Does cutting the power of teacher unions, cutting teacher salaries and reducing tenure and seniority rights— all ingredients in the conservative recipe for educational success—make for better education? Let’s take a look at Wisconsin, one of the country’s experiments in conservative governance.
In 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed a bill that reduced the bargaining rights of K-12 teachers as well as other government employees. It also prohibited payroll deductions for union dues. Teachers and other state employees could still bargain over their pay, but they couldn’t bargain over other benefits, hours or conditions of employment. The amount the state contributed to health care and retirement plans decreased.
That same year, Wisconsin’s K-12 spending was cut by seven percent. The idea was, teachers would absorb the cuts with their lowered compensation, so the children would get the same education at a lower cost, while lack of seniority, tenure and other teacher protections would allow the state to get rid of underperforming teachers.
How has it all worked out? In 2016, teacher compensation was down 12.6 percent. The decrease is mostly in the form of lowered benefits, but a salary cut is a salary cut. If teachers have to spend more of their pay on health care and retirement, that means their take-home pay takes a significant hit. The number of teachers moving from district to district increased, with more experienced teachers moving from lower income to higher income districts which could pay more. Rural districts were especially hard hit by the teacher drain, which led to an increase in the number of low-experience teachers.
In terms of test scores, in high income districts which made up for the loss of state funds with local revenues, student scores either remained stable or increased. Scores in lower income districts decreased.
It looks a whole lot like the Wisconsin legislature cut teachers’ rights and school funding at the expense of teachers in low income areas and the children they serve. Teachers in higher income areas were held harmless if the community replaced the funds cut by the state, and their children performed at least as well as they did before. In fact, high income areas probably benefited because they were able to lure some the best teachers from other districts with more attractive salary packages.
Cut state funding, hurt lower income areas and help upper income areas. No doubt, Walker and his fellow fiscal conservatives must be patting themselves on the back for a job well done.
Note: My information comes from a study by the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. All studies should be looked at with a healthy dose of skepticism, and that holds true for this one as well. By its own admission, the study is at its best in its discussions of the 2011 law and its effects on teachers. The analysis of the effects on student achievement are based on information pulled together from a number of academic studies whose results generally agree but have to be considered tentative because they have not yet been peer reviewed.
This article appears in Nov 16-22, 2017.
Republicans do not consider a good education essential for their supporters. In fact a sub-par education is what they prefer to keep their mindless base mindless. It isn’t as easy to dupe your followers if they have at least two brain cells that work together.Maybe this could explain why there are so few Republican conservatives teaching in colleges and universities other than those religious campuses where the only two requirements are that you denounce all other religions and say the lords prayer before class, before a meal, before a game, and before you go to sleep.
Correct. A poorly education population is easier to dupe, ergo our current GOP takeover…but not for long. We are waking up.
So why would a person from Tucson get on their high horse about Wisconsin’s spending and school policy when Arizona’s is a heck of a lot lower. Political axe to grind comes to mind.
http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html
Wisconsin in FY 2010 $12,338 down to FY 2014 to $11,186 a 9.3% decrease. Then the last two biennia an uptick followed by an upsurge.
Compare that to Arizona:
Arizona in FY 2010 $8,520 down to FY 2014 to $7,528 an 11.6% decrease. No data available on the last two years in this chart.
There are very few times that I’ll ever say this in an official email, but I’m going to say it now, “Bite me”, and it’s directed to the disingenuous writer of this article
Make it a Happy Thanksgiving!
WI State Representative Bob Kulp
what makes you think that just because david safier is from arizona that that alone means that he approves of our state’s spending on education. if you took the time to read what he’s written you’d know he does want more money in this state’s spending. https://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/arch…
bite yourself
A friend has been ranting that, ‘throwing money at the problem isn’t going to solve it’ – for many years now. But all of a sudden, when vouchers became available (to the rich), he’s willing to try ANYTHING to improve education. Even throwing money at it.
And to Wisconsin State Representative, up your nose with a rubber hose.
That said, it is past time for teachers and their union representatives to acknowledge they are on the wrong side of history. Unionism is dying the slow death of attrition with the remaining membership nearly exclusively members of publicly supported workplaces. They are too easy a mark.
Public sector employees need a new business plan and new tactics to survive, much less prosper as their livelihoods become even more precarious. They are getting their asses kicked nationally and as the last election showed, they are being taken less seriously as a reliable bloc of supporters.
Times are changing way too fast. Einstein was right. Get your collective acts together.
In a context like the current one, where Walker, Brownback, Ducey and their ilk are gunning for worker protections and universal education, would it be possible for the left to unite behind concepts like human dignity, solidarity in pursuing the common good, workers rights to a just share in the fruits of economic gain their labor produces, and the duty of caring for the needy? Probably not, given the way the left has been behaving since November 2016. Peter Steinfels has a good essay on the topic in the most recent issue of Commonweal. It is entitled, Watching the Left Castrate Itself: A Lesson?
Some interesting questions for the anti-voucher camp to contemplate in their spare time, when theyre not busy running divisive campaigns like SOS that limit the ability of the disadvantaged to access good education: what is the largest membership organization in the world, whose leader has recently spoken openly and repeatedly about the dangers of unregulated capitalism and failing to structure society to protect the needy? What role has this organization played in educating millions of people to be effective advocates for human dignity, the common good, just wages, and concern for the poor and the oppressed? What are you actually doing when your policy initiatives undermine and economically penalize this organizations educational institutions? Cf. the Steinfels article hes got exactly the right figurative language to describe it.
Let’s look at both 2011 and 2015 8th grade math data to examine two questions. 1) Does the higher spending by Wisconsin give them an advantage over Arizona? 2) Did Wisconsin score different in 2015 than they did in 2011?
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is the Gold standard by which such questions are answered.
Arizona Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics outscored Wisconsin Whites, Blacks and Hispanics and the differences were statistically significant for all but the White scores. So, no, their higher spending doesn’t give them an advantage over us.
Wisconsin Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics outscored the nation by 2, -8, and 0 points in 2011. In 2015, they outscored the nation by 6, -10 and -1 points. Only the shift in the White score was statistically significant. The only evidence we have is that White students in Wisconsin improved relative to the nation.
You have a campfire story to build a mythology. It may be true, it may not be true. Who knows?
Hmmm, it appears that Mr. Kulp from WI uses the same debate methology as 45 which includes: ‘who says?’, ‘make me’, and ‘so what?’
“Hmmm, it appears that Mr. Kulp from WI uses the same debate methodology as 45 which includes: ‘who says?’, ‘make me’, and ‘so what?'”
I think I detected a fair number of facts in Mr. Kulp’s comments along with the spice of a little snark.
Maybe the fact base applies to 45 also.
I re-read a few of Diane Ravitch’s anti-privatization articles in the New York Review of Books, trying once again to give the “anti-privatization” camp’s arguments a fair hearing.
Here are some representative quotes:
***”The motives for the privatization movement are various. Some privatizers have an ideological commitment to free-market capitalism; they decry public schools as ‘government schools,’ hobbled by unions and bureaucracy. Some are certain that schools need to be run like businesses, and that people with business experience can manage schools far better than educators. Others have a profit motive, and they hope to make money in the burgeoning ‘education industry.’ The adherents of the business approach oppose unions and tenure, preferring employees without any adequate job protection and merit pay tied to test scores. They never say, ‘We want to privatize public schools.’ They say, ‘We want to save poor children from failing schools.'”
***”Most of those who support privatization are political conservatives.”
***”Privatization divides communities and diminishes commitment to that which we call the common good.”
When, as David Safier has pointed out in previous posts, the largest beneficiary of voucher policy in this region (and, I would add, in other regions as well) is a well-established, non-profit, academically viable network of schools that has been one of the strongest and most effective promoters of commitment to the COMMON GOOD, compassion for the disadvantaged, and support of social welfare programs, the above quotes look misleading and disingenuous at best. You cannot provide a fair analysis of the so-called “PRIVATIZATION” movement in education, which includes vouchers that attempt to eliminate economic discrimination against taxpayers utilizing Catholic schools, without even referring to the Catholic school system, its values, and its characteristics in your analysis.
Here are some quotes from (female) graduates of one of the many academically excellent Jesuit institutions in this country:
“My…education…made me feel that I have some large obligation to help those less fortunate than I. I am currently teaching physics to inner city kids in Baton Rouge.”
“I am a much more socially concerned person than I might have been if I had gone to another school…I have chosen a career that many question because of the salary I’ll receive, teaching. Many can not comprehend my motivation, which is a desire to help others, particularly children.”
“I am currently an Assistant District Attorney…and I feel my commitment to public service started with my family, but was enhanced by my time [as a student at a Jesuit school].”
“The Jesuit idea of service, along with my past experiences with my family and my work at the soup kitchen, influenced me deeply. My first job after school was as a community organizer in a Hispanic, impoverished neighborhood near my home. I am now studying to be a teacher and hope to teach in the inner city.”
“I think [the Jesuit school I attended] did an excellent job in preparing me, both academically and socially, for medical school and ultimately for becoming an educated, compassionate physician.”
So no, Diane Ravitch et al., the voucher component of the evil PRIVATIZATION campaign you rail against does not necessarily “diminish commitment to that which we call the common good.” If the schools which inspired the above expressions from graduates had received public funding, it could easily be said that this particular application of public funding BUILT commitment to the common good rather than diminishing it. The way Ravitch and her followers refuse to include discussion of — or even to acknowledge the existence of — the Catholic community’s significant, ongoing contribution to serving THE COMMON GOOD and, at several key points in American history, INCREASING support for unions and liberal economic and social policy raises some large and troubling questions about the motives for and quality of their analysis of the American education scene. Public support of Catholic schools through vouchers is a separate policy issue from other policy initiatives that some try to chain it to: e.g., de-funding, union busting initiatives and punitive testing in public schools. There are certainly conservative politicians who have attended Catholic schools who choose to set aside whatever they may have learned about the common good (Paul Ryan comes to mind), but there are also many distinguished liberal politicians whose Catholic schooling form part of the basis for their liberal social and economic policy: Tip ONeill. Joe Biden. Tim Kaine. Catholic school graduates who didn’t, a la Paul Ryan, later discard what they had learned at school in favor of devotion to Friedman, Hayek, and Ayn Rand are among the strongest supporters of universal education, concern for the poor, and adequate funding for schools.
(Cf. Ryan being asked, by a nun, to explain his conspicuous departures from the Churchs social teachings. His response is not persuasive to anyone who has read and understood the social encyclicals)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EvvaCijQLTM
Bottom line: What’s divisive and crippling to building the strongest possible base behind liberal economic policy is not voucher initiatives, but the bigoted assumption that it is only PUBLIC DISTRICT SCHOOLS that can properly build support of THE COMMON GOOD. For the past year it has been painful to watch the “left’s” bungling. Their misguided self-righteous, secularist identity politics and false analyses of a complex and pluralistic American education scene are disastrous in a context where worker rights are swiftly and effectively being mowed down by a unified, well-organized, extremely well funded group of libertarian corporatists. Meanwhile, the left, in the school funding policy it promotes, makes enemies of those who could be its strongest allies, disastrously laming the labor-supportive economic agenda they say they are trying to save.
Sad.