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January 1998, Vol. 121,
No. 1
Book reviews
Quality of teachers
Future of unions
Labor history
Book reviews from past issues
- Quality of teachers
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- Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality.
By Dale Ballou and Michael Podgursky. Kalamazoo, MI, W.E.
Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1997, 185 pp.
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- This is a very well written and researched
book that teachers, labor economists, education
policymakers and compensation specialists will enjoy. The
book is filled with charts, graphs, regression analysis
tables, and algebraic expressions. The authors use
empirical data collected over many years from a variety
of sources to show the relationship between teacher pay
and teacher quality. The conclusion the authors reach may
surprise you.
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- In 1983, the National Commission on
Excellence in Education released a report on the
condition of American education entitled A Nation at
Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. The
Commissions concerns centered on the quality of
teaching. Among their claims were the following:
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- Too many teachers had been poor
students themselves.
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- Programs of teacher education placed
too much emphasis on the methods of education, and too
little on the subject to be taught.
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- There were severe shortages of
qualified teachers in certain subject areas, such as
science and mathematics.
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- Too many newly employed teachers
were not qualified to teach the subjects they were
assigned.
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- These concerns were not new. In 1963, the
president of the Council for Basic Education described
teacher education in the following terms: "A weak
faculty operates a weak program that attracts weak
students".
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- The question this book seeks to answer is:
Does an increase in teacher compensation equate to an
increase in teacher quality? Will an increase in pay
attract higher quality teachers into the profession, and
how will that relate to improved student test scores? The
answers are summarized below.
- Higher teacher salaries have had
little discernible impact on the quality of newly
recruited teachers.
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- The authors found essentially no
discernible relationship between salary growth and the
qualifications of new teachers compared with experienced
teachers in the same state. After testing for biases, the
conclusion remained the same.
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- The failure of this policy can
be traced, in part, to the structural features of the
teacher labor market.
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- Teacher salary schedules are not
differentiated on the basis of performance. When pay
rises for one, it rises for the entire salary schedule.
The result of increase pay for the same performance is
lower attrition of seasoned teachers. A lower attrition
rate means less new hires. Additionally, prospective
teachers have high opportunity costs in
occupation-specific training that has no value outside
public education. Teacher certification is not a highly
transferable skill.
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- Recruitment of higher quality
teachers is impeded by public schools that show no
preference for applicants with strong academic records.
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- Little is known about the way school
districts screen job applicants; however, case studies
provide some anecdotal evidence. New teacher applicants
are not generally asked to teach a class as part of the
interview process. Some research suggests that school
recruiters give too much weight to the impression the
applicant makes during the interview, and too little to
the academic record. Websters (1988) study of
hiring and evaluation showed that teachers scores
on verbal and quantitative tests were the best predictors
of student achievement test gains.
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- A variety of reforms have been
proposed that might lower entry barriers and improve job
prospects of more capable prospective teachers.
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- Salary differentiation on the basis of
performance could provide encouragement for teachers
without stimulating an increase in the supply of
teachers. Licensing and certification requirements could
be relaxed for individuals who demonstrate promise in
other ways. Teacher tenure and other job protections
could be weakened, making it easier for administrators to
dismiss ineffective teachers.
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- The practices of private schools
indicate that market based reforms would improve the
quality of the teacher applicant pool.
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- Private schools place greater emphasis on
the teachers academic record. They are more likely
to have performance based pay than strict salary
schedules. Private school entrepreneurs appear ready to
provide education services to a wide variety of students,
not just the most affluent. Opposition from the public
school sector is intense. This opposition has influenced
charter school legislation and the design of other target
school plans.
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- Instead of offering new solutions or
policy recommendations, the authors highlight proposals
that were discussed in the book. On the supply side of
the market, reduce the opportunity cost by relaxing
licensing requirements so that promising applicants can
seek jobs without investing in a credential that they may
never have the opportunity to use. There are many private
schools that employ this method allowing the beginning
teacher to complete the necessary course work once they
have started teaching. Relaxed licensing requirements are
already a policy of alternative certification programs
established to recruit minority teachers in shortage
areas. At a minimum, the relaxed certification and
licensing requirements should be expanded throughout the
public school systems with the purpose of recruiting
better teachers.
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- The demand side of the market may require
additional reforms. School districts must change their
preference for applicants with traditional training and
must look to non-education majors with strong academic
backgrounds. The authors are doubtful this can be
accomplished and discuss this in detail in chapter 5 of
the book. The authors are, however, more optimistic about
other reforms such as the charter school movement.
Charter schools compete for students and are run by
entrepreneurs who compete in the educational services
market. These schools are strongly opposed by interests
within the public school community, raising the
possibility that charter schools will become isolated
pockets of quality while business goes on as usual.
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- Kathleen Chapman
Office of Publications
Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Top
- Future of unions
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- Unions at the Crossroads:
Strategic Membership, Financial, and Political
Perspectives. By Marick F. Masters. Westport,
CT, Quorum Books, 1997, 231 pp., bibliography.
$65.
- The future of American labor unions is the
subject of this book. But Masters creative
contribution is his processing and analyzing of a vast
quantity of data relating to trends in union membership,
organizing activity, financial assets, income and
spending, including political action money. He gets a lot
more than you would expect out of the LM-2 financial
forms unions are required to file with the U.S.
Department of Labor.
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- Masters, a professor at the University of
Pittsburgh, puts his focus on the "institutional
health" of the 28 biggest national unions in the
United States, their resources and ability to engage in
collective bargaining, to finance strikes, to organize
new union members, and to affect their political
environment. These 28 unions have 80 percent of all U.S.
union members. Five of them hold two-thirds of all union
wealth.
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- What are union resources? Unions have
human capital in their members, their union density or
share of the relevant work force, and their activism,
says Masters. They have financial capital in their real
and financial assets and income, he says, and political
capital in their political action money. While you could
argue about the scope of these definitions, Masters lays
out his detailed aggregate and union-by-union analysis as
a preface to his discussion of strategic union resource
decisions.
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- How should unions use available resources?
Union financial capital and political capital have been
rising at the same time that unions human capital
base and dues income have been shrinking, Masters finds.
But without big growth in organizing and a big increase
in union membership and union density, labor unions will
be weaker in bargaining and less relevant in politics.
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- Union financial resources are relevant to
growth in union membership. In 1995, the 28 unions of
Masters study had 13 million members. Simply to
overcome attrition and keep at their current total, these
unions must add more than 650,000 new members a year,
Masters says. To grow by 1 percent a year, they would
have to add still another 800,000 a year, he claims. And
to grow by 10 percent a year would require more than 2
million new union members beyond the attrition
replacements. Masters estimates 1995 cost per additional
union member at about $1,800-so a steady-state membership
target would cost $6 billion over 5 years, 1 percent
growth would cost $7 billion over 5 years, and 10 percent
growth would cost $22 billion.
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- There are 48 data-rich tables, many
showing trends from 1979 to 1993. Twelve tables present
"real" constant dollar assets, income, PAC
receipts, and union budgets. Only the first table (page
74) tells us how current dollars are adjusted (CPI
1982-1984=100).
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- This book is not for the general reader
who will bog down in a wealth of detail and pedestrian
and sometimes repetitious prose. But if you are
interested in unions and their prospects for the future,
the Masters book is well worth the effort.
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- Markley Roberts
Labor economist
Formerly with the AFL-CIO
- Top
Labor history
- WCFL: Chicagos Voice of Labor,
1926-1978. By Nathan Godfried. Champaign, IL,
University of Illinois Press, 1997, 390 pp. $49.95 cloth;
$19.95, paper.
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- The gods in Greek mythology punished the
mortal Sisyphus for deceiving them by forcing him to
eternally push a large stone up a hill only to have it
roll back down. The proponents of labor broadcasting at
the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) must have
entertained similar frustrations while founding radio
station WCFL. CFL President John Fitzpatrick and
Secretary Edward Nockels faced many barriers trying to
fulfill their dream for a working-class-oriented radio
station only to stumble over new ones constructed by the
controlling political paradigm. The crusade for a
"voice of labor" began in 1926 and, when the
dream finally became reality, both its founding fathers
were deceased and the stations format was subsumed
into the commercial, capitalist order it wanted to
oppose. The author recognizes this conflict from the
beginning in noting that mass media, like mass
production, was a product of capitalism and the dominant
reactive force-labor capitalism-actually constructed the
evolution of a working-class medium.
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- Nathan Godfrieds narrative is really
two books in one. The first story relates how Edward
Nockels sacrificed everything to establish a voice for
the working classes over the airways. Opposed to his
effort was a plethora of antagonists including the
commercially-owned stations; Godfried interestingly
illustrates that the call letters of some stations-the
Sears & Roebuck-owned facility "WLS" was an
acronym for
- "worlds largest store" and
that the Chicage Tribunes station "WGN"
translated into "worlds greatest
newspaper." The author contends that these and
similar monopoly-capitalistic forces-virulently
anti-labor-enveloped a defacto censorship over WCFL. To
add to Nockels' woes, the established labor order in the
American Federation of Labor offered
"luke-warm" support at best and many times
outright opposition. A third source of anguish for
Nockels and Fitzpatrick was the Federal Governments
regulatory agencies, the Federal Radio Commission and its
successor the Federal Communications Commission, that
viewed WCFL as a "special interest" and
regulated it to the verge of suffocation by restricting
broadcasting hours and relegating the station to weak
broadcast channels
- .
- The death of Nockels in 1937, from a
massive heart attack that Godfried has little doubt was
complicated by the barriers erected against WCFL,
embarked the station on a new adventure. The radio
stations history paralleled the flow of changing
social and political events in the Nation. The New Deal
emerged from the Great Depression and forged a
corporatist social compact where labor, business, and the
government shared in the reconstruction of the capitalist
system. The second history of WCFL amounted to struggles
for a clear broadcast signal, one unencumbered by
competing signals in the kilocycle range and permission
to increase its power to 50,000 watts. Yet when the
Federal Communications Commission finally acceded to
WCFL'S demands, the station already leaned in the
direction of broadcasting popular music, sporting events,
and general entertainment rather than in covering strike
activity, organizing drives, and the dispute between the
AFL and the rival industrial federation, the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO). It entered into a
partnership with the NBC network, thus further
neutralizing its aggressive labor support. By the 1960s
it embraced a "top forty" format and in the
1970s converted to an "all-talk" programming.
In 1978, WCFL was purchased and its call letters changed
to WLUP.
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- Nathan Godfried portrays the birth, life,
and death of WCFL fairly well. One grasps the basic
essence of his philosophy about the subject just by
reading the introduction. This book follows the "new
left" paradigm of historiography that ironically
became popular about the time the radio station shifted
format from social and economic emphases to one of
"top forty" programming. One of this
schools founders, Herbert Gutman, is even quoted in
an opening chapter introduction. Other monographs in this
series on the "history of communications" have
a similar ideological bent and their authors, for
example, historian Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, are often
identified as part of this school-of-thought. The
capitalist establishment continues to oppose any advances
by the working classes and they have to devise new
methods of advancing their causes.
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- While this paradigmatic interpretation is
anything but new-and this is not a criticism of the
book-the subject matter is intriguing. Broadcast
networking was state-of-the art during the period marked
by industrial domination of the U.S. economy, with all
the concomitant social and economic upheavals of the
1920s and 1930s and the post-war corporatist industrial
models of the 1940s and 1950s. If, as Patrick Henry once
stated, we know of no better way to judge the future than
by the past, this book will be a valuable contribution to
the bank of knowledge as we enter the so-called
"information age" and leave the
"industrial age" behind. What kind of
communication vehicle will organized labor utilize to
drive along the information highway? The struggle to
adapt and evolve through the use of technological
innovation was as much the focus of labor broadcasting
yesterday as it is for organized labor and the Intemet
today. The examples of struggle for WCFL may not
alleviate all the barriers constructed against labor as
we enter the 21st century, but it may give some ideas to
prevent workers from being between a Sisyphean rock and a
hard place!
Henry P. Guzda
Industrial relations specialist
U.S. Department of Labor
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