For example, AFTie Michelle recently came across a teacher policy paper that my Quick+ED colleague Sara Mead wrote with Andrew Leigh a couple of years ago. Citing research from Caroline Hoxby, the paper posited that:
"collective bargaining agreements that compressed teacher pay scales and eliminated the possibility of performance-based pay for highly effective teachers might have reduced the returns to aptitude in teaching."
This apparently struck Michelle as so on-its-face ridiculous that she wrote a December 26th post with the very not-in-the-holiday-spirit title of "Dumb and Dumber," complaining that this is obviously absurd because...well, just because.
In refutation, she notes that unions helped to improve teacher salaries and working conditions, which is perfectly true, but doesn't address the actual issue at hand: wage compression. She also asserts that the Hoxby article Sara cites wasn't peer reviewed. The comments section suggests that this is wrong, but in any case it's a strange standard for the AFT to start throwing around, given that less than two weeks earlier Michelle was perfectly willing to cite AFT research director Howard Nelson's not-peer-reviewed research on teacher transfer provisions.
Finally, Michelle dismisses the research as "in keeping with Hoxby's dim view of unions," for which she provides a link to another Hoxby paper finding that teachers union policies have had a negative impact on student achievement. In other words, Hoxby's criticisms of union policy cannot be trusted, because she has a documented track record of criticizing union policy.
My point is not to hack on Michelle's sour post as yet another example of the frustrating tendency of teachers unions to characterize all criticisms of union policies as thinly veiled attempts to attack or otherwise undermine the very existence of unions themselves, to see all critiques through the lens of teachers unions' existential struggle...well, okay, that may be partially my point.
But the larger issue here is the way underlying shared assumptions have a huge impact on the way people talk to one another, take in information, and generally see the world. I'm routinely fascinated by the way two reasonable, well-meaning people can look at the same information in a policy debate and reaching diametrically opposite conclusions. The difference (usually) isn't that one person is just stupid or acting in bad faith. It's that they simply have a whole different way of seeing things, different baseline facts and modes of thinking that are very hard to shake.
Different boundaries, in other words. For people who live and breath unionism, the idea that the rise of unions could have been in any way a bad thing is literally beyond the pale. They resent even having to address the issue. The idea--which I personally believe-- that unionism was on balance a big improvement, but came with both pluses and minuses, is outside the confines of polite conversation.
The lesson for advocates and policy entrepreneurs is that if you want to make a real difference in the world, try to figure out where the boundaries are, and move them. It's hard, because people don't like to have their baseline assumptions shaken. It's nice to walk out the door in the morning knowing that some things are true and some things are not, and it feels rude when someone tells you otherwise. But that's where the real potential for change lies--not just telling people what to think but how to think, not just giving them new information but new ways to interprate all kinds of information. Doing so makes people unfcomfortable, and is bound to produce an intemperate blog post or two. But in the long run, it's the policy work most worth doing.
Update: AFTie Michele notes that I've spelled her name wrong throughout the post above. My bad! Clearly, I need to be reading Eduwonk more closely. It's One-L, not two.....
No comments:
Post a Comment