RealClearEd Today 06/05/2014: Bare Walls and Poor Learning? The Trouble
Good morning, it’s Thursday June 5. This morning at RealClearEducation we have news, commentary, analysis, and reports from the top of the education world. This week, Dan Willingham takes a look at the classroom decor study that's recently made the news, but points out that there's more than what the headlines suggest. And a new Rasmussen Reports survey of 1,000 adults found that most Americans think school nutrition standards are a local issue. Below are a few highlights of what’s on the main part of our site this morning. As always there is additional content organized by key issue areas on our sidebars. And we update all through the day.
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On this date in 1916, Louis Brandeis was sworn in as a justice on the United States Supreme Court. His nomination was controversial – the first to draw confirmation hearings. So you could be “Brandeised” long before you could be “Borked.” Some of the opposition was owed to Brandeis’ progressive views and his resistance to unfettered capitalism. Some of it was also anti-Semitism. Brandeis was the first Jew nominated to the high court.
Brandeis had violated what is, unfortunately, increasingly best practice for getting a federal court appointment these days – he left a paper trail. He was a public intellectual and wrote and spoke on a variety of issues. Brandeis is frequently quoted for his view that, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the best policeman.” But that wasn’t in any Supreme Court case. It was the second line of a 1913 essay he published in Harper's.
In early February 1905, Brandeis found himself in Boston addressing the Boston Central Labor Union. He praised a recent labor action for its savvy and noted that public perceptions of labor unions were changing.
But Brandeis cautioned that with better fortunes came real responsibility,
"Your representatives must understand not merely the general line of the business, but the possibilities and the necessities of the particular business in which your demands are to be applied. Concerns engaged in the same line of business in one part of the country and in another, or even in the same community, have varying possibilities and necessities, and your demands must be tempered by those possibilities and necessities.
The possibilities of employers' businesses vary like the employees' capacities. If you attempt to apply rigidly uniform rule to all you may kill the goose that lays the egg; and except in extreme cases the goose must be kept alive whether the egg be golden or not."
That’s advice America’s teachers' unions have largely ignored. And they’re increasingly paying a steep price for it. As Stephen Sawchuck reports in Education Week, the National Education Association has lost 230,000 members over the past three years and is launching new initiatives to attempt to reverse those fortunes.
Meanwhile, bigger threats lie ahead. Whether through the political process or court cases, the days of automatic dues collection seem numbered. And more Wisconsins – the state severely curtailed public sector union power – seem likely. In other words, the teachers' unions will have to offer a compelling value proposition to entice members rather than getting them by default – that’s the idea behind the new NEA initiative.
Yet these and other change efforts face an uphill climb. Reformist union leaders around the country are out of fashion and pushback against anything resembling reform is on the rise in state and local teachers' union affiliates. Younger teachers want something else, though, and the imperative of better schools demands substantial changes to traditional practices. Squaring that circle against the backdrop of a decline in their fortunes is the challenge teachers' unions face. Privately, even some of the unions' staunchest supporters acknowledge they're in a mess that is in no small part their own making. Now they're in a race against the clock, too.
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