Mike's post about teachers unions and education reform in Massachusetts really seems to have struck a nerve; we have run four follow-up posts, each highlighting other people's opinions on this issue. Missed the debate? Here's the most recent Flypaper post on this subject.
It has attracted attention from outside this blog, too.??Stephen Sawchuk of??EdWeek's "Teacher Beat" blog added his thoughts, excerpted below:
I've been to enough education policy discussions to recognize two common tropes on this topic. One argument runs along these lines: Student achievement tends to be lowest in the South, which has many right-to-work states that don't allow collective bargaining for public employees. The other argument, which is at the center of the Flypaper debate, notes that the nation's highest-performing state on national tests, Massachusetts, has laws and policies that are generally favorable to unions.
Leo Casey at EdWize wrote a thoughtful post that defends Diane Ravitch's point of view more than Jay Greene's. He concluded his post with the following:
For reasons I will take up in a subsequent post, I think there are good reasons to be skeptical about all broad stroke generalizations about teacher unionism and educational achievement, whatever the scholarly apparatus supporting them. But if you think that the scholarly literature on the subject is a guide, it clearly comes down in a place quite different from that suggested by Greene: this is a movie we have seen many times before.
Jay responded to Casey's comments about the quality of research Greene was citing, saying:
Leo's claim hinges entirely on what ???scholarly literature??? means and whether all ???studies??? should be treated equally.?? For example, I could claim that the scholarly literature shows that candy improves student achievement, citing as scholarly literature papers written by my 5th grade son and friends whose research design involved describing how smart they felt after eating candy.
Finally, the Pioneer Institute directed its readers to the "smart debate" here at Flypaper, where??Jim Stergios is right to say that Mike's original post "has attracted thoughtful contributions and some sharp elbows." Thanks to everyone for their insightful comments and for noticing this interesting and important issue.