Anti-Teacher Union Rhetoric Is Not Supported by Test Data
No education reform rock start can get through a few sentences without playing the ”union” card. Walt Gardner makes mince meat of the argument by pointing to those NAEP results they quote so much:
……if teachers unions are responsible for low student achievement, then students in states where teachers unions are weak should do much better than students in states where teachers unions are strong. This is not the case. In Massachusetts and Minnesota, where teachers are heavily unionized, students post the highest scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card. Conversely, in Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, which have few teachers union members and virtually no union contracts, students have the lowest NAEP scores (“Beyond Silver Bullets for American Education,” The Nation, Dec. 22, 2010).
We’ve been finding out that using test data to justify a policy position in education is quite the slippery slope, but it is eduction reformers who have made them matter so much. Its fair to wonder what likely GOP