Granted, Lacy might not be the best person to listen to about this, but I have yet to hear a better explanation for why public schools can't seem to get their act together.
34 states and DC have laws mandating collective bargaining with teachers. Now, it is true that in the other 16 states, there are other laws that can serve to protect teachers. But these states certainly have the ability to engage in ruthless combat with the unions, and they don't. I blame the voters and the legislators - unions exist to protect their members.
The best freely available overview of this problem I've found is here: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/BetterBargain.pdf
In addition, you're a bit off on the facts. There actually are three states that expressly prohibit collective bargaining with teachers unions: North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. In a lot of these right-to-work states, the unions have been able to get work rules and the like codified in state law as opposed to within collective bargaining. Again, the PDF I linked to has a lot off good data and cites, and yes, it does comes down pretty harshly on the unions.
Look, I've been actively engaged on this subject for the last six years of my life. It's clear that I'll never convince you that simply eliminating public sector unions won't magically solve our education woes. But I can show you the facts that the circumstances that would allow for that to happen haven't happened.
If, as you assert, unions can influence outcomes via state law and collective bargaining even in right to work states, then we would not expect right to work laws to have much effect. Thus, the fact that educational outcomes are similar provides no evidence about whether or not unions are the culprit. Your argument is simply incorrect.
That seems a rather fine and mostly moot point.
If it's still public school teachers' interests and campaigning that torpedoes necessary reforms, then it doesn't matter if that's effected through a mandatory-membership union or collective bargaining or legislation.
The same interests need to be confronted in any case, and I don't know anyone who's suggested that "simply eliminating public sector unions" would "magically solve our education woes". There's no magic bullet, just a bunch of necessary reforms. And teacher's unions in both right-to-work and mandatory-union states oppose most of the necessary steps.
I'd rather focus on the areas where there aren't necessarily entrenched interests so we can focus on experimentation and trying to change the anti-education sentiment[1]. Schools like the KIPP Academies have exceptional outcomes over and over again. We need to find a way to get their techniques wider distribution.
I believe that fighting a war of words with the teachers unions is both a waste of time and counterproductive from a policy/results perspective. Public sector unions just aren't going anywhere. Furthermore, we're going to have a shortage of teachers - estimated to be as high as a million teachers [2] - once the Boomer generation retires. Demeaning the remaining teachers (who are generally union-affiliated) strikes me as ridiculously counterproductive. The experiences in NYC and DC are proof that there are ways to make teachers more accountable, reward better teachers, remove crappier teachers, and generally change the culture in our schools without taking tactical nukes to the NEA and AFT.
[1] Read Bissinger's Friday Night Lights for the best-written example of what I'm talking about.
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/education/07teacher.html
Do you have a reference that compares states and controls for outcomes with respect to income, general educational levels, and other confounding factors?
Using state-level averages for comparisons can be misleading, due to Simpson's Paradox. For example, people in wealthier states are more likely to vote Democratic. But if you used that to determine that wealthier people are more likely to vote Democratic, you'd be wrong. In each state individually, and nationwide, wealthier people are less likely to vote Democratic than poorer people (until you get to a small number of the very-rich).
Also, I don't think any reformer is obsessed with collective bargaining and right-to-work laws as the root of the problem. Rather, reformers want accountability, choice, experimentation, and competition. Public teachers' unions consistently and effectively oppose those, even in right-to-work states. Unless their power is reduced, even in right-to-work states, many of the most promising reforms and experiments can't even be tried.
Unequal funding based on property taxes further penalizes the lower classes. The wealthiest go to posh private schools, the upper-middle classes have public schools with greenhouses and olympic size swimming pools, most everyone else has outdated textbooks and low salaries, and the lower classes have lead paint and crumbling infrastructure.
The result is that, averaged out, we have terrible results. Mostly because there's only so much you can do with money, so the wealthiest who have access to a surplus of funding can only do so much to balance out the disadvantages of the rest.
An equalized system would produce much better results for the country. This is how Finland and other social democracies operate.
And yet, there are schools attended by the "lower classes" with much higher funding levels than private schools who rank as some of the worst in the nation.
According to a 2007 article in The Washington Post, the Washington D.C. public school district spends $12,979 per student per year. This is the third highest level of funding per student out of the 100 biggest school districts in the U.S. Despite this high level of funding, the school district has produced outcomes that are lower than the national average. In reading and math, the district's students score the lowest among 11 major school districts – even when poor children are compared with other poor children. 33% of poor fourth graders in the U.S. lack basic skills in math, but in Washington D.C., it's 62%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_United_States#...
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=unequal+funding+educatio...
A good "primer" book, although a bit old, but not outdated, is called "Savage Inequalities"
http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Inequalities-Children-Americas-... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Inequalities
Another book is "The Shame Of A Nation" by the same author. These are just starting points, though, there's no shortage of studies, essays, books, and scholarly works on the subject. What I'm presenting here, in terms of social critiques of education, is by no means unique.
Several stories and articles posted this week with actual science data showing that its the deep culture in both preventing change and progress...
You will find the articles here at HN, reddit , and slashdot..