Collective Bargaining

With Republican-controlled legislatures and state houses from Wisconsin to Oklahoma attempting to strip state workers of collective bargaining rights, figures on the combined SAT and ACT college entrance test scores in states without them are proving fodder for the ongoing debate.

As republished in The Economist, a chart purporting to show that combined SAT and ACT scores in the five U.S. states without collective bargaining rights are among the worst in the country quickly became a viral hit on Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, this reporter first saw the information via Andrew Sullivan's blog, which linked to The Economist, a highly trusted source of information. The specific data showed the following combined SAT/ACT rankings for the states without collective bargaining rights for teachers:

* South Carolina -- 50th
* North Carolina -- 49th
* Georgia -- 48th
* Texas -- 47th
* Virginia -- 44th

According to the source cited by the Economist, Wisconsin ranked second.

Though the Economist did note that drawing the conclusion that students did better as a direct result of the inclusion of collective bargaining rights for their teachers was tenuous, it suggested that arguing that doing away with those rights would lift student performance was rather absurd.

The Economist wrote, "this doesn't show that collective bargaining makes school systems better. But it makes it pretty hard to argue the converse." The problem with the stats? As PolitiFact discovered, the data came from 1999, not 2010. Moreover, a variety of factors account for test score results.

While the most recent data on SAT/ACT scores shows outcomes not altogether out of line with the 1999 figures with South Carolina scoring 49th on the 2010 SAT and 46th on the 2009 ACT, while Wisconsin ranked third and 13th, respectively the point remains that judgment is better withheld on what the scores say in regard to collective bargaining. Here's how PolitiFact put it:

A review using current data finds that Wisconsin does perform better on test scores than the non-union states, but not as dramatically as suggested in the Facebook post. And there is at best limited evidence that unionization played a causal role in shaping differences in test scores.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, argues that allowing teachers unions to retain collective bargaining rights is too expensive a prospect in light of the state's budget shortfall.

North Carolina’s Controversial

Last fall, our own Nathan Koppel wrote about a 2009 North Carolina law that allowed death row inmates to challenge their convictions by showing that the convictions were racially biased.

As Koppel wrote, the law was controversial, and likely to be challenged in court.

Well, the law called the Racial Justice Act has survived its first serious challenge. On Thursday, a judge in Forsyth County rejected arguments by prosecutors that the law was too sweeping and failed to comply with the North Carolina Constitution.

Two North Carolina death-row inmates, Errol Duke Moses and Carl Stephen Moseley, are using statistics and findings from a Michigan State University study to claim racial imbalance and bias played a role in their trials and sentencing.

Their cases are the first of the 154 death row inmates seeking relief under the law to get to a courtroom. Prosecutors in the case earlier this week attacked the law, saying it was too sweeping to apply fairly across the state, according to the News & Observer story.

An assistant district attorney, argued that the law does not specify exactly how race is to be considered in evaluating the bias claims. He objected to the fact that one of the two defendants, Moseley, a white inmate convicted of killing white victims, was alleging racial bias played a part in his sentencing.

Defense attorneys argued that that a broad law was exactly what the legislature intended. “In North Carolina, we have a societal interest in addressing a history that has been marred by racial discrimination,” said Paul Green, one of Moseley’s attorneys.

Lawyers will now move to the bias claims.

That said, according to the News & Observer story, the law could be in jeopardy in the political arena.

Republicans who gained control of the state Senate and House in January have talked about either severely narrowing the reach of the act or repealing it all together.