While a causal relationship has not yet been proven, some of the data below suggests higher student achievement for states with teacher unions. There are other factors to consider. Read excerpt below from the Truth-o-meter, and judge for yourself:
Consider Wisconsin’s third-place ranking in the SAT. It sounds great — but only 4 percent of graduates in the state took the test in 2010, and those that did likely did so because they had a particular need to take the SAT as they applied to certain colleges. And that means that Wisconsin SAT takers were a self-selecting group, probably more academically advanced than average.
As a result, it’s fairer to look at Wisconsin’s ranking on the ACT, which was taken by 67 percent of graduates in 2009. And that ranking was 13th in the nation — not bad, but well short of the 2nd place finish cited in the Facebook post.
Meanwhile, in the five non-collective-bargaining states, the SAT was the more widely taken test, and in those rankings, the non-union states placed between 34th and 49th nationally. Meanwhile, for the ACT — where participation ranged from 15 percent to 50 percent — the rankings in the non-union states ranged from 22nd to 46th.
So, on neither test did the five non-collective bargaining states perform as well as Wisconsin did, and in general those five states clustered in the bottom half of the national rankings. Given these statistics, it’s reasonable to say that Wisconsin outperformed the other five states significantly — but not as overwhelmingly as the blog and Facebook posts suggest.
After we contacted the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, Melissa Baldauff, the party’s research director, wrote us to say that “after further investigation, we determined that the data was not the most up-to-date. Accordingly, we have removed the post from our Facebook page.”
We should add another key question: What does SAT and ACT data actually tell us about the connection between collective bargaining rights and student achievement? The answer is a little — but not very much.
Looking only at these six states, there’s a suggestion that lack of collective bargaining rights for teachers is mildly correlated with test scores, even though the linkage is a lot less striking than the Facebook post suggests. Still, it’s impossible to know whether collective bargaining has any role in causing test scores to rise. That’s because countless other demographic, economic and cultural factors play a role in shaping a state’s test scores.
“Most of the states that don’t have teachers’ unions are poorer than Wisconsin and have more English Language Learners in their schools, and rank higher for other demographic factors that make strong academic performance less likely,” Johnston wrote. “Rich kids in a school with a teacher’s union will do better than poor kids in a school without one, generally, but that doesn’t have much to do with the union itself.”
Consider just one statistic — the percentage of residents living below the poverty line. Wisconsin ranked 38th in the nation, similar to Virginia (39th), and well below Texas (8th), South Carolina (9th), Georgia (13th) and North Carolina (15th). The fact that many fewer Wisconsin residents, proportionally, were impoverished almost certainly had an impact in shaping the states’ comparative test results.
This leads me to the question of how does New York City compare in terms of poverty level of its students. According to a recent letter from Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers of New York, “Half the households in our city have incomes of less than $30,000 a year and more than 10 percent live in deep poverty on incomes of $10,500 or less.”
Surely, UFT teachers are working very hard to level the playing field with good curriculum and instruction while, according to Mulgrew, “At the same time, the top 1 percent of city households average $3.7 million each year, or $10,137 a day.” In fact, recent research studies prove that public school teachers are doing more with less funding (compared to charter schools) to educate the city’s children. And the Mayor refuses to tax members of New York’s millionaire club. Instead, he wants to lay off 5,000 teachers next September!
If the Mayor wanted to increase revenue so teachers can keep doing their job all he has to do is renew the millionaire’s tax next year. Mulgrew writes that that move “would bring in $1 billion this year and $5 billion next year.”
What can you do? Call 311 and tell the mayor to say no to layoffs and skyrocketing class sizes. Sign up to participate in the UFT’s growing grassroots campaign at www.uft.org/jointhefight.
