What real school reform looks like
Michael Petrilli’s recent charge on the Observer’s Opinion page that the elections confirm “[t]eachers unions remain the Goliath to the school reformers’ David” is neither a brave claim to make in a paper serving a right-to-work area of the U.S., nor an accurate portrayal of the balance of power in education reform.
First, a question: If teachers unions are the primary causes of public education failures, why do right-to-work states such as my home state of South Carolina also sit historically and currently near the bottom of test data we routinely use to evaluate school quality?
Also: Since the most prominent correlations between unionization and student achievement show that unionized states have high test scores and non-unionized states have low ones, why do reformers such as Petrilli ignore that school quality data are primarily reflections of poverty and affluence?
In part, the answers reveal union bashing, “bad” teacher refrains, and finger pointing at the