Shanker Blog

Free Labor In A Hostile World

Our guest author today is Arch Puddington, director of research at Freedom House. The Global State of Workers’ Rights: Free Labor in a Hostile World, the Albert Shanker Institute-supported report he cites below, is available here. A "Map of Workers’ Rights," depicting its findings is here. 

This month marks the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of Solidarity, the independent trade union movement that played so crucial a role in the collapse of Communist rule in Poland and ultimately everywhere else where it held sway. Solidarity emerged from a series of spontaneous strikes called by workers at the shipbuilding yards of Poland’s Baltic coast cities. It quickly spread throughout the country, pulling in workers from steel works, textile mills, and coal mines. Soon, the working class was joined by the intellectual opposition, a loose movement of academics and former student activists that had been gathering momentum as the corruption of the Communist system became increasingly apparent. 

Solidarity thus quickly evolved into a broad movement for democracy, with a free-wheeling press, a diplomatic apparatus, and close ties to Poland’s influential Catholic Church. It was, however, the support of Poland’s huge working class that ensured Solidarity’s staying power. Where Communist regimes had faced down opposition stirrings among students and intellectuals in the past, it had never been confronted by an adversary as large, disciplined, and well-organized as Solidarity came to be.  

It’s worth mentioning during this U.S. Labor Day period that U.S. unions, led by individuals such as AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland and AFT President Al Shanker (from whom this blog is named), among many others, were Solidarity’s staunchest supporters in the U.S.

Does Language Shape Thought?

Do the words we use frame the thoughts that we have? And, if so, does the language we speak affect how we think?

It turns out that linguists and cognitive scientists have been going back and forth on this issue for years. There is a fascinating article on the subject in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine (which I’m only now getting around to reading). It’s a piece by Guy Deutscher, an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester, and author of a forthcoming book, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.

First popularized in the 1940s, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity "seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think." The lack of a future and past tense in a given language, for example, was supposed to limit some speakers’ ability to comprehend the concepts of future and past.

Although such ethnocentric and romantic aspects of the theory have been totally discredited, new research does suggest that language can have an effect on both thought and perception. For example, it has recently "been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue." As it turns out, different languages "carve up the spectrum of visible light" in different ways, with, for instance, many languages considering blue and green to be variations of the same color. And, astonishingly, "our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language." So, "as strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue."

Help The Economy: Put A Teacher's Aide In Every Classroom

Economist Robert Shiller (co-creator of the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, an essential tool for investors and economists) has an interesting idea for stimulating the economy: Put a teacher’s aide in every classroom.

Why? As reported by the Wall Street Journal, "Not only would it employ millions, but it would be good for the children," who would benefit from "the extra attention of another person."

Shiller is regarded as one of the most important economists today. The Arthur M. Okun professor of economics at Yale University and professor of finance at the Yale School of Management, he forewarned about both the dot.com bust and the housing bubble. For years, he criticized the so-called efficient markets model of economics, which many today cite as a key driver of the policies that led to the financial crisis. He is also the author of many books, including, Irrational Exuberance in 2000, which warned that the peaking real estate and stock markets were in bubble territory.

Shiller is worried about today’s economy. He estimates that the likelihood of a double-dip recession is growing and that we are "teetering" on the brink of a dangerous deflationary spiral. What to do?

The Test-Based Language Of Education

A recent poll on education attitudes from Gallup and Phi Delta Kappan got a lot of attention, including a mention on ABC’s "This Week with Christian Amanpour," which devoted most of its show to education yesterday. They flashed results for one of the poll’s questions, showing that 72 percent of Americans believe that "each teacher should be paid on the basis of the quality of his or her work," rather than on a "standard-scale basis."

Anyone who knows anything about survey methodology knows that responses to questions can vary dramatically with different wordings (death tax, anyone?). The wording of this Gallup/PDK question, of course, presumes that the "quality of work" among teachers might be measured accurately. The term "teacher quality" is thrown around constantly in education circles, and in practice, it is usually used in the context of teachers’ effects on students’ test scores (as estimated by various classes of "value-added" models).

But let’s say the Gallup/PDK poll asked respondents if "each teacher should be paid on the basis of their estimated effect on their students’ standardized test scores, relative to other teachers." Think the results would be different? Of course. This doesn’t necessarily say anything about the "merit" of the compensation argument, so to speak, nor does it suggest that survey questions should always emphasize perfect accuracy over clarity (which would also create bias of a different sort). But has anyone looked around recently and seen just how many powerful words, such as "quality," are routinely used to refer to standardized test score-related measures? I made a tentative list.

The Cost Of Success In Education

Many are skeptical of the current push to improve our education system by means of test-based “accountability” - hiring, firing, and paying teachers and administrators, as well as closing and retaining schools, based largely on test scores. They say it won’t work. I share their skepticism, because I think it will.

There is a simple logic to this approach: when you control the supply of teachers, leaders, and schools based on their ability to increase test scores, then this attribute will become increasingly common among these individuals and institutions. It is called “selecting on the dependent variable," and it is, given the talent of the people overseeing this process and the money behind it, a decent bet to work in the long run.

Now, we all know the arguments about the limitations of test scores. We all know they’re largely true. Some people take them too far, others are too casual in their disregard. The question is not whether test scores provide a comprehensive measure of learning or subject mastery (of course they don’t). The better question is the extent to which teachers (and schools) who increase test scores a great deal are imparting and/or reinforcing the skills and traits that students will need after their K-12 education, relative to teachers who produce smaller gains. And this question remains largely unanswered.

This is dangerous, because if there is an unreliable relationship between teaching essential skills and the boosting of test scores, then success is no longer success. And by selecting teachers and schools based on those scores, we will have deliberately engineered our public education system to fail in spite of success.

It may be only then that we truly realize what we have done.

Selling The State

In a recent post, we discussed the explosive growth in privatization of public services, including one town that recently privatized everything and everybody. Along similar lines, this week, the Wall Street Journal published a story about desperate state and local governments, squeezed by declining revenues, selling or leasing public property to private interests. The reporter notes:

Cities and states across the nation are selling and leasing everything from airports to zoos—a fire sale that could help plug budget holes now but worsen their financial woes over the long run.

The notion that we should cede public services to the private sector has assumed the status of quasi-religious dogma in recent years. There was a brief time during the earlier, more dire days of the current recession during which many began to question this market fundamentalism. Such dissent continues in some circles today. But you wouldn’t know it looking at actual policy.

Things may even be getting worse. Cash-strapped governments have stepped up efforts in a new area: privatization of public assets.

Accountability For Us, No Way; We're The Washington Post

In his August 4th testimony before the Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Government Accountability Office (GAO) official Gregory D. Kutz offered an earful of scandalous stories about how for-profit, post-secondary institutions use misrepresentation, fraud, and generally unethical practices to tap the federal loan and grant-making trough. One of these companies, so says the Washington Post itself, is Kaplan Inc, a profit-making college that contributes a whopping amount to the paper’s bottom line (67 percent of the Washington Post Company’s $92 million in second quarter earnings, according to the Washington Examiner; 62 percent according to the Post’s Ombudsman Andrew Alexander).

One might assume that the Post's deep financial involvement in Kaplan Inc. would prompt its editorial board to recuse itself from comment on new proposed federal regulations designed to correct the problems. Instead of offering "point-counterpoint" op-eds on this issue, this bastion of journalistic integrity has launched a veritable campaign in support of its corporate education interests, and offered up its op-ed page to education business allies. It is a sad and disappointing chapter in the history of this once-great institution.

Youth Unemployment: A Global Concern

The global economic crisis may be leading to a deep sense of despair among the world’s youth, warns the International Labor Organization (ILO) in a just- released report (see here and here) – with potentially damaging social and economic consequences for us all.

Youth unemployment is at its highest level since the agency began tracking it in 1991, the ILO reported, noting that among other impacts “…[i]n many countries with stagnant economies and poor prospects for productive employment, [young people are drawn to] religious sects, secular ideologies and revolutionary movements."

Although the report cites disaffected Nepalese youth and their growing attraction to Maoism, most Americans will probably be more interested in how this issue plays out in the Middle East and North Africa. That region is currently experiencing an unprecedented "youth bulge," with young people between the ages of 15 and 29 accounting for over 30 percent of the overall population, some 20 percent or more (for some countries, the estimates are over 45 percent) of whom are unemployed. Under the circumstances, the danger of a rise in radical Islamist extremism can’t be overstated – especially since, as the ILO notes, the figures for sub-Saharan Africa don’t adequately reflect the extent and extremity of the region’s poverty and lack of government services.

Data-Driven Decisions, No Data

According to an article in yesterday’s Washington Post, the outcome of the upcoming D.C. mayoral primary may depend in large part on gains in students’ “test scores” since Mayor Adrian Fenty appointed Michelle Rhee to serve as chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools (DCPS).

That struck me as particularly interesting because, as far as I can tell, Michelle Rhee has never released any test scores to the public. Not an average test score for any grade level or for any of the district’s schools or any subgroup of its students. None.

What About Curriculum Effects?

Our guest author today is Barak Rosenshine, emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Bill Gates, the Los Angeles Times, and others have argued that teachers should be held accountable for the achievement of their students. This has led to heated debates over the validity and proper use of value added statistical measures. But no one seems to be talking about curriculum effects. What if an excellent teacher is in a school that has selected a curriculum for mathematics or for reading that isn’t very good. How accountable should the teacher be in those circumstances?