First: National Review reports:

Over the past several decades, American teachers’ salaries and benefits have increased steadily, while the academic performance of the nation’s students has stagnated. In a new paper released on Wednesday, Sally Lovejoy and Chad Miller of the American Action Forum argue that teachers unions’ and their collective-bargaining policies are at least partly to blame for both issues.

The authors cite an array of studies examining the impact of teachers’ unions and their negotiating strategies. The majority of these studies have found that collective-bargaining agreements typically focus on higher teacher pay and benefits and greater job security, with little consideration given to student performance. In fact, teachers’ unions have historically resisted most efforts to hold teachers accountable for the academic performance of their students, and have succeeded consistently. Tenure policies, for instance, make it virtually impossible to fire unqualified or ineffective teachers. Most states award tenure automatically after about three years, and do not test a new teacher’s mastery of even the most basic reading and math skills. Perhaps not surprisingly, this has had a largely negative impact on the students themselves, especially those in large urban school districts with a high percentage of black and Hispanic students.

The paper compares student-performance data from two such districts, New York City and Chicago (both of which require collective bargaining), with data from Charlotte, N.C., and Austin, Texas, urban districts in states where collective bargaining is banned for public employees. The two different situations reveal how collective bargaining is inflating salaries, compensation, and job security while it’s strangling policies that could help student achievement. …

Research indicates that high-quality teachers have a significant impact on student achievement both in school and beyond, making the teachers’ unions’ resistance to performance-based evaluation all the more frustrating. One study by professors at Harvard and Columbia found that students assigned to teachers classified as “high-value added” instructors attend better colleges, earn higher salaries, and are less likely to have children as teenagers. Furthermore, simply replacing a “low-value added” teacher with an average one can increase students’ lifetime earning by as much as $1.4 million.

According to teacher unions, every teacher is a great teacher. According to reality, that is not the case. In addition to inflating the cost of schools, teacher unions protect bad teachers and inhibit the ability of good teachers to do better. Too bad Gov. Scott Walker tried merely to make government employees pay more for their (taxpayer-funded) benefits, instead of destroying teacher unions.

Speaking of the cost of schools, George Mitchell points out something you haven’t heard in the ongoing complaints that every single taxpayer dollar is not going to schools:

Of the many fallacies perpetuated by lazy journalists, one of the most consequential involves public school finance.  = Coverage of current budget deliberations in Madison illustrates this.

Consider a recent Green Bay Press-Gazette story on the possible expansion of the Milwaukee and Racine school choice program.

Oconto Falls district Superintendent Dave Polashek was reported as one of many local school officials  “frustrated” by the prospect.  He said, “At a time when we’re cutting things like drivers education and home ec, they want to divert funding from public schools to create a dual school system.” Polashek said legislators are “somewhat oblivious to the needs of schools. Does it make sense to support private education with public dollars at a time when we’re hurting?”

In a similar vein, the Journal Sentinel editorial board accused legislators of “[c]ontinuing their attack on the public school system” by approving a tax deduction for parents of private school students.  The paper opined,”The losers [will] be public schools, which are already under significant financial pressure. Wisconsin has great public schools; why not give them more support instead of undermining them?” …

In fact, however, only by ignoring recent history can one believe that Wisconsin public schools are financially shortchanged.  That history flatly refutes the claim that legislators are “oblivious to the needs of schools.”

In 1987, per pupil public school revenues were $4,302.  If schools had been held harmless from inflation in the next twenty-four years, revenues would need to have grown 88 per cent, to $8,108.

What actually happened during that period?  Financial support for public schools ballooned 198 per cent, more than twice as fast as inflation. By 2010 this meant that public school revenue equaled $12,822/pupil, a whopping 58 per cent increase over the level that would have held schools harmless from inflation. The accompanying chart compares how spending actually has grown with what would have occurred to insulate schools from inflation.

The new money added to the K-12 system by 2010 equaled $4,714/pupil. Given public school enrollment of 872,000 students that year, Wisconsin taxpayers had provided public schools with a spending windfall of more than $4.1 billion a year by the time Governor Walker took office.  So much for being “oblivious.”

Wisconsin journalists have failed to report this history. Further, they have failed to explain adequately that much of the new spending has not reached the classroom.  Instead, it has gone to pension, health care, and other fringe benefits.  Where such costs once equaled about a quarter of teacher salaries, in many school districts that share now exceeds fifty per cent.  In the Milwaukee Public Schools, the meteoric rise in fringe benefits is the principal reason for reductions in education programming that have been part of recent budgets. …

The overall journalistic failure has predictable consequences when it comes to public opinion.  In scientific polling, scholars at Harvard University have found that the public is clueless when it comes to public school spending and levels of teacher compensation.

These scholars have reported their findings in the respected journal Education Next. They find that the average citizen has a “wildly inaccurate” understanding of school finance.  For example, “…[w]e asked respondents to estimate average per-pupil expenditures within their local school district and the average teacher salaries in their states…[W]e discovered that those surveyed, on average, underestimated per-pupil expenditures by more than half and teacher salaries by roughly 30 percent…”

How do citizens react when they “learn the truth”?

• “For the nation as a whole, overall support for higher spending levels dropped by 8 percentage points (from 46 to 38 percent) when respondents were informed of actual per-pupil expenditures in their own district.”
• The impacts of this information varied widely across subgroups. Told the truth about per-pupil expenditures, the share of African Americans willing to support additional spending plummeted from 82 to 48 percent.”
• “When informed about actual average teacher salaries in their state, respondents’ support for higher salaries dropped by 16 percentage points (from 56 to 40 percent).”

• US politics
• Wisconsin politics