A Whole Bunch of Thoughts on Progressives, Teachers, Unions, and Tests
With about an hour to go before I leave for vacation, I can't resist making one last parry in my ongoing debatewith Matt Yglesias about standardized tests and teacher merit pay.
First, though Matt is a dear friend, I bristle at his suggestion that my positions uncritically echo a pro-union line. Those who read my work regularly will know that I believe there is little evidence for the claim that teachers' unions are the primary barrier preventing the United States from closing the achievement gap or beating Finland and Canada's butts on international assessments. There are simply too many other deep-seeded differeces between those societies' educational systems and our own; what they all share in common is that the teachers within them are unionized. What's more, American states without teacher collective barganing perform worse educationally than those with strong unions. That doesn't mean the unions are responsible for strong academic performance, just that it is doubtful that they are signficantly hindering it.
That said, I carry no water at all for those progressives (and there are not that many of them, by the way) who say there's no use in focusing on school reform until we beat poverty and fix health care, child care, and the like. If I thought that were true, I wouldn't spend so much time reporting on and writing about interesting, innovative educational programs like the Children's Literacy Initiative in Newark or Tech Valley High School in Albany. I do
