Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

How is it that teachers’ unions can spend so much money and devote so much energy to get-out-the-vote efforts for any kind of election except their own?

The election for the presidency of the Washington Teachers Union included candidates with truly different views on policy, who genuinely disliked each other, and who had opposing positions on the DC teachers’ contract. AFT national HQ was heavily involved, and the campaign received steady press from the Washington Post, which means national attention.

The results? A runoff, after only 881 votes were mailed in from an estimated electorate of 4,200. The 21 percent turnout was actually pretty standard for union elections. Check out some past figures from Los Angeles, Colorado and elsewhere (item #6).

If gaining the support of 12 percent of eligible voters is enough to get you elected president of the DC or Los Angeles teachers’ union, one wonders why more people don’t take a whack at it.

The Buffalo school district may have laid off 44 teachers this year, but some of the ones who are left are much improved, thanks to almost $9 million in taxpayer-funded cosmetic surgery they received in accordance with a provision in the collective bargaining agreement.

“The only reason it’s still there is because the board hasn’t agreed to a new contract with us,” said Buffalo Teachers Federation president Phil Rumore. “If anybody is responsible for there still being a cosmetic surgery rider, the board is.”

Rumore also had this to say to WRGZ-TV:

Maybe we could find a way to hook up the Buffalo teachers and the Milwaukee teachers.

After having its much-lauded contract voted down by the rank-and-file, the Baltimore Teachers Union has responded by… presenting virtually the same contract again. This isn’t sitting too well with some of the people who opposed it the first time:

“The major reason we wanted a delay in the vote was for the democratic process and to have these details,” said Robin Bingham, a teacher who started an electronic petition against the contract until the evaluation system is complete. “I feel it’s really disrespectful to dress up the same contract and present it again.”

The BTU campaign to get the thing approved this time seems to consist of “regional information sessions for its members with the American Federation of Teachers” and schmoozing sessions with building reps (who already have a plum in the new contract). This, from Teacher Beat:

Now, the word on the street from sources is that the district and union have essentially finalized a second (tentative) pact—and that the BTU was essentially shopping it to its unions’ building representatives today during a four-hour meeting.

“They had us all over, had us released from school, they fed us an entire meal, chicken, all this stuff, and gave us a gift at the end and sent us off with the ‘newly revised’ contract,” a source told me this afternoon.

I’ve sworn off predicting the outcome of contract ratification votes, but I’ll be waiting to see if these tactics work.

That’s what one union official told Politico about supporting Democratic candidates who didn’t fully back the labor agenda in the last Congress.

Click here to read:

1) NEA Loses 34,500 Members

2) NEA to Spend $2.5 Million on ESEA Reauthorization Campaign

3) Last Week’s Intercepts

4) Quote of the Week

Today’s The Answer Sheet features a column by Matthew Di Carlo of the Shanker Institute wherein he compares the NAEP math and reading scores of states “with binding teacher contracts” to states without. He finds the contract states to have scores an average of 2.65 points higher.

He concludes this way:

If anything, it seems that the presence of teacher contracts in a state has a positive effect on achievement.

Now, some may object to this conclusion. They might argue that I can’t possibly say that teacher contracts alone caused the higher scores in these states. They might say that there are dozens of other observed and unobserved factors that influence achievement, such as state laws, lack of resources, income, parents’ education, and curriculum, and that these factors are responsible for the lower scores in the 10 non-contract states.

My response: Exactly.

Di Carlo isn’t comfortable claiming flat out that collective bargaining increases student test scores, but emphasizes that the opposite argument – the absence of teacher contracts would benefit test scores – lacks evidence. In his follow-up blog post, Di Carlo delves deeper into the numbers, and finds:

Finally, in all four models, the association between scores and whether or not states have binding contracts is not statistically significant at any conventional level (even at the 90% confidence level).  So, while this analysis is far from conclusive, I certainly find no evidence that teacher union contracts are the among the biggest reasons why achievement is low, as Davis Guggenheim and countless others imply (see here and here for more thorough analyses, which actually show small positive benefits of unions).

It’s going to be difficult for some to resist the temptation to argue about what effect, if any, teacher contracts have on student test scores from state to state, but it entirely misses the salient point that the purpose of teacher contracts is not, and never has been, to increase student test scores. In states with collective bargaining, contracts define the salaries, benefits and working conditions of public education employees. Since compensation accounts for upwards of 80% of all public school expenditures, we might learn something about the “real effect of teachers’ union contracts” if we compare per-pupil spending in states with binding teacher contracts to states without. Here, I use U.S. Census Bureau figures for 2007-08:

Average per-pupil spending in AL, AR, AZ, GA, LA, MS, NC, SC, TX, and VA – $8,904

Average per-pupil spending in the other 40 states and DC – $10,745

Stating there is no significant difference between bargaining and non-bargaining states when it comes to student achievement is not a winning argument for unions. We pay a 20.7% premium to have unions. Isn’t the onus on them to demonstrate their worth to students, parents and taxpayers?

The Wall Street Journal provides this overall picture of campaign spending by interest groups…

…while state-by-state reports flesh out the details:

* Oregon - ”With OEA ad campaign, union help for Kitzhaber tops $2 million”

* Tennessee – “Teachers union bets big bucks on Democrats”

* North Carolina - ”Only 13 House candidates have seen more spent against them than Republican Harold Johnson in the 8th District, according to the center for Responsive Politics. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Education Association have spent nearly $1.9 million against him.”