Over the last few days we have been blessed by numerous Republicans, led by the Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, teaching us about the dangers of public sector unions. In particular, we have been told that teacher's unions are the reason for the lousy education our children are receiving. Now, I have pretty much assumed this was a load of horse shit, but I was actually interested enough to go out, collect some data, and make a chart. Please join me below the "ugly squiggle" (tm Weatherdude) to see my proof, that teachers unions and collective bargaining make for a better education.
A few days ago, I read an excellent diary by Jud Lounsbury calling out Gov. Walker about lies he had made concerning Wisconsin's education ranking. Specifically, Jud called out Walker for selective misrepresentation of the National Assessment of Education Progress Scores. For those who are not familiar, these are the ranking of states generated by those idiotic tests that all states are now required to give their students, seemingly every day that ends in the letter "Y". I don't particularly like those tests, and they certainly are not the best indicator of educational aptitude, but lets use them for our purposes here to roughly rank order the states in terms of educational quality.
Note: You should go to the site and look at the raw data, the rank order is actually a bit misleading. The report indicates which states have statistically higher ranking than others--and not all do. For example, while New Hampshire is rated higher than Vermont in 4th grade reading, that difference is not statistically significant.
About the same time Jud posted his/her diary, TPM posted a map of those states with or without public sector employee unions. They divided up the states into those that require membership in public sector unions, those states that allow unions but do not require membership (i.e., right to work states), and those states that prohibit public sector unions.
I became curious, what is the relationship between public sector unions, collective bargaining, and education. So I mashed up the info from the NAEP Surveys with the information on collective bargaining to see what would pop out. Here I used the NAEP info on 4th grade reading. Here's what I got.
Collective
Rank State Bargaining
1 Massachusetts Required
2 New Jersey Required
3 New Hampshire Required
4 Connecticut Required
5 Vermont Required
7 Virginia Prohibited
8 Maryland Required
9 North Dakota Required
10 Colorado Permissable
11 Florida Required
12 Kentucky Permissable
13 Delaware Required
14 Montana Required
15 Ohio Required
16 New York Required
17 Kansas Required
18 Missouri Permissable
19 Maine Required
20 Pennsylvania Required
21 Minnesota Required
22 Rhode Island Required
23 Indiana Required
24 Wyoming Permissable
25 Nebraska Required
Mid-Point
26 South Dakota Required
27 Iowa Required
28 Washington Required
29 Idaho Required
30 Wisconsin Required
31 North Carolina Prohibited
32 Utah Permissable
33 Illinois Required
34 Texas Prohibited
35 Michigan Required
36 Oregon Required
37 Georgia Prohibited
38 Oklahoma Required
39 Tennessee Required
40 Alabama Permissable
41 Arkansas Permissable
42 South Carolina Prohibited
43 West Virginia Permissable
44 Nevada Required
45 Alaska Required
46 Hawaii Required
47 Mississippi Permissable
48 Arizona Permissable
49 California Required
50 New Mexico Required
51 Louisiana Permissable
52 Dist. of Col. Required
Note:DoD schools omitted from this ranking
While it isn't a perfect correlation, of the top 25 states, one state (Virginia) prohibits public sector unions, and 4 allow unions but do not require membership (right to work). Of the bottom 25 states (and the Dist. of Columbia), 4 states prohibit public sector unions and 7 do not require union membership (right to work). So basically only 5 of the top half limit teacher unions, while 11 in the bottom half do.
So what does this mean? Simply put, they aren't the whole story, but in general, states with public sector unions educate their children better than states without them. No surprise here, but the right wing meme--the right wing assumption--that teacher unions harm education is without merit.
This is not to say that teacher unions are completely necessary to have a good eduction, nor do they guarantee a good education. Virginia has a fairly high ranking in education without teacher unions and New Mexico a fairly lousy education with unions, but on average, be very scared of states that limit unions if you want your child, or any child, to become an educated, fully functioning adult.