Earlier this week, the RAND Corporation released the results of a study that found merit pay had no effect on increasing student achievement or teacher motivation.

Teacher union supporters are gleefully promoting this study as proof that merit pay does not work.

Before the RAND study enters the information bloodstream and is accepted as conventional wisdom, Education Action Group would like to point out two serious concerns we have with the study:

First, buried three paragraphs from the bottom of RAND’s press release announcing the results, is this little stink bomb:

“Researchers also found that a majority of the schools disseminated the bonuses equally among staff, despite program guidelines granting school committees the flexibility to distribute the bonus shares as they deemed fit.”

In the summary, the study’s authors elaborate:

“About 31 percent of schools reported using individual performance as at least one of the factors for determining awards. The remaining schools either did not differentiate or reported using only factors related to time or job title but not individual performance.”

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Sunday begins National School Choice Week, the annual seven-day period in the middle of winter when kids all over the country dream of either: (1) having the freedom to stay home from school on account of snow, or (2) moving to Florida.

Well, actually, kids dream of those things all the time.  But their parents ought to spend this week dreaming of Florida because the Sunshine State now boasts some of the most forward-looking school choice policies in the country.

In fact, last year a remarkable bipartisan coalition – which included most of Florida’s black and Hispanic state legislators – passed a major expansion of the Sunshine State’s landmark Tax Credit Scholarship Program.  This prompted The Wall Street Journal to marvel at “Florida’s Unheralded School Revolution.”

And last year, not coincidentally, Florida’s student achievement test scores continued to rise, catapulting the Sunshine State into the nation’s Top Five states in K-12 education, according to the American Legislative Exchange Council’s annual rankings.  (Not bad for a state that used to place in the bottom third of annual student achievement rankings.)

While there is much to celebrate in the Sunshine State’s schools, Florida still has its share of education policy problems.  For example, last year Florida’s politically-opportunistic former Governor (Charlie Crist) decided to curry favor with the powerful teachers’ unions by vetoing a merit pay for teachers’ bill that he had previously pledged to sign.

Crist’s political strategy ultimately backfired – he got trounced by Marco Rubio in the U.S. Senate race.  Yet, interestingly, his flip-flop on merit pay would not have even won Crist the 2010 prize for Most Unseemly Behavior by a Floridian in the merit pay debate.

That dubious honor, sadly, would have gone to a government teacher at East Ridge High School in Clermont who sent the Florida Senate President a packet of nearly 100 letters – all of them opposing merit pay for teachers – which his students had written as a class assignment.  In a cover letter, the teacher claimed that he had presented the bill (S.B. 6) to the students with “a neutral connotation.”  And the teacher also expressed “total amazement” that every single one of his students wrote a letter opposing merit pay.

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President Obama still gets overwhelming support from black, largely Democratic voters. His support hovers around 90 percent despite the economy and high unemployment.

But a new poll out hints that Obama might have lost black voters on policy . . . Obama’s position on education vouchers and merit pay for teachers has no significant impact on black opinion.

Question-experiments in the yearly Education Next/Harvard poll allow us to compare support and opposition to various education reforms when respondents are just asked in the standard way to their levels of support when they are told what President Obama thinks about the issue.

In 2009, informing respondents that Obama supports merit pay for teachers increased the margin of black support for the policy by 30 points. Obama’s opposition to vouchers dampened the margin of black support for them by 26 points. But this year, mentioning that Obama supports merit pay actually decreases the black margin of support by a couple of points and Obama’s opposition to vouchers increases the margin of black support by a few points.

In other words, even core supporters don’t seem to trust President Obama on policy.

The intersection of race and politics is a complicated place; a jumble of socio-economic, ideological, and Party differences. Black Americans are predominantly Democratic, are more liberal than the general population on many issues (although more conservative on some), and on average have lower incomes. All of these characteristics have a major impact on an individual’s political opinions, and they are highly correlated with race in America. What this confluence of correlations translates into is overwhelming support for Democratic Presidents in general and President Obama in particular; 88 percent approval compared to 54 percent from Hispanics and 38 percent from whites.

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If only they were as determined to cut spending.  Alas, Congressional Democrats are hell-bent on taking care of their friends in the teachers unions.

The original $23 billion “Education Jobs Fund,” or “public schools bailout,” in the words of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, fizzled, despite earnest lobbying by both the AFT and the larger National Education Association.

That number was trimmed to $10 billion and inserted into the Afghanistan war spending bill in a cynical maneuver cooked up by Big Labor.

While that passed the House, word is emerging that the pork-laden war bill isn’t going anywhere in the Senate.

But Big Labor’s pals aren’t giving up.  They’re a tenacious bunch that will find one way or another to continue spending oodles more on a bloated system that’s underserving America’s children.

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Earlier this year Robert Chanin, the recently retired general counsel for the National Education Association, discussed the effectiveness of teachers unions at a gathering in San Diego:

Despite what some of us would like to believe, it is not because of our creative ideas. It is not because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about children. And it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child.

NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.

You can see that portion of his 20 minute speech here:

Chanin’s honesty was, in a way, refreshing. For too long the NEA, as well as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have been hiding their intentions behind the guise of student advocacy, using children as human shields to block criticism.

But the truth is that the NEA and AFT are huge national labor unions with political agendas and have a great deal of influence with state and national lawmakers.  NEAexposed.com and AFTexposed.com are designed to bring attention to those facts.

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