Opinion Blog


Rick Hess Straight Up

Education policy maven Rick Hess of theAmerican Enterprise Institute think tank offers straight talk on matters of policy, politics, research, and reform.Read more from this blog.

School & District Management 宝金博188官方网址

Have School Reopening Decisions Been Driven by Union Influence?

ByRick Hess — April 22, 2021 6 min read
图片显示了一个hittin multi-tailed箭头g the bullseye of a target.
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

In a newstudy ”,学校重新开放决策相关的联盟Influence?,” Corey DeAngelis, the American Federation for Children’s national director of research, argues that reopening decisions are in fact related to teachers’ union strength. A prolific writer, Corey is also the executive director at the Educational Freedom Institute and has been named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list. I recently spoke with Corey about his paper’s findings and its implications for education.

—Rick

Rick:So what got you interested in studying this whole union and reopening question in the first place?

Corey:There was a stark contrast in the response to COVID-19 between school sectors. Private schools were fighting to reopen. Kentucky private schools, for example, took the fight to the U.S. Supreme Court for the right to provide in-person services for their customers when Governor Andy Beshear ordered them to close. Private schools in states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin took similar legal actions. A Catholic private school in Sacramento even rebranded itself as a day care to get around the government’s arbitrary closure rule that applied to schools but not child-care facilities. But so many public school teachers’ unions fought to remain closed for in-person instruction. I also noticed a fascinating preliminaryanalysis by Dr. Jon Valant at the Brookings Institution. He used data from Education Week and found that public school reopening decisions were linked to political partisanship—but not COVID risk—in the surrounding area. That analysis did not include what I believed to be an important part of the story—union influence.

Rick:You’ve been critical of school districts and vocal about the benefits of school choice—tell us a bit about what sparked this way of thinking.

Corey:I attended government-run schools throughout my entire K-12 education, but I had the opportunity to attend a magnet high school. I believe that opportunity had a positive impact on my life trajectory—and I would like all families to have more educational options. During my studies in economics, I started to realize that the main problem with the K-12 school system is the monopoly power generated through residential assignment and guaranteed taxpayer funding. In a sense, the past year has highlighted this problem more than ever. The way that I would put it is that COVID-19 didn’t break the public school system—in many ways, it was already broken. The past year simply shined a light on the main problem with K-12 education in America: a long-existing massive power imbalance between the public school monopoly and individual families.

Rick:OK, let’s talk about your paper—how’d you go about studying whether school reopening decisions are related to union influence?

Corey:We analyzed data on school reopening decisions for over 800 public school districts provided by188竞猜比分 and for over 10,000 public school districts provided byMCH Strategic Data . We used regression analyses to examine the relationship between teachers’ union influence, as measured by four proxies—whether the state had a right-to-work law, Fordham Institute’sstate ranking of teachers’ union strength , the share of unionized employees at the state level, and the share of unionized employees at the county level—and the district’s reopening decision. We were able to control for a robust set of county-level characteristics, such as COVID-19 risk as measured by recent cases and deaths per capita, the share of Trump voters in the 2016 presidential election, household income, educational attainment, and the race and age distributions.

Rick:All right, tell us a bit about your findings.

Corey:我们发现学校在位置和stronger teachers’ unions were substantially less likely to reopen in person even after we controlled for differences in local demographic characteristics. For example, we found that school districts in states without right-to-work laws were about eleven percentage points less likely to fully reopen in person, a forty-four percent reduction relative to the sample mean. Additionally, we found that a ten percent rise in union workers at the county level, and a ten percent increase in union power—as measured by Fordham Institute’s state ranking of teachers’ union strength—were both associated with around a one percentage point decline in the probability of public schools reopening in person. The results were robust to the four measures of union strength, various potential confounding characteristics, a further disaggregation to the county level, and various analytic techniques and data sets. We also found that political partisanship was a strong predictor of reopening decisions, but we did not find consistent evidence that measures of COVID‐19 risk were correlated with reopening schools in person. The keytakeaway is that school reopening has been more about political partisanship and power dynamics than actual safety concerns and the needs of millions of families.

Rick:If someone were to say, “Oh this is just an attack on the unions,” what would you say to them in reply?

Corey:The data speaks for itself. Many public school teachers’ unions have fought to remain closed by moving the reopening goal posts every step of the way. At the same time, the preponderance of theevidence indicates that schools can reopen safely and that preventing families from having the option of in-person instruction has harmed children academically, physically, and mentally.

Rick:All right, so what do you think explains what you’re seeing?

Corey:The main problem is the messed up set of incentives that’s baked into the public school system. It’s arguable that the public school employees are simply rationally reacting to those backward incentives. The monopoly receives children’s education dollars regardless of families’ satisfaction levels, families’ choices, and—as we’ve seen this past year—regardless of whether the schools reopen their doors for business. And the only way that we’re ever going to fix that power imbalance is to fund students directly so that families can access alternatives and provide schools with true bottom-up accountability.

Rick:So does this mean unions are or are not a problem?

Corey:I don’t have a problem with the existence of unions. I wouldn’t have a problem with a strike by Safeway employees, for example. In that scenario, families would be able to vote with their feet and go to Walmart or Trader Joe’s, and Safeway would feel pressure. But when it comes to a public school system without exit options, families are the ones stuck feeling the pain. Funding students directly would solve the problem by empowering families.

Rick:For policymakers, practitioners, or parents who read your piece, what would you encourage them to do?

Corey:一个好的解决方案是允许每个人family to make the in-person versus remote-instruction decision for their own children. A better solution would be to fix the root of the problem—the power imbalance—by allowing every family to take their children’s education dollars to the education provider of their choosing. We already fund students directly when it comes to Pell Grants and the GI Bill for higher education and with pre-K programs such as Head Start. The money goes to students and their families who can choose public or private, religious or nonreligious providers of educational services. The same goes for so many other taxpayer-funded initiatives including food stamps and Medicaid. With all these programs, we fund people instead of buildings. We should apply the same logic to K-12 and fund students instead of institutions. If a grocery store doesn’t reopen, families can take their money elsewhere. If a school doesn’t reopen, families should similarly be able to take their children’s education dollars elsewhere. As a matter of fact, families should be able to take their children’s education dollars elsewhere regardless of the reopening decisions. Education funding is supposed to be meant for educating children—not for protecting a particular institution. We should fund students, not systems.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The opinions expressed in Rick Hess Straight Up are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

Events

This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Privacy & Security Webinar
K-12 Cybersecurity in the Real World: Lessons Learned & How to Protect Your School
Gain an expert understanding of how school districts can improve their cyber resilience and get ahead of cybersecurity challenges and threats.
Content provided byMicrosoft
Student Well-Being Webinar How Social-Emotional Learning Assessments Strengthen Tier 1 MTSS
Learn how districts can integrate effective multi-tiered support systems (MTSS) by using data from high-quality, strengths-based universal SEL assessments.
Equity & Diversity K-12 Essentials Forum Education Equity: Where We Go From Here
Join us for this event with educators and experts on the current state of equity and what comes next.

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

School & District Management Making Time for Academic Recovery in the School Day: Ideas From 3 Principals
Creative uses of lunch hours, advisory periods, and after-school time can help students regain ground.
7 min read
Planning process for the week, scheduling
Natalya Kanishcheva/iStock/Getty
School & District Management How to Reset School District Priorities After a Long First Semester
Consistency about the big-picture focus can be grounding, superintendents say.
3 min read
Image of date planner.
iStock / Getty Images Plus
School & District Management As Illnesses Increase, Some Districts Turn Back to Masking
It’s a proactive move intended to keep kids healthy and in school, leaders say. But it's also likely to be controversial.
3 min read
Photo of child holding mask.
iStock / Getty Images Plus
School & District Management 2 Cities Pursued More School Time for Kids. Only 1 Pulled It Off
Hopewell, Va., schools adopted year-round schooling in 2021. Why was one city able to do the seemingly impossible, while another failed?
8 min read
First grader Amora Speid, left, stretches out during classes at Chimborazo Elementary School Thursday, Nov. 17, 2022, in Richmond, Va. The Richmond school district, which includes Chimborazo elementary, ultimately decided against year-round school.
First grader Amora Speid, left, stretches out during classes at Chimborazo Elementary School in Richmond, Va. The Richmond school district, which includes Chimborazo elementary, ultimately decided against year-round school.
Steve Helber/AP