In a recent article in the journal Perspectives on Politics, Sarah Anzia and Terry Moe examine whether pension plans that have pension beneficiaries serving on the board are more likely to underfund their pension systems. In the paper, they explain the logic behind underfunded pensions:

Another basic feature of pension politics is that public workers and their unions have incentives to support the chronic underfunding of their own pensions. Due to state statutes, constitutions, and judicial decisions, pensions promised by state politicians are backed by strong legal protections almost everywhere; and public workers thus know they will eventually get what they are promised even if their pension plans are currently underfunded. Indeed, because full funding on a regular schedule would be tremendously costly for state (and local) budgets— crowding out other services, forcing higher taxes, making the true costs of pensions painfully transparent to citizens —public workers and their unions have incentives to prefer that their pension plans be underfunded. Underfunding enables the fiscal illusion that pension benefits are much less expensive than they really are. If public workers and their unions want increasingly generous benefits in future years, they need to convince the public that these benefits are not costly to provide. At the same time, underfunding keeps employee contributions to their own pension funds at low levels; and by keeping contributions by their employers down, they are freeing up public money for other government services, keeping public workers employed—and providing funds for their own salaries and raises.

Each of Missouri’s three teacher pension systems (Kansas City, St. Louis, and Public School & Education Employee Retirement Systems of Missouri (PSRS)) have board members who are also members of the pension system. In St. Louis, the system is currently funded at 78.1%, the lowest funded ratio since 1992. Kansas City’s funded ratio is just 66.2%. PSRS, the system which covers teachers throughout the rest of the state, has the highest-funded ratio, 84.4%. These figures, of course, rely on the pension plan’s rosy assumptions. More conservative (and arguably more realistic) estimates put the funded ratios for each of the plans below 60%.

Overall, support among teachers for Missouri’s teacher pension systems is high. But would teachers continue to support the pension plan if they had to increase their contributions to fully fund their plan? 

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Charter schools are public schools, but instead of being governed by a local school board, they are governed by a document—their charter—that lays out how the school will operate and the metrics by which its performance will be judged. The charter is granted to the group of individuals who seek to open and run the school, and it has an expiration date of three to five years, at which point it needs to be renewed or the school is closed. The charter is awarded by an authorizer, or sponsor, who is responsible for making sure that the school stays on track, both academically and financially, and who makes the renewal or closure recommendation.

A little history might be helpful in understanding how the charter school movement began. It started in the late 1980s as an idea to let teachers, parents, or community leaders open and run a public school outside of district oversight. Credit for the idea usually goes to Al Shanker—head of one of the two major teacher’s unions in the United States. In 1988, Shanker offered an idea for reinvigorating public education that was inspired by a visit to a school in Cologne, Germany the prior year. He argued that we should allow teachers to create innovative, autonomous public schools, and that these chartered schools would serve as laboratories from which effective ideas could be replicated.

Around the same time, political economists John Chubb and Terry Moe argued that the institutional structure of public education wasn’t working. they found that autonomy was the one indispensable requirement for an effective school. And, they concluded, the existing structure of public education limits and undermines school autonomy. In their book Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, Chubb and Moe proposed building an entirely new structure for public education that would withdraw authority from existing institutions and place it directly in the hands of schools, parents, and students. School districts could continue to operate their existing schools, but they would have no authority over the “chartered” public schools.

In 1991, bipartisan support for Al Shanker’s idea led to the passage of the first charter school law in Minnesota. The law was groundbreaking, and in 1992 eight chartered public schools opened in Minnesota that were autonomous, student-centered, results-oriented, and designed and run by teachers. The following year California followed suit. At the start of the 2017–18 school year, there were over 7,000 charter schools in 42 states plus the District of Columbia, serving nearly 3.2 million students. Charter schools now represent seven percent of all public schools and enroll six percent of public school students. Today, one in five public school students attends school in a district with at least 10 percent of its students in charter schools.

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The graphic below represents how teachers’ unions influence local school districts.

The first path of influence is through national and state political activity. At both levels, teachers’ unions make contributions to candidates that are likely to represent their platforms. The NEA, for example, takes strong positions on national education issues such as Common Core and school choice.

Unions also back issues at the state level—the Missouri NEA is reported to have donated $20,000 to campaign against Amendment 3, an initiative to end teacher tenure in Missouri, while it’s PAC, the Committee in Support of Public Educators, raised almost $90,000. Although there is money spent on the opposite side, monetary contributions are not the only way teachers’ unions influence policy.

Involvement in school board elections is the second route of influence. In Missouri, teachers’ unions have the right to collectively bargain with school administrations. These agreements include a range of items such as workplace rules, teachers’ compensation, and personnel decisions. According to union guru Myron Lieberman, collective bargaining was initially seen as a check on the power of school boards, who are democratically elected by residents within a school district.

However, a study by Stanford Political Scientist Terry Moe showed that within the 253 school districts examined unions supported school board candidates in 92 percent of the districts,”made phone calls in 97 percent, campaigned door-to-door in 68 percent, and provided mailings and publicity in 94 percent.”

If Moe’s study holds true in Missouri, then teachers’ unions have influenced school board elections, helping to elect candidates with similar views—nine Missouri school boards have passed resolutions against Amendment 3.

Through these two paths, the teachers’ union cycle perpetually strengthens itself. By limiting the power of parents, influencing the hand of local school district officials, and mobilizing state and national efforts to keep the status quo, the teachers’ union is able to protect the people the system was designed to serve—teachers.

Protecting the interests of teachers is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that within the teachers’ union cycle the interests of teachers often outweigh the needs of students.

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On March 16, the topic up for debate was whether teacher unions should be blamed for failing public schools. Arguing that teacher unions should not be blamed were Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers; Gary Smuts, a superintendent of a successful public school district in California; and Kate McLaughlin, an elementary school teacher in Lowell, Mass. Arguing that unions should be blamed were Dr. Terry Moe, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; Rod Paige, former U.S. Secretary of Education; and Larry Sand, a teacher from Los Angeles.

The debate itself is incredibly interesting and well worth watching for anyone interested in the topic of education reform. Although the details of the debate are too numerous to go into here, I will give you an idea of how it turns out.

Before the debate, 43 percent of the audience said that unions were to blame, 24 percent said they were not to blame, and 33 percent were undecided. After the debate, 68 percent said that unions were to blame, 25 percent said they were not to blame, and only 7 percent remained undecided. In short, only one percent of the audience’s undecideds were persuaded by the union advocates, while 25 percent were persuaded by the union’s detractors.

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The authors are vague as to what technologies they’ll be discussing. The first few examples are specifically about online courses, which I agree have tremendous potential. Other technologies, I’m not so sure about. I’ve heard jubilant praise for education computer games and those little devices that let students vote on questions posed to them, but I don’t think either will change the education market much. If they just mean technological progress in general, as opposed to, say, labor or capital, then the first part of the thesis is a truism. Of course, technological progress can improve education, the way it improves any other sector. Which innovations represent progress, however, remains a pertinent question.

The section on political resistance is more informative. It explains how reforms like online schools threaten public school employees, and how unions have succeeded at diluting reforms to protect the status quo. Some may blame education problems on a lack of concern about schools, but Moe and Chubb are right to lay the blame on the political process. Concern — nay, even panic — is everywhere. Meaningful action on the part of schools is what’s missing.

I’m looking forward to reading their analysis of why new technology can change politics in ways that other developments in the education sector haven’t.

The post Thoughts on Liberating Learning: The Seeds of Change appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I think that technology has the potential to change the market and the way educational services are delivered to students. Virtual schools bring competition to areas where there was none before, and help break the connection between where a student lives and his learning environment. They bring enrichment opportunities to students who once had only the foreign languages and electives offered by their local schools to choose from.

However, curriculum and learning processes will evolve more slowly. “Virtual” students take tests and complete assignments online, but they still read books and practice handwriting. Although they have more subjects to choose from than their counterparts in brick-and-mortar schools, they don’t study them in radically different ways. A student learning Chinese online will memorize vocabulary and learn to write just as a student studying French in a classroom would.

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So, who chooses the school board members?

Voters. But some of them have more on the line than others. A school district is one of the few places where employees have some say in choosing the people who will ultimately affect the size of their paychecks.

A district employee has a greater incentive to vote for a board member who would raise school salaries than does someone not employed by the district. And, with turnout in some Missouri school districts lower than 10 percent, school employees might just be able to decide the election.

As Terry Moe noted in a 2006 article in Education Next, “district employees have strong incentives to get involved in school-board politics and to take action in trying to elect candidates who will promote their occupational interests.”

In other words, if turnout of non-school personnel is too low, district employees are a much more potent force in school board elections. So, they may ultimately choose the very people they will later bargain with for salary increases, benefits, and retirement packages, to name a few.

In many Missouri counties, a school district is no small thing. There are counties where one in five employees gets a paycheck from a school district. And, if most of them vote, that’s substantial. And potentially decisive.

Let’s look at the Pattonville School District. I’ve discussed its superintendent’s contract in an earlier post. If you recall it, you know that the Pattonville superintendent’s salary and benefit package is substantial.

Well, the Pattonville School Board approved that contract and all its attendant benefits — and the district’s voters elected the board members.

So, just how many voters showed up to choose who negotiated on their behalf for the superintendent’s pay? Well, not many. From 2000–2007, an average of just 16.31 percent of registered voters in the district turned out at the polls.

This is not to say that the voters who did turn out were only school district employees. In truth, I have no guess as to the number. But low turnout makes it that much more possible that district employees will have decisive electoral power, should they turn out in high numbers. The higher the overall turnout, the more diluted the influence of district employees.

How much say should district employees have? Well, for me, at least, that’s not the real question. The question is: How much say will taxpayers allow district employees to have by repeatedly failing to show up at the polls?

If you would like to know more about school board election turnout, or if you have ideas about the extent to which district employees affect school board election results, feel free to leave a comment below, or email me.

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