss school has also been busted for various types of cheating.