Tag Archives: foundry

Heritage Looks at Indiana’s Push for Right-to-Work

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More analysis on right-to-work and seperating fact from fiction from the Heritage Foundation’s blog, The Foundry:

Heritage’s James Sherk says the law is a common-sense solution for states wanting to create more job opportunities for workers.

Right-to-work laws reduce the financial benefit from organizing workplaces where unions have limited support. This makes unions less aggressive and encourages business investment, creating jobs. States can and should reduce unemployment by becoming right-to-work states.

Sherk’s analysis also found that right-to-work laws have little effect on wages, despite union claims to the contrary. Opponents of Indiana’s bill are making that argument a major issue in their campaign to defeat the effort.

While supporters in Indiana maintain their focus on the bill’s effect on job creation, there’s also a case to be made about the anti-American concept of forced unionization. Currently in Indiana, the government gives workers no choice. Their dues — 1 percent to 2 percent of wages — are given to union bosses, often to advocate for an agenda that workers might not support.

Passage of the bill in Indiana could boost efforts in other states. Last year New Hampshire lawmakers adopted a right-to-work bill, only to have it vetoed by the governor. The New York Times noted other campaigns in Maine, Michigan and Missouri.

New York City Schools See Benefits of Making Kids Earn Promotion

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The Foundry blog of the Heritage Foundation has an interesting post about the gains New York City schools have made by not allowing undeserving students to move forward. They write:

New evidence shows that ending social promotion – the practice of allowing students to advance a grade level without having mastered the content of their current grade – is having a positive result in student testing. A new study released on October 15th by the RAND corp. shows how New York City seventh graders who were held back as fifth graders have made academic gains.

The study, which looks at the effectiveness of the New York City Department of Education’s 2003 grade promotion policy, finds that fifth-graders who were held back due to low testing scores in math and language arts tested better as seventh-graders than did their peers who also tested low but advanced to grade six anyway. The policy, which put an end to social promotion for fifth-graders in 2003-04, has since been expanded to include grades five through eight.

Students in the Big Apple aren’t the only benefactors of the new policy. New York City Schools’ Chancellor Joel Klein takes notice of the success Florida has also had by ending social promotion. Klein writes about the similarities that exist between the policies Florida has implemented and those New York City is trying to implement in Education Next:

“Like Florida’s schools, New York City’s serve a high-needs population. But we are not allowing demographics to define our outcomes. Since 2002, our students have made steady progress. Today, far more students are meeting and exceeding standards in math and reading. We’ve substantially narrowed the racial and ethnic achievement gap, our students are catching up to students in the rest of the state, and our graduation rate is the highest it has been in decades.”