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Randall Eberts explores the role of teachers unions in public education. He focuses particularly on how collective bargaining agreements shape the delivery of educational services, how unions affect both student achievement and the cost of providing quality education, and how they support educational reform efforts. Eberts's synthesis of the empirical research concludes that union bargaining raises teachers' compensation, improves their working conditions, and enhances their employment security—while also raising the cost of providing public education by upwards of 15 percent. The effect of unions on student performance is mixed. Students of average ability who attend school in union districts perform better on standardized tests, whereas low-achieving and high-achieving students perform worse. However, the overall gain in achievement does not make up for the higher cost. Of late, unions have begun to be more supportive of school reform, moving from an adversarial bargaining model to a more collaborative one in which teachers and administrators share common goals and hold joint responsibility. Yet unions' desire to participate in reform does not match their fervor to organize in the 1960s and 1970s. While national union leadership has talked about reform, local affiliates have initiated most of the reform efforts, pioneering reforms such as accountability and incentive pay. In Eberts's view, one reason that unions have been slow to embrace reform efforts is the lack of consensus on their effectiveness. He argues that many reforms have been too narrowly focused; rather, effective schools result from well-designed systems and processes. In principle, adopting standards that help teachers focus on lessons they want students to learn, aligning their teaching to the lessons, and devising measurements that demonstrate that students are responding to these lessons can improve teaching as long as the public, policymakers, and school administrators acknowledge the complexity of the learning process and the broad outcomes that society desires.

This paper describes the role of local partnerships in the delivery of workforce and economic development services in the United States. Partnerships include both public and private organizations and increasingly depend upon local business people for leadership. With grassroots organizations traditionally taking the lead in addressing local issues and a long history of decentralized government, it is not surprising that a labyrinth of partnerships characterize the provision of public services. This paper grew out of a study tour that the Upjohn Institute conducted in conjunction with the Local Employment and Economic Development (LEED) Committee of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). Delegates from 16 European countries visited nearly two dozen partnership organizations in the U.S. Midwest. The paper summarizes the history of local partnerships in the United States, tracks the separate evolution of workforce and economic development activities, describes the leadership roles of the federal and state governments in fostering partnerships, and provides case studies of current public-private partnerships that the delegates visited on the tour. The paper concludes by drawing lessons learned from the tour regarding the efficiency of partnerships, the efficiency of service delivery, the local management of programs, and the proper roles of federal, state, and local governments. A version of the paper appears in an OECD volume on partnerships entitled Local Partnerships for Better Governance, prepared by Sylvain Giguere