Some Thoughts on Teacher Union Bashing

[Time for change]

Teacher union bashing is part of an aggressive effort in the United States to discredit two institutional groups, with the aim of privatizing everything in our country in the interest of corporate profits. Those two groups are labor unions and public servants.

Public servants must be targeted by this movement because they are the public face of government, which must be routinely stereotyped as too incompetent to accomplish anything of value. Labor unions must be targeted because they are one of primary enemies in the corporate class’s war against ordinary Americans. Get labor unions out of the way, and that leaves corporations pretty much free to dictate wages, benefits, and working conditions in their quest for ever greater profits.


The war against teacher’s unions

A recent article in The Nation, “Beyond Silver Bullets – The Problems Facing American Education Demand Solutions, Not Slogans”, by Pedro Nuguera and Randi Weingarten, touch on the war against teacher unions (though they don’t call it by that name):

A manifesto by Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, published in the Washington Post in October, said, “The glacial process for removing an incompetent teacher…has left our school districts impotent and, worse, has robbed millions of children of a real future.” Similarly, articles in Newsweek and Time have singled out teachers unions as the scourge of public schools. The movie Waiting for Superman even suggested that it is because of teachers unions that American students lag behind their peers in other countries.

The article then goes on to note that there is no evidence for negative effects of teacher unions on public education:

Consider this: in states like Massachusetts and Minnesota, where public schools are heavily unionized, students earn the highest scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the standardized exam known as the nation’s report card. In contrast, students in states such as Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, which have few if any teachers union members and virtually no union contracts, have the lowest NAEP scores. What’s more, in almost all the nations that outperform the United States in education, teachers are unionized and teaching is a respected profession.

On our dire need for government programs with strong worker protections

There are many reasons why a wide variety of services should be provided primarily by government rather than by the private sector. I discuss some of those reasons in detail in this post. Here I will stress just one, which is probably the most important: the elimination of the profit motive. Our government is founded upon the principle that ALL government employees, even including the President of the United States, work in the service of the citizens of our country. Making a profit is not the issue. The purpose of all government work is to serve our fellow citizens – at least in theory.

Right wing ideologues hate that philosophy. They believe (or say they believe) that everything operates best according to the principles of the so-called “free market”, which means that the profit motive is the best means of ensuring that government work or any other work is of the highest quality, efficiency, and effectiveness.

The profit motive has a valid place in society. But when it comes to essential services for which competition tends to be stymied through the creation of effective monopolies, the profit motive is absolutely destructive of the goal of providing decent services. We see that principle at work with the health insurance industry – which routinely denies payment for necessary medical care in their quest for profits. We see it at work with the financial industry, which threw us into our worst economic crisis since the Great Depression with their widespread irresponsible gambling and selling of “financial products” that were so complex that nobody could understand them. And we see it with the prison industry, which lobbies our government for ever harsher and more frequent prison sentences – which they use in a multitude of ways, including the use of slave labor, to amass great profits. People who can’t see the inherent conflict of interest between public service and the profit motive need to open their eyes.


Conflict of interest at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

I see that conflict of interest frequently at the FDA, where I work as an epidemiologist. The FDA is supposed to regulate a variety of products, including foods, drugs, medical devices, and vaccines, in the cause of ensuring safety for American consumers. The problem is that lobbyists for the corporations that manufacture these products have gotten their grubby fingers into the pockets of our elected representatives. This results in pressure on the FDA from Congress to go easy on those who we are supposed to regulate, thus resulting in severe conflicts of interest, which might be better termed simply ‘corruption’. The problem was described in a letter that FDA whistleblowers wrote to Congress:

Serious misconduct by managers of the FDA at the Center for Medical Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) is interfering with our responsibility to ensure the safety and effectiveness of medical devices for the American public and with FDA's mission to protect and promote the health of all Americans. Managers at CDRH have failed to follow the laws, rules, regulations and Agency Guidance… They have corrupted the scientific review of medical devices. This misconduct reaches the highest levels of CDRH management…

There is extensive documentary evidence that managers at CDRH have corrupted and interfered with the scientific review of medical devices…. While managers can disagree with FDA experts, they cannot (legally, that is) order, force or otherwise coerce FDA experts to change their scientific judgments, opinions, conclusions or recommendations. Managers at CDRH with no scientific or medical expertise in medical devices, or any clinical experience in the practice of medicine have ignored serious safety and effectiveness concerns of FDA experts…

To avoid accountability, these managers at CDRH have ordered, intimidated and coerced FDA experts to modify their scientific reviews, conclusions and recommendations in violation of the law…

This kind of thing pervades our every day work, even after scandals such as that noted above have been exposed. For example, one of the primary means of evaluating our work is by how quickly we approve the products we are supposed to regulate. Our public mission is not supposed to be to approve the products we regulate. It is supposed to be to evaluate them and then make science-based decisions on whether or not they should be approved. The fact that the top levels of FDA management can’t see that evaluating our work on how quickly we approve products creates an inherent conflict of interest that is destructive to our mission of regulating these products says a lot about how the private sector has insinuated itself and corrupted the workings of our government.


On the effect of teacher unions on public education

The above discussion indicates why it is so important that civil servants have strong job protection, in the form of civil service protections and effective labor unions. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be fired for failure to do their job effectively. What I mean is that it is crucial that those who provide essential public services have protection against arbitrary repression. Those protections are what allowed the FDA whistleblowers to complain to Congress about corruption at the FDA. Our society needs those protections because without them essential public services are easy prey for corporate greed. Essential public services must be provided for the people and by the people – that is, by government, not for private profit.

That is why whenever I read about teacher union bashing I smell a rat. This isn’t about “reform”, as claimed by the right-wingers who bash unions and routinely stereotype government as being “the problem, not the solution”. It’s about eliminating our remaining bulwarks against corporate control of essential services – such as education. Teachers who do their teaching work through private corporations may have the best of intentions. But what about when their teaching goals conflict with their employer’s desire to make a profit? What if those teachers who care most about providing quality education get weeded out of privatized education systems because their goals for their students conflict with the profit motive?

So when I read the above cited article by Nuguera and Weingarten, about high scores on our “nation’s report card” for two states (Minnesota and Massachusetts) that are characterized by a heavily unionized school system, I found that very instructive. But citing a small handful of states doesn’t really make the point. Maybe those states are exceptions to a more general rule. Maybe they were cherry picked by the authors to make a point. It’s impossible to tell unless one evaluates the issue in terms of all 50 U.S. states.


The correlation between teacher unionization and scores on our “nation’s report card”

To assess the correlation, by state, between teacher unionization and scores on the NAEP, I compared 2009 NAEP scores by state with 2007-2008 data on percent unionization of public schools:

% unionization 0-20%: 12 states; average NAEP score 236.2
% unionization 20-90%: 14 states; average NAEP score 238.2
% unionization 90-100%: 24 states; average NAEP score 242.8

The odds of getting that strong of a correlation between percent unionization and NEAP score by chance alone is about 6000 to 1 against.

Another way to assess the correlation is to calculate a correlation coefficient using linear regression analysis. That provides a correlation coefficient of 0.48. The odds against getting that strong of a correlation by chance are in the same neighborhood as the first calculation, described above.

In conclusion, there is a strong and highly statistically significant correlation between percent unionization and NAEP score. It is a positive correlation. That is the opposite of what one would expect from listening to the privatization lobbyists, who always claim that teacher unions rob our children of quality education by forcing our public education system to retain incompetent teachers. It is possible that there are other variables that influence the calculated associations between percent unionization and NAEP score. If that is the case, it is possible that the associations may not be as strong as they appear. But certainly this data provides no evidence whatsoever that teacher unions have a negative effect on educating our children.


Conclusion

Not only is there no evidence for the claim of the corporate privatization lobbyists that teacher unions hinder the education of our children, but analysis of test scores in the 50 U.S. states suggest precisely the opposite: The more unionized the state the better its test scores. It is not surprising that the corporate privatizers are wrong. They don’t get paid their fat salaries for telling the truth. They get paid on the basis of how convincingly they can tow the corporate line.

Perhaps a reason for better test scores in the highly unionized states is that tenured teachers who belong to unions, having better job security than those who do not, have more freedom to teach their students in accordance with the principles they’ve acquired through many long years of teaching. Or maybe it’s because unionized teachers on average have more experience than non-unionized teachers. Whatever the exact reason, the main point is that there is no evidence whatsoever to support the argument that unionization of teachers is bad for our children.

Education of our children is an essential service. It is essential for the long-term welfare of our country, as well as the welfare of our country’s children. Like health care, our prison system, our police, our military, and many other kinds of essential public services, public education of our children should not be left to the good graces of private for-profit corporations. Everyone knows – or should know – that the number one goal of any for-profit corporation is to make a profit. The first priority is NOT the education of our children. Nuguera and Weingarten conclude that the starting point for education reform in our country should be:

substantive and constructive debate. Any such effort must engage parents as partners in the educational process and enlist the broad public and key social institutions (including foundations, hospitals, churches and nonprofits). Only through such partnerships can children be assured access to social workers, psychologists, healthcare, mentors and the other forms of social and emotional support that are known to be vital to healthy development. Most important, we must take steps to ensure that the “public” remains part of public education. This includes building transparency into the way schools are financed and managed, and engaging in open discussion and debate about what it will take to ensure that all students receive the education they need and deserve.

And in the cause of constructive debate, don’t let the privatizers get away with their lies. Challenge them to document their assertions. Unverified assertions and lies have no role in constructive debate.