So AttDC, so you believe we should keep the Blacks and Hispanics in their proper place and not cure the achievement gap? Or did I misunderstand you?

Anyway, the only point is that Mississippi has lots of poor black students; Massachusetts does not. It’s fundamentally dishonest for a purported social scientist to pretend that the differing academic performance of those two states proves anything about whether unions are good for education or not.

Perhaps if you mentioned that the achievement gap is socioeconomic, not ethnic, your comment would be less offensive, and your conclusion would be better science than the one you originally made.

No one is saying that the students are doing better because of unions. My original point was that other factors need to be addressed in order to reform education. Just keep bashing the teachers’ unions and we’ll get nowhere. BTW, of course I’m an educated fool- I went to college in the South. Haha

It’s not racist to observe that, here and now, there is an achievement gap in America between black and white students. Your contention is idiotic. You can’t do anything about the achievement gap if you think it’s racist even to mention it.

So if some highly educated fool says, “Hey, look at Massachusetts, its students are doing fine and there are strong unions, while the deep South has weak unions and poor students,” the obvious response is that there are lots of reasons why the South would have lower academic performance than Massachusetts. If you really want to know how unions affect academic performance, you’d find some natural experiment wherein single states like Massachusetts dramatically strengthened or weakened their union laws, and then see what happened afterwards within that state.

The Wagner Act of 1935 allowed states to form unions. However, at the insistence of Southern legislators, Congress exempted agricultural and domestic workers from being able to form unions. By permitting these exceptions southern states were allowed to preserve their heritage of cheap labor from the time of slavery. Somehow, this legislation remains in place today.

Also contributing to poor school performance of children nationwide is poverty. Historically, poor children have not performed well in school, are more likely to drop out, less likely to attend college, more likely to go to an emergency room for health care, more likely to wind up in prison, and less likely to pay taxes. As well, their children are more likely to repeat a similar cycle of poverty in their lifetimes.

According to 2007 figures for median household income by states, only one southern state, Georgia, makes the top fifty percent, sneaking in at number twenty three. Of the ten poorest states in the country by median household income, eight are from the “Old South” along with New Mexico and Oklahoma. The five poorest in median household income: (46) Alabama, (47) Kentucky, (48) Arkansas, (49) West Virginia, and (50) Mississippi.

The South’s high incidence of poverty has clearly had a negative impact on many of the South’s schools. Can this poverty be traced in any way to the Wagner Act and doomed millions of these youngsters for the past seventy years to futures of diminished opportunity?

Anyone familiar with social science stuff wouldn’t make such an obviously racist insinuation. Furthermore, all you are doing is proving the teachers’ unions point that the unions aren’t to blame for the US education “crisis, ” but that other factors outside the classroom are more important. As a teacher of critical thinking skills, I would label your logical flaw a shift to a more defensible position, since the earlier point was too weak to defend. In addition I would point out that a poor urban school in the North probably has similar ethnic ratios and socioeconomic conditions as MS, and still outperforms that state.

Surely you’re aware of the concept of controlling for other variables. Here are two completely obvious reasons why, say, Mississippi would have “low performance” compared to Massachusetts:

1) Mississippi population: 61% white, 37% black. Massachusetts: 88% white, 7% black.

2) Mississippi median income: $26,908. Massachusetts median income: $56,592.

Anyone remotely familiar with social science should know this stuff.

Unions aren’t against all education innovations, just the ones that don’t work.