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The nation has just celebrated Labor Day, yet few Americans have any idea why. As high school students, most were taught little about unions-their role, their accomplishments, and how and why they came to exist. This is one of the conclusions of a new report, released today by the Albert Shanker Institute in cooperation with the American Labor Studies Center. The report, "American Labor in U.S. History Textbooks: How Labor's Story Is Distorted in High School History Textbooks," consists of a review of some of the nation's most frequently used high school U.S. history textbooks for their treatment of unions in American history. The authors paint a disturbing picture, concluding that the history of the U.S. labor movement and its many contributions to the American way of life are "misrepresented, downplayed or ignored." Students-and all Americans-deserve better.

It's well-known that patterns of occupational sex segregation in the labor market - the degree to which men and women are concentrated in certain occupations - have changed quite a bit over the past few decades, along with the rise of female labor force participation. Nevertheless, this phenomenon is still a persistent feature of the U.S. labor market (and those in other nations as well). There are many reasons for this, institutional, cultural and historical. But it's interesting to take a quick look at a few specific groups, as there are implications in our current policy environment.

The Labor Education Program of the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois conducted surveys of 983 Chicago Public School (CPS) teachers during winter 2011-2012.  In light of the recent debate over the length of the school day, this study offers a profile of a teacher's standard school day workload and the time he/she devotes to the job. Results from this survey revealed that claims that teachers are working "too short a day" are unwarranted at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.

Educators in public schools in the United States are typically enrolled in defined-benefit pension plans, which penalize across-plan mobility. We use administrative data from Missouri to examine how the mobility penalties affect the labor market for school leaders. We show that pension borders greatly affect leadership flows across schools  - for two groups of schools separated by a pension border, our estimates indicate that removing the border will increase leadership mobility between them by 97 to 163 percent. We consider the implications of the pension-induced rigidities in the leadership labor market for schools near pension borders in Missouri. Our findings are of general interest given that thousands of public schools operate near pension boundaries nationwide.

The claim that Chicago public school teachers aren't working enough hours during the school day are unwarranted at best and intellectually dishonest at worst, according to research from a University of Illinois labor expert. The contentious debate between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis over the length of the school day has focused on Chicago public schools having the shortest official day of any major city - five hours and 45 minutes for elementary school students, and six hours and 45 minutes for high school students. But Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois, says when you account for time outside of the contractually obligated instruction, a teacher's day is almost twice as long.

For the second time, the state's labor relations board has ruled that the city must accept mediation in its teacher evaluation talks with the United Federation of Teachers. The board, the Public Employees Relations Board, first decided in March to heed the UFT's request and appoint a mediator to broker negotiations about teacher evaluations in the 33 schools that until December had been receiving federal School Improvement Grants. But the city appealed the decision, arguing that it was no longer planning to negotiate a separate evaluation system for just those schools. Now the board has affirmed its stance and once again ordered the city into mediated talks with the union.

Breaking her silence on the city's plan to overhaul 33 struggling schools, Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said late Wednesday that she believes "turnaround" is a political strategy, not an educational one. "There's a fight going on here that has nothing to do with what's going on at the school," she said. "It's a labor dispute between labor and management and has nothing to do with the kids."

Here's my operational definition of screwed for this post. A district is identified as screwed (new technical term in school finance… as of a few posts ago) if a) the district has more than 50% higher census poverty than other districts in the same labor market and b) lower per pupil state and local revenues than other districts in the same labor market. As I've explained on numerous previous occasions, it is well understood that districts with higher poverty rates (among other factors) have higher costs of providing equal educational opportunity to their students. I then tally the percent of statewide enrollments that are concentrated in these screwed districts to determine the share of kids screwed by their state. And here are the rankings… or at least the short list of states that screw the largest share of low income students

Economist Jesse Rothstein recently released a working paper about which I am compelled to write, as it speaks directly to so many of the issues that we have raised here over the past year or two. The purpose of Rothstein's analysis is to move beyond the talking points about teaching quality in order to see if strategies that have been proposed for improving it might yield benefits. In particular, he examines two labor market-oriented policies: performance pay and dismissing teachers.

SKDKnickerbocker (SKD) is one of the top firms providing outside assistance to labor coalitions while raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars for work to undermine organized labor, particularly teachers unions. Led by Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director and current Democratic Party advisor, SKD has spearheaded state-based campaigns for Students First, the anti-teacher's union charter and school privatization group founded by former Chancellor of DC Public Schools Michelle Rhee.

"In previous posts, I've conveyed my distaste for the oft obsessively narrow thinking of the traditional labor economist when engaged in education policy research. I've picked on the assumption that greed and personal interest are necessarily the sole driving force of all human rational decision making. And I've picked on the obsession with narrow and circular validity tests. Yet still, sometimes, I see quotes from researchers I otherwise generally respect, that completely blow my mind. I gotta say, this quote from Tom Kane of Harvard regarding compensation for teachers holding masters degrees is right up there with the worst of them - most notably because it conveys such an obscenely narrow perspective of compensation policies (public or private sector) and broader complexities of labor market dynamics."

"The sharp decline in U.S. union membership over the past 30-40 years is well known, but does it reflect a change in attitudes towards organized labor? In other words, is decreasing union membership accompanied by decreasing support for labor?"

"I'm sure you've heard for years-even decades-that the public schools are failing; that teachers are lazy, incompetent and their labor unions are responsible for this so-called failure. The solution: fire the teachers, close the public schools and get rid of the labor unions. Then turn education over to private sector corporations run by CEOs who only answer to their wealthiest stock holders. For instance, Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, the Walton family, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdock and a flock of Hedge Fund billionaires. Let's see what you think after we go back to 1779 and walk through 235 years of history to the present. It won't take long-a few facts and a conclusion."

"I consider the Gates report to be another step in reducing teachers to labor under the heel of principals who function as management. If reform is ever to be successful, teachers and principals must work as partners. An adversarial system may work in the courtroom, but it has no place in the classroom."

We examine the link between math skills and labor-market outcomes using a resume-based field experiment.

"Last September's Chicago teachers strike, organized-and won-by an unapologetically democratic, community-centered union, gave hope to laborites across the country that there could be a functional American labor movement. Now, a caucus of unionists seeks to remake New York's United Federation of Teachers, the city's local of the American Federation of Teachers, in the CTU's mold. The Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE) was founded last spring as an alliance of teacher caucuses and activist groups. The caucus stands unconditionally opposed to school closings, retributive punishment of students, and the "junk science" of evaluating teachers based on student tests. "Teachers need to play the role in laying a platform for parents and students," says Marissa Torres, MORE's candidate for assistant treasurer in next month's elections. Torres calls for the UFT, like the Chicago Teachers Union, to foreground explicit anti-racism and collective struggle."

"Teachers are one of the most important resources a nation has for providing the skills, values and knowledge that prepare young people for productive citizenship - but more than this, to give sanctuary to their dreams and aspirations for a future of hope, dignity and justice. It is indeed ironic, in the unfolding nightmare in Newtown, that only in the midst of such a shocking tragedy are teachers celebrated in ways that justly acknowledge - albeit briefly and inadequately - the vital role they play every day in both protecting and educating our children.  What is repressed in these jarring historical moments is that teachers have been under vicious and sustained attack by right-wing conservatives, religious fundamentalists, and centrist democrats since the beginning of the 1980s. Depicted as the new "welfare queens," their labor and their care has been instrumentalized and infantilized; [1] they have been fired en masse under calls for austerity; they have seen rollbacks in their pensions, and have been derided because they teach in so-called "government schools."  Public school teachers too readily and far too pervasively have been relegated to zones of humiliation and denigration.  The importance of what teachers actually do, the crucial and highly differentiated nature of the work they perform and their value as guardians, role models and trustees only appears in the midst of such a tragic event. If the United States is to prevent its slide into a deeply violent and anti-democratic state, it will, among other things, be required fundamentally to rethink not merely the relationship between education and democracy, but also the very nature of teaching, the role of teachers as engaged citizens and public intellectuals and the relationship between teaching and social responsibility.  This essay makes one small contribution to that effort."

Are charter schools public? Are they private? Are they somewhere in between? There is a lively debate in the education community over these questions. Charter advocates claim that charter schools are, of course, public schools, with all the democratic accountability that this entails. The only difference, they say, is that charters are public schools with the freedom and space to innovate. On the other side, charter critics argue that contracting with the government to receive taxpayer money does not make an organization public (after all, no one would say Haliburton is public) and if a school is not regulated and governed by any elected or appointed bodies answerable to the public, then it is not a public school. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was recently forced to weigh in on this question. It came out with a clear verdict that charter schools are not, in fact, public schools.

The mayor wants to give his hand-picked superintendent the power to reassign bad teachers, reshape failing schools and stagger class times without union contract barriers. Mayor Frank Jackson, the only Ohio mayor who controls schools through an appointed board, angered fellow Democrats and the party's labor allies by challenging timeworn teacher union contracts. "What we will not accept is incremental change or the belief that everything is OK and we should continue down the same path," he said in a city hall interview. "That is not acceptable to us."

Nonprofit leaders have long been told to behave "more like a business" and the corporatization of higher education, where I now labor, has gotten critical attention. But these issues are still not widely discussed in philanthropy, where I once toiled, except by a few intrepid souls who study and critique the field.