Michael Petrilli’s charge that the recent 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 lessons of the elections or the balance of power in education reform. [1]
Let’s begin with a question that challenges Petrilli’s initial claim: If teachers unions are the primary or one of the primary forces at the root of the failures of public education, why do right-to-work states such as my home state of South Carolina (where unions have essentially no power in teachers’ hiring, firing, pay, or tenure) also sit historically and currently at or near the bottom of test data we routinely use to evaluate school quality?
And let’s add another question: Since the most prominent correlations between unionization and student achievement show that unionized states have high test scores and non-unionized states have low test scores, why do self-proclaimed “reformers” such as Petrilli ignore that