With all due respect towards my former CUNY peeps, there is something wrong on the Internet and I won't be able to function unless I add my two cents.
Scott Lemieux passes along some info from my old stats professor, Ken Sherrill. Sherrill points out that the worst performing states in education don't have collective bargaining rights. Sherrill doesn't really say that collective bargaining rights leads to better schools, but it's implied. Lemieux says that this information shows that crushing the unions won't make the schools better.
There is no evidence that strong unions lead to better school performance. Strong unions are all in Northern states, which have a higher SES, stronger state government, and a whole slew of other significant factors for schools. Urban areas, which have perhaps the strongest unions, have the worst school performance.
I'm not arguing against collective bargaining rights. We just need to come up with a better reason to support it.
Apt. 11d 
There’s a better review of the data available and I find it quite persuasive.
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The update at your link (especially the link in it) basically says what Laura says in the post.
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CA, WA, OR also have strong unions (don’t know how the CA & OR compare to the NE, but I think WA’s are pretty robust).
I don’t know how their school stats rank up.
I’ll admit to an ideological acceptance of an analysis that more powerful teachers means better education. Kind of like he empirical result that empowering women helps children in developing countries.
Of course, the teachers can use their power exclusively for themselves. But, not infrequently, even that narrow analysis results can result in better outcomes for children (i.e. smaller class sizes). And, many teachers (like mothers) often use that power for the benefit of the children under their care. Finally, when individual parents are asking for extra work to help their individual child, they’re often ignoring the long term and horizontal health of the system, so I’m generally unsympathetic to that local argument.
But, I should look at the data.
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It says something, at least, to say that it’s very implausible that collective bargaining rights damage educational outcomes.
The arguments for collective bargaining rights are about the workers’ interests — if it’s possible to serve those interests without hurting the kids they teach, that (in broad strokes) seems like a good enough reason to support collective bargaining.
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“It says something, at least, to say that it’s very implausible that collective bargaining rights damage educational outcomes.”
Yeah. I think there’s no relationship at all between collective bargaining rights and good or bad outcomes.
I’m not sure why the teachers’ unions would even want to hint that they were related to good outcomes, because they are usually trying to distance themselves from outcomes. They usually fight against the notion that teachers’ salaries should be tied to outcomes, especially in urban areas, because they say that they can do little to help poor kids in rough neighborhoods.
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Here’s another issue–collective bargaining may be bad for teachers themselves, in that they are able to exact promises of pie in the sky by and by (in the form of pensions, etc.) that local governments cannot realistically follow through on.
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Maryland has collective bargaining. Maryland has one of the top education systems in the country. Maryland is one of the richest states in the country and consistently as some of the richest counties in the country. I’m not sure the first fact is as important as the third and fourth, in relation to the second.
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“But, I should look at the data.”
Hey, come on, this is the internet! You don’t have to look at the data. I never do.
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It says something, at least, to say that it’s very implausible that collective bargaining rights damage educational outcomes.
How?
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Caroline Hoxby found that unionization tends to lower student achievement: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/fichiers/enseig/ecoineg/articl/Hoxby1996.pdf
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In reply to Krugman, Iowahawk has produced a very nice analysis here of NAEP scores, broken down by ethnicity:
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html
“To recap: white students in Texas perform better than white students in Wisconsin, black students in Texas perform better than black students in Wisconsin, Hispanic students in Texas perform better than Hispanic students in Wisconsin. In 18 separate ethnicity-controlled comparisons, the only one where Wisconsin students performed better than their peers in Texas was 4th grade science for Hispanic students (statistically insignificant), and this was reversed by 8th grade. Further, Texas students exceeded the national average for their ethnic cohort in all 18 comparisons; Wisconsinites were below the national average in 8, above average in 8.
“Perhaps the most striking thing in these numbers is the within-state gap between white and minority students. Not only did white Texas students outperform white Wisconsin students, the gap between white students and minority students in Texas was much less than the gap between white and minority students in Wisconsin. In other words, students are better off in Texas schools than in Wisconsin schools – especially minority students.”
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