It was bound to happen, whether in Chicago or elsewhere. What is surprising about the Chicago teachers’ strike is that something like this did not happen sooner.

The strike represents the first open rebellion of teachers nationwide over efforts to evaluate, punish and reward them based on their students’ scores on standardized tests of low-level basic skills in math and reading. Teachers’ discontent has been simmering now for a decade, but it took a well-organized union to give that discontent practical expression. For those who have doubts about why teachers need unions, the Chicago strike is an important lesson.

Nobody can say how widespread discontent might be. Reformers can certainly point to teachers who say that the pressure of standardized testing has been useful, has forced them to pay attention to students they previously ignored, and could rid their schools of lazy and incompetent teachers.

But I frequently get letters from teachers, and speak with teachers across the country who claim to have been successful educators and who are now demoralized by the transformation of teaching from a craft employing skill and empathy into routinized drill instruction using scripted curriculum.Read more

Rebecca Mead understands what too many of my friends do not. In an excellent blog post for the New Yorker, Mead warns that the neo-liberal education “reform” movement is not primarily about improving educational opportunities for poor, urban minority students. It’s about breaking teachers unions.

Chicago is currently ground zero for the so-called reformers, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel is their latest champion, picking up the same cudgel that Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee wielded in New York and Washington, D.C. Emanuel has provoked a strike by 29,000 school teachers, refusing to settle unless the teachers’ union gives in to high stakes testing.

Rhee once admitted that she would be happy to see the entire D.C. school system turned over to private charter schools, and my guess is that Emanuel feels the same way about Chicago. Chicago’s public school teachers, who devote their lives to the education of the city’s poor, mostly minority children, know the direction Emanuel and his school CEO are heading; they’ve seen Arne Duncan and his successor close schools, charterize schools, increase class sizes, and divert money from the school budget.Read more

As the Chicago public schools  teachers strike continues, with no resolution of the  conflict in sight, the mayor and CEO might do well to reflect on two key lessons imparted by a scholar whose research on Chicago school reforms is universally hailed as in-depth, groundbreaking, and unimpeachable. Anthony Bryk is the creator of the Consortium on Chicago School Research and current president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Bryk and his CCSR colleagues’ 2010 book, Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago, has become a bible for evidence-based education policymakers across the country. While their data and methods are so complex that the authors advise many readers to skip the long chapter explaining them, two key findings jump out as relevant to the battle being waged now in Chicago over the current round of attempted reforms.

First, Bryk says, contrary to current popular reform policies, which advocate relatively quick-fix single-shot changes like replacing teachers or principals, turning over schools to new management, or closing them altogether, improving a school and sustaining those improvements is a complex, long-term process. Indeed, after much mulling, he and his colleagues liken the process most closely to that of baking a cake. It requires five ingredientsRead more

Although Hispanic and black families have the highest poverty rates of the major racial and ethnic minorities, the latest poverty data holds some positive news. The poverty rate for Hispanic families with children under 18 years old declined 1.6 percentage points (Figure A). Black families showed a 1.1 percentage-point decline, but this decline was not statistically significant. Non-Hispanic white and Asian American families had small increases that were not statistically significant.

By family type, for all families with children under 18 years old, only families headed by single1 fathers showed a real decline.Read more

Everybody knows the most pressing economic problem facing the United States today is joblessness. And many also know that this problem is economically solvable, yet not being solved largely because of political gridlock.

But, some might still find it hard to believe that policymakers could really be so indifferent to the economic struggles of most American families. This is where The State of Working America—released yesterday—comes in handy. Think of it as the Rosetta Stone of American economic policymaking over the past generation. Or just a book and accompanying website with lots and lots of charts and tables. Either way.

The two important points that come through loud and clear from its tracking of trends in income, wages, jobs, wealth and poverty are:

• The primary barrier to low– and middle-income families seeing decent rates of economic growth over most of the last generation was the simple fact that a very narrow slice at the very top claimed a vastly disproportionate share of the fruits of economic growth Read more

In his Democratic National Convention speech last week, former President Bill Clinton joked about conservatives’ struggle between professed concern about public debt, proposed tax cuts, and arithmetic:

“Somebody says, ‘Oh, we’ve got a big debt problem. We’ve got to reduce the debt.’ So what’s the first thing [Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney] says we’re going to do? ‘Well, to reduce the debt, we’re going to have another $5 trillion in tax cuts, heavily weighted to upper-income people. So we’ll make the debt hole bigger before we start to get out of it.’”

There are plenty of holes in Romney’s plan, which would translate to somewhere between $2.7 trillion and $6.1 trillion in deficit-financed tax cuts over the next decade, relative to current tax policies.1 Within this range, their impact is difficult to quantify because the Romney plan suffers from serious sins of omission.

Romney initially proposed repealing the estate tax; eliminating capital gains, dividends, and interest taxation for households with adjusted gross income under $100,000 ($200,000 for married taxpayers filing jointly); cutting the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent; eliminating the corporate alternative minimum tax (AMT); and repealing new taxes from the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This $2.7 trillion package of tax cuts would be entirely deficit-financed. Read more

By Scott Nova and Isaac Shapiro

Information from Apple’s own factory auditor, the Fair Labor Association, and new reports in Chinese media show that the iPhone 5 is being produced by employees:

• Who work far more hours than allowed by Chinese law;
• Who are not paid for all the hours they work;
• Who lack any true voice in the workplace to advocate for necessary reforms
• Who partly consist of thousands of students who are being coerced to work, in a practice that Chinese media outlets characterize as “forced labor”

In short, any excitement over any new capabilities of the iPhone 5 demands to be tempered by a realistic appraisal of the unacceptable working conditions for the Chinese workers producing it. These conditions are explained in some detail below; a fuller analysis by our organizations of what changes in labor practices have and have not been made at Foxconn (Apple’s lead supplier in China) over the past year is forthcoming. Read more

If you believed the Wall Street Journal Washington Wire headline or the rhetoric of Arizona’s attorney general, you’d think the right to use card check to select a union as a bargaining representative had been struck down by a U.S. district court. But it always helps a little to read the court’s decision. And having done so, I’m happy to report that the obituary for card check as a way to select a union was premature, at best.

Arizona, goaded by the Koch brothers and anti-union businesses, passed a constitutional amendment declaring that secret ballot elections are the only permissible way to select an employee representative in Arizona. In other words, card check elections are illegal. (“The right to vote by secret ballot for employee representation is fundamental and shall be guaranteed where local, state or federal law permits or requires elections, designations or authorizations for employee representation.”) Federal law protects card check elections, so the National Labor Relations Board sued Arizona in federal court, and the court issued a decision on Wednesday. Read more

In his convention speech last night, former President Bill Clinton claimed that, “We could have done better, but last year the Republicans blocked the President’s job plan, costing the economy more than a million new jobs.” According to Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, this claim was “merely a fuzzy and optimistic projection.” This is flat-wrong, and the evidence cited by Kessler to support his claim is far “fuzzier” than the counterfactual impact of the American Jobs Act (AJA).

The problem revolves around the baseline against which policy changes are scored. With the benefit of hindsight, we know pretty well how many jobs would have been created relative to what actually happened in terms of 2012 policy changes. The article linked to by Kessler, and on which he hangs his criticism, is full of quotes from forecasters saying that the AJA wouldn’t add to jobs because, “Some of this is just extending support that was already in place,” and implicitly would happen anyway. We now know that this is wrong—much of what was called for in the AJA turns out not to have supported the economy in 2012 (because it was never passed). And if it had been, the effects would have been … to add over a million jobs to the economy. Wonky details follow. Read more