February 14, 2023 Hoover Institution | Stanford University
Join the Hoover Book Club for engaging discussions with leading authors on the hottest policy issues of the day. Hoover scholars explore the latest books that delve into some of the most vexing policy issues facing the United States and the world. Find out what makes these authors tick and how they think we should approach our most difficult challenges.
In our latest installment, watch a discussion between Senior Fellow Terry Moe and Hoover Fellow Michael Hartney, author of How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American Education on Tuesday, February 14, 2023 at 10:00 am PT / 1:00pm ET.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Hartney is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and an assistant professor of political science at Boston College. Hartney’s scholarly expertise is in American politics and public policy with a focus on state and local governments, interest groups, and K–12 education politics and policy. His work has been published in top academic journals such as the American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science and received press coverage in the Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Hartney has also written for popular outlets including City Journal, Education Next, National Review, and the Washington Post.
ABOUT THE BOOK A critical, revelatory examination of teachers unions' rise and influence in American politics. As most American labor organizations struggle for survival and relevance in the twenty-first century, teachers unions appear to be an exception. Despite being all but nonexistent until the 1960s, these unions are maintaining members, assets—and political influence. As the COVID-19 epidemic has illustrated, today’s teachers unions are something greater than mere labor organizations: they are primary influencers of American education policy. How Policies Make Interest Groups examines the rise of these unions to their current place of influence in American politics. Michael Hartney details how state and local governments adopted a new system of labor relations that subsidized—and in turn, strengthened—the power of teachers unions as interest groups in American politics. In doing so, governments created a force in American politics: an entrenched, subsidized machine for membership recruitment, political fundraising, and electoral mobilization efforts that have informed elections and policymaking ever since. Backed by original quantitative research from across the American educational landscape, Hartney shows how American education policymaking and labor relations have combined to create some of the very voter blocs to which it currently answers. How Policies Make Interest Groups is trenchant, essential reading for anyone seeking to understand why some voices in American politics mean more than others.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:05):
[MUSIC]>> Terry Moe: Hello, I'm Terry Moe,
a senior fellow atthe Hoover Institution and
a professor of politicalscience at Stanford University.
Welcome to our latest installmentof the Hoover Book Club,
where we bring Hoover fellows and friendstogether to discuss their latest writings.
Today, we're joined by Hooverfellow Michael Hartney,
(00:27):
who has written a new book.
The title is how policiesmake interest groups.
The subtitle is governments,unions, and American education.
Hi, Michael, welcome.
>> Michael Hartney (00:41):
Thank you, good to be here.
>> Terry Moe (00:43):
Yeah, great to see you.
I look forward to our discussion today.
So just to kick this thing off,your book is very much about
the teachers unions,about their rise to power and
the various roles they'veplayed in American education.
So how did this project come about?
(01:05):
Why did you choose tostudy the teachers unions?
>> Michael Hartney (01:08):
Yeah, there's actually quite an interesting story behind that.
This is almost a book that really nevercame to fruition for two reasons.
One, a lot of mentors and other seniorscholars in the field told me when
I was a young graduate student,if you write on teachers unions and
you say anything that's not laudatory oryour research comes down in some
(01:32):
ways that teachers unions might not like,it will be career suicide.
So there were some voices saying,you weren't one of them,
you were one of the sortof rays of light out there.
But most people said, this is a politicalminefield, you don't wanna touch it.
The second reason was that there'snot a lot of data out there.
(01:53):
Most of the best data is heldby the unions themselves.
And so very early in the project,I actually reached out to the director of
research at one of the nation'stwo largest teachers unions and
asked if they would furnish me with somebasic information on the candidates that
they had endorsed forthe school board in a particular state.
(02:15):
And I guess this particular persondid an Internet search on me and
came across a paper that Ipublished in a scholarly journal.
And what's interesting is that the paperI published showed quite clearly
that in states where this teacher'sunion was politically active,
the union was very effective inblocking the policies that it opposed.
(02:38):
And I was sort of, I found it kind ofhumorous when this person told me, we're
not gonna share data with you because wedidn't like that article, because in my
mind, as a political scientist who studiesinterest groups, what I had just shown was
that this gentleman's interestgroup was very effective.
But for whatever reason,it's not easy to get data in this area.
(03:00):
And so for those two reasons, I almostdidn't tackle it, I'm glad I persisted.
And I know we're gonna talk aboutsome of sort of how I did that and
what went into that today.
>> Terry Moe (03:10):
And so would you say that the teachers unions are central
to what happens in American education?
>> Michael Hartney (03:15):
You can't divorce, particularly since 1983.
And those of us who study educationpolitics kind of look at 1983 as this
pivot point in the history of Americaneducation, the rise of the performance
based era of reform, where we sortof looked at schools and we said,
they need to be doinga lot better academically.
(03:36):
You can't understand those efforts toreform American education without putting
the teachers unions at the center of yourarguments, at the center of your analysis.
And other than a book that you wrote,I think, 2011,
that came out really, there was noscholarship among political scientists,
at least not book lengthtreatments on this topic.
(03:59):
So it's unfortunate.
And it's also true, I should say,that there's really not much written with
a political lens,sort of an interest group focus,
a policy influence story inschools of education either.
I mean, there's some rare exceptions,but it's few and far between.
>> Terry Moe (04:14):
So how did the teachers unions become so
important to what happens in education andto the politics of education?
Where did this all come from?
How far back does it go?
What were they like back aroundthe turn of the century and
later on up to the present day?
>> Michael Hartney (04:32):
Yeah, well, one of the most interesting things that sort of,
when I knew that there was a story to betold here that really happened when I,
I made several trips to the NEA'sarchives in Washington, DC,
there at George Washington University,and I came across a very old publication.
It was an internal survey that the NEA,just for folks listening,
(04:55):
the NEA is the nation'slargest teachers union.
It clicks in at about 3 million members,give or take the year.
You're looking at the largest laborunion in all of North America.
And so I'm in the archives and
I come across a survey that the NEAdid of its members in the 1950s.
(05:17):
And the survey revealed that teachersthought that outside of voting in,
say, presidential year elections,
that political activity was somethingthat teachers shouldn't do.
I mean, this was remarkable when we allknow today that teachers unions and
teachers are some of the most likelyfolks to vote in school board elections.
The unions are very active in makingendorsements in those elections and
(05:40):
quite effective.
We'll talk a little bit about that,I'm sure.
But you go back 50 years, and the NEA'sbig problem was that 75% of their
members thought it was even inappropriatefor teachers to talk to their
colleagues about which school boardmembers teachers should support.
So right off the bat, I said,there's a huge puzzle here.
(06:01):
And so I asked the question inthe first half of the book,
how did that all come to change?
And so the answer, in brief, and we candrill down a bit on this, but the answer,
in brief, is government.
Government intervened, and in particular,state governments in the 1960s and
1970s when they adopted public sectorlabor laws that empowered public
(06:22):
employees, not only teachers, of course,but teachers were the largest group,
public employees to collectively bargainwith state and local governments.
And my book argues that that wasa defining point that really ushered in
the sea change where unions were able tomobilize teachers in politics and unions
(06:44):
were able to build a large war chest ofpolitical money to spend and the like.
>> Terry Moe (06:51):
Okay, so let's go back a bit.
If you go back to the early 19 hundredsand working up through that period,
if you look across the world,teachers unions had emerged and
were powerful andvery active in other countries,
(07:11):
in other western nations,western democratic nations.
What were they like here back then?
>> Michael Hartney (07:22):
Well, I can report, I mean, my focus was less, say,
on the collective bargainingprocess in looking at this and
more on how they wereperceived by lawmakers.
And in my research,the quotations that I came across,
the surveys of statelegislatures prior to the 1960s,
there's that period, 1940,1950, is that two points?
(07:46):
One, teachers were consideredto have very little influence
over education policy making.
And two, state legislators did notdeem them a particularly influential
voice in American politics either.
So they were neither perceived.
As powerful in education, norwere they perceived as active and
influential in politics.
(08:06):
And so the result of thatis something that was of
concern to the teachers unions.
But you have to remember that atthis time period before the 1960s,
these associations that existed, andthey referred to themselves more as
associations than unions,certainly in the case of the NEA.
(08:26):
They really represented the interests ofschool administrators, superintendents,
sort of leadership,very male dominated leadership ranks,
and the education workforce, which was,of course, overwhelmingly female.
To the extent that theseorganizations did much for them,
it was really only as an indirectbyproduct of the NEA, say, lobbying for
(08:48):
more educational funding fromthe federal or state governments.
Obviously, there wasn't a lotof federal funding, but
that's something thatthe association would do.
But in terms of representingthe occupational interests of teachers,
that wasn't something that happened untilafter the advent of collective bargaining
in the 1960s.
>> Terry Moe (09:06):
Yeah, so, I mean, I think it's an interesting thing that public and
private sector unions have verydifferent histories in this country.
I mean, the private sector unionshad the National Labor Relations Act
in 1935 that really gave a hugeboost to private sector unions.
(09:27):
By 1953 or so,a third of private sector members or
private sector workers were union members.
So what was going on inthe public sector then?
The teachers unions are part of the publicsector, not part of the private sector.
They weren't covered bythe National Labor Relations act.
(09:50):
So what was happeningin the public sector?
Why weren't public sector unions included?
Why weren't they getting organized?
>> Michael Hartney (09:59):
Well, you have to start with the sort of prevailing ethos
that existed, right?
I mean, as many of those watchingprobably know, Franklin Roosevelt
himself was very skeptical of the ideathat you could transplant traditional
industrial style collectivebargaining to the public sector.
And the reasons, I mean, we're manifold,but quite obvious that when it
(10:23):
comes to government, the governmentis supposed to be representing and
watching out for the taxpayers.
It's supposed to be gettingthe best quality public
service that it can get atthe lowest possible cost.
And so that kind of ran anathema tothe idea that we ought to empower,
and particularly empower publicsector workers with the right to
(10:46):
withhold their services orwhat we would call strikes.
That this was a problem,would be a problem for
public safety if you expanded the right tobargain, to, say, police or fire, and it
would expand to the problem of teachers ifyou wanted them to be in the classroom and
not out on the picket line.
So there was just a prevailingethos against it, and as a result,
because teachers and other publicsector workers were left out, and
(11:10):
the story gets more complicated.
Of course, there have been efforts overtime to pass a nationwide public sector
collective bargaining law.
Those were defeated.
Sometimes it was because the signals beingsent by the Supreme Court were that they
would not allow that, because it wouldtake away the rights of states to define
their relationships withtheir own workforces.
(11:31):
So there's some other idiosyncraticreasons, but the bottom line is
teachers unions were not able to getorganized and get involved in collective
bargaining until state governments oftheir own volition decided to enact
laws that were analogous to that1935 National Labor Relations act.
(11:52):
And then when they did, that's when we seea flurry of teacher union organizing and
activity across the statesin the 1960s and 1970s.
>> Terry Moe (12:00):
Okay, so public sector workers, in terms of unionization,
were sort of late to the party, right?
I mean, in the private sector,
a lot of workers were unionizedstarting in the late.
Actually, they began to get unionizedbefore the National Labor Relations Act,
but afterwards, there was a bigincrease in unionization, but
(12:24):
not among public sector workers.
So when was it that the states,many of them,
started to adopt these labor lawsthat gave public sector workers,
including teachers, the same kinds ofrights that private sector workers had?
>> Michael Hartney (12:44):
So Wisconsin in 1959, became the first state to enact
a mandatory public sectorcollective bargaining law.
And I think it's also important to justbriefly mention what that is, by the way.
[LAUGH] So when a state adoptsa mandatory collective bargaining law for
public employees, what it means inpractice is that once it varies from state
(13:07):
to state the details of their law.
But for the most part, it means thatwhen a majority of employees in a given
bargaining unit, so if we're usingteachers as an example, the majority of
teachers in a school district vote thatthey want to be represented by a union.
That at that point,under that mandatory bargaining law,
(13:28):
the local school district governmenthas to legally sit down and
bargain over salary, wages, andworking conditions with the union.
And then there's a whole set of regulatorylaws and rules, oftentimes governed
by a public sector employee relationsboard, that maps out what that looks like.
But it's a real game changer for
(13:48):
the responsibilities thatthe school board itself,
as the representative of the public,owes to the teacher union employees.
But to return to your question, so 1959,
Wisconsin's the firststate to adopt such a law.
And then we see a lot more ofit in the mid sixties, but
particularly in the seventies.
And when the smoke clears by 1990,I believe it's about 34 states.
(14:15):
Certainly the majority of teachersin the United States were covered or
working in a state with a public sectorcollective bargaining law by 1980.
And then New Mexico, I think,is the last one to add one in 1992.
So it was a real sea change that happenedin a pretty quick period of time.
And I think it's important as wellto mention that the period of time
(14:37):
in which it happened, the timing andsequence is very important.
Because going back to what I mentionedat the outset, to your first question,
a nation at risk,the movement to reform America's schools,
to try things like new accountabilitymechanisms, charter schooling,
all the things that are the talkof reformers today that doesn't
(14:58):
get started until the mid eighties.
And so the teachers unions wereable to get a head start and
sort of get their power built upthrough collective bargaining and
through political activism,well ahead of the reformers.
And that's really hadlarge ramifications for
the battle between teachers' unions andreformers over American education policy.
>> Terry Moe (15:19):
So did teachers get unionized only in states
that had collective bargaininglaw legislation, or
did states that didn't have that kindof legislation, like Alabama and Texas?
Did teachers unionize there,too, and become powerful?
>> Michael Hartney (15:40):
So in regard to, there were only a handful of states, really,
that outright made collectivebargaining illegal, explicitly illegal.
And I think that probably that numbervacillated between maybe four to seven
states, give or take the particular year.
Those states that weren't in the 34 I hadtalked about that adopted those mandatory
Bargaining laws kind of fell into whatwas classified as permissive states.
(16:03):
So if the school board wanted to bargainand agree on a contract, they could.
And in fact, in many cases,we did see that happen.
Colorado is a state that comesto mind that over the years,
some of its larger school districtsbargained collectively with teachers,
even without that mandatory publicsector collective bargaining law.
(16:24):
But there's something else in yourquestion which is really important, and
that is that it's a myth.
A lot of people think it's the case, butit's a myth that teachers unions, or
if you, some people will push back,
you can't call it a union if itdoesn't bargain collectively.
Okay, fine.
[LAUGH] Teacher interest groups orteacher association interest groups,
they're pretty powerfulin almost every state.
(16:44):
Now, that varies, I wouldn't claim thatteachers unions in Alabama historically
were necessarily as powerfulas maybe in California, but
they were also pretty powerful.
And the reason for that is manifold.
But it relates to the fact that, firstoff, as employees, they have a perpetual,
never ending incentive to monitorwhat's going on in education policy.
(17:06):
We look at the percentage of peoplethat turn out to vote in school board
elections or will show up toa school board meeting when there's
a controversial issue on the agenda.
And it's not a big number, so just alittle bit of activism can go a long way.
And obviously, teachers and
other public school employees havean incentive that other citizens don't.
But another reason is that stateslike Alabama, for example,
(17:30):
the interesting case,
the union there became quite powerfuleven without collective bargaining.
And they were able to do thatbecause the state legislature,
which was controlled then by Democratsin a very clever sort of way,
if you will, decided that it wantedto help out its political ally in
the state's teachers union,the Alabama Education association.
(17:53):
So in 1983, the legislatureadopted a law that required local
school district governments in Alabamato automatically deduct the dues and
pack contributions of every memberof the AEA in a teacher's salary.
So you'd imagine,we're out here in Silicon Valley.
Could you imagine how excited Netflix orone of these subscription
(18:15):
companies would be if they knewthat every month out of your and
my paycheck they were gonnaget a membership fee?
Well, that's what the legislature didin Alabama, and it paid great returns.
The percentage of contributions thatteachers in Alabama gave to state politics
went through the roof afterthese laws were adopted.
And it was this symbiotic relationshipwhere the legislature was able to get
(18:37):
a policy in place that helped them andsecured their re-elections.
And the union was able togrow powerful and become
a big player in shaping the tone anddirection of education policy in Alabama.
So big takeaway here is that teachersunions are pretty active and
influential in almost all states andhave been since the 1970s.
>> Terry Moe (18:55):
Yeah, one interesting factoid I'll throw in here is that
even though Alabama doesn't havea collective bargaining law,
roughly 80% of the teachers belong tothe Alabama Education Association.
And in 1992, the president ofthe Alabama Education Association
(19:15):
was the democratic candidate forgovernor, right?
So this is not a weak organization.
And if you look at Texas,cities like Dallas and Houston and
Fort Worth and San Antonio,they all have powerful unions,
even though they don't havecollective bargaining.
(19:37):
So let me ask you another,more general question.
What's the relationship betweenthese laws that the states have and
the things that give unions power,say, in politics, and
also in dealing with school boards andgetting what they want right?
>> Michael Hartney (19:58):
And so this is the heart of the book,
certainly the heart of the first part ofthe book, like I said, basically built on
digitizing old historicalrecords from the NEA's archives,
measuring things across all 50 statesover roughly a 50 year period.
In terms of how many members dida given teachers union in a state have?
(20:18):
How many dollars did they raise for theirpolitical action committee per member
in a given state during a given year?
And the answer is that these laws hada direct influence, a causal relationship
between the adoption governmentdeciding to put its thumb on the scale,
if you will, and adopt these friendly,mandatory public sector
(20:39):
bargaining laws and the ability ofteachers unions to do several things.
So let's walk through those things.
The first is to mobilize theirmembers in terms of turning out for
political activities, knocking on doors,leafletting, making phone calls,
all the way from local school boardelections to state legislative and
gubernatorial elections.
(21:02):
And the evidence for that is quite simple.
I looked at a survey that's usedby many political scientists,
the American National Election Study.
And I identified allthe teachers in that survey.
It's a survey that goes back and asks manyof the same questions to the 1940s and
1950s about how activeAmericans are in politics.
(21:22):
And if you were a teacher working ina state that adopted one of these labor
laws, after the passage of the law,
you were much more likely to reportto the AES that you did that,
knocking on doors that you were morelikely to donate to a candidate.
And I'm able to deduce that thatuptick in political activism,
(21:42):
that there's a direct line betweengovernment subsidy of the unions through
collective bargaining and the union'sability to mobilize their members.
Because these same teachers reported thatafter the onset of collective bargaining,
they were much more likely to receivea recruitment request from their
union to get involved in politics.
(22:03):
And the reason that's important,it might seem like common sense, but
it's important because politicalscientists who study political
participation have long known that one ofthe best predictors for who reliably gets
involved in politics are citizens whoare embedded in social networks or
members of organizations that mobilizethem and ask them to be involved.
(22:24):
So that's what happened at the mass level,that teachers unions were able
to get teachers to jettison that politicalapathy that they had before the advent of
collective bargaining andto get involved in the trenches.
But at the organizational level, and thisis probably even more important than at
the mass level, at the organization level,
after the onset of a publicsector collective bargaining law,
(22:46):
you saw huge increases in the numberof members of a state's teachers union.
You saw a huge increase in the amount ofdues revenue that the union was able to
raise, andyou see big increases in the spending or
the money that was donated totheir political action committees.
And so let me give a contemporary exampleto help kind of give life to this.
(23:10):
So several years ago,
when Arnold Schwarzenegger wasthe governor of California,
he sponsored some ballot initiativesthat the teachers unions opposed.
They were education reformrelated ballot initiatives.
And the teachers unions wanted tobuild a huge war chest to defeat
these initiatives.
And so to raise more money, theyinstantly increased all members dues by
(23:32):
something like $60,I mean, a huge increase.
Now, basic economic theory would predictthat any membership association that
instantly raises dues by that much wouldlose members, would hemorrhage members.
And in fact, one of the things I point outin the book is that we've seen that over
the years, when you look atthe American Bar association,
(23:53):
the American Medical Association,
Bob Putnam documented thisfamously in bowling alone.
That around the time the teacherunions were finding their moxie,
all of these other membershipassociations were cratering.
And so the same thinghappened here in California.
The CTA,the California Teachers Association,
didn't even feel a pinprickwhen it raised dues like that.
(24:14):
And the reason was that at that time,the public sector collective bargaining
law over teachers in California not onlyrequired that if you didn't want to be
a member of the teachers unions,that you nevertheless had to pay a so
called agency fee to support the union,but that was an automatic thing.
The union didn't even have to bargain forthat in California.
(24:36):
It was just the minutea new teacher was hired,
the CTA could count on xnumber of new dollars.
So it wasn't a surprisethat they lost membership.
So it was these laws andthese labor policies and
practices that enabled unions to becomeformidable political organizations and
formidable at the federal,state and local level.
(24:57):
And that's very important, obviously,
because education policy is madeat all three levels of government.
That's something that none of theirpolitical opponents were able to replicate
because they didn't have access to thissort of governmental subsidy that helped
them build themselves up.
>> Terry Moe (25:13):
Okay, so I think you've given a good discussion now of
governmental subsidy, andthat's a key concept in your book
because it provides a key explanation forunion power.
Another key concept in yourbook is policy feedback.
And I'm sure this is a conceptthat most people in the audience
(25:35):
are not familiar with, in a way,it's political science jargon, right?
But it's really a very straightforward andimportant thing.
So maybe you can explain that.
>> Michael Hartney (25:46):
Well, what we mean when we talk about policy feedback, and
central to that concept,at least in the context of my book,
is work that you've done sort of termingthis notion of vested interests.
Vested interests in a political system areeven more powerful than a special interest
because vested interests are intereststhat arise from the very institutions
(26:07):
that we're seeking to understand.
So in the case of American education,
school employees are an obvious vestedinterest because the US spends seven,
$800 billion a year on education,which means it's fun, and
80% of that is spent on schoolemployees salaries and benefits.
So those policies, there's a directlinkage between those policies and
(26:32):
the propensity and incentive for schoolemployees under the auspices of their
unions, to be involved in then trying todo political advocacy that shapes policy.
So it becomes this cyclical processwhere the government enacts policies.
It changes the way that vestedinterests and school employees behave.
(26:54):
They get active in school board elections,they show up at school board meetings,
their interest groupsshow up in Washington and
engage in grassroots lobbyingthrough their membership base.
And then that provides an incentive formembers of Congress, governors,
state legislators and school boardmembers to all listen to what they prefer
(27:15):
when it comes to policy in a way thatthose elected officials don't necessarily
have an incentive to listen to othergroups that have an interest in how our
schools look like parents and taxpayerwatchdog groups and so on down the line.
>> Terry Moe (27:31):
Okay, so
how does all this relate tothe American education reform movement?
So in 1983, a nation at risk sort of kicks
off this huge movement toimprove America's schools.
In some sense,it's still going on today, but
(27:51):
it's really sort of peteredout to some extent.
But it's decades, right,decades of attempts at reform.
How does government subsidy andpolicy feedback,
how do they help explainthe union's role in all that and
the actual success orfailure of the reform movement, right?
>> Michael Hartney (28:14):
Well, the most important thing to understand in regard to
how teachers unions influenceeducation policy is that
we really need to bifurcatewhat we're talking about into
the efforts of teachers unionsto act as political advocates.
To get government to adopt reforms orpolicies it wants, and
(28:37):
separate those from efforts thatthe teachers unions, as an interest group,
undertake to block the reform proposals ofthose in the education reform movement.
And this distinction is critical because alot of times people will read the book or
in conversations that I have onthis work will say, wait a minute,
I don't understand.
(28:58):
How can you say teachers unions are sopowerful?
Teachers make a modest salary,
an average of a little under60,000 are around there a year.
If they were really so powerful,wouldn't they all be making a quarter
million dollars [LAUGH] Andso on and so forth.
And the answer is that when it comes totrying to get the things that they want,
of course teachers unions aren't allpowerful because they're just like every
(29:20):
other interest group out there trying tofight for the common pool of resources.
I mean, there's only so much money to goaround, but where they're very powerful.
And this isn't a controversial point.
I should point out that the notedhistorian David Tyack, in his 1974 book,
famously said that the teachersunions are the single entity in
(29:41):
education that has the most powerto block reform and change.
And so that's really what I explore inthe book as it relates to the American
education reform movement, that unions,particularly at the state and
local levels, and that's reallykey to what I unpack in the book,
that when we're talkingabout national politics.
(30:02):
It's no accident that you're able to sortof have a breakthrough with no child left
behind because the political constituency,there's more competition in Washington.
Elected officials in Washington have tocare what the Chamber of Commerce thinks,
what those civil rightsorganizations think.
But oftentimes, when these policy issuesare pushed down to the state level, and
particularly like the localschool district level,
(30:25):
where one in ten Americans are votingin school board elections.
The union's persistent political activismin their organization has allowed
them to block the reform policies whereyou would have to implement them.
And so that actually is part ofthe story of no Child Left behind.
So remember, under No Child Left Behind,
one of the things that its authorsenvisioned having happen was that when
(30:47):
school districts failed tomake adequate yearly progress,
when their students weren't doing well andschools weren't improving.
The authors of the legislation had thesebig visions for empowering parents by
providing public school choice,by providing quasi vouchers, say,
that students could take to go gettutoring at Kaplan or Princeton review.
(31:08):
But all of that had to be implementedat the school district level by
administrators and superintendents andschool board members.
Who, when it comes to who they owe theirpresence to, they owe it oftentimes to
teachers unions, who, as I show in thebook, when the unions make an endorsement
in a school election,they win seven out of those ten contests.
(31:29):
So education reform did get off with abang in 1983, but we really got a whimper.
I think Rick Hess of the Americanenterprise institute puts it
really well when he says, if we startedthe education reform movement on maybe
the 20 yard line in 1983,if we're doing a football analogy.
Maybe today in 2022,other than some bright spots,
(31:50):
we've moved the ball five yardsin about 30 something years.
And a lot of that, not all of it, buta lot of that is owed to the vigorous
resistance of teachers unions to Change,which is just a natural thing, right?
If somebody's proposinga massive change and
these are things you're uncomfortablewith and you don't wanna take a chance,
whether it's reimagining teacher pay orteacher tenure.
(32:12):
You're gonna be risk averse andyou're gonna hunker down and
you're gonna have your interest group thatrepresents your occupational interests be
a lot more risk averse inthe way that parents and
those desperate for a better system aremuch more open to reform experimentation.
>> Terry Moe (32:26):
Well, in addition to being uncomfortable with change, what is there
about the interests of teachers'unions that would drive them to be
opposed to the kinds of changes that werecentral to the school reform movement?
>> Michael Hartney (32:43):
Right, so here I think it's most helpful to break this up into
the sort of two major planks of reformthat we've seen since a nation at risk.
Maybe we could argue there's a third ofschool governance reforms, but the two big
ones, of course, are the movement forinfusing standards and accountability.
(33:03):
Well, really standards, accountability andassessments into education,
holding schools accountable forhow much students learn, and
the second one beingthe school choice movement.
And if you look directlyat those two movements,
if you follow through the logic ofthose reforms, to their endpoint,
(33:24):
they both involve risking orputting at risk teachers jobs,
putting at risk money that goesinto traditional public schools.
Taking accountability is very obvious,until the great Recession,
until President Obama's presidency.
There were very few states in this countrythat when they evaluated a teacher,
(33:45):
which could happen every couple of years,
or when they decided to make a tenuredecision and give a teacher some.
Some permanent or some real jobprotections, they would do that without
looking one iota at how effectivethe teacher was in the classroom.
And so the accountability movement,which started by saying,
(34:06):
let's hold schools accountableafter a few decades,
said, well, we should be holdingteachers accountable, too.
By the way, I should point out that thesereform proposals at the time were very
popular with the public,60, 70% of the public.
And many Democrats said it does make a lotof sense to pay teachers who do a good
job in the classroom more than teacherswho don't do a good job in the classroom.
(34:27):
Very common sense,apple pie supported reforms.
But obviously, labor unions, they can'tget on board with that because their job,
by definition, is to represent theinterests of every one of their members,
not just the one that'shelping students learn and
is very effective in the classroom.
But the union's perspective is, no, let'sgive that teacher a third, fourth, fifth,
(34:49):
sixth, seventh chance.
We can't allow the loss of any jobs.
So that's kind of the storyon accountability.
On choice, the story is similar,but only slightly different,
that charter schools andother new models of schooling,
whether it would be through school voucherprograms or education savings account.
These offer the opportunity forparents to take their education dollars to
(35:12):
another school,a school that might do great things for
their kid, but a school that's going, weknow, is much less likely to be unionized.
And so what that, again,
means is that dollars are flowing intoschools that are not unionized, which,
again, means fewer dollars in termsof union dues and union power.
So when it comes to both of those things,and then let me add a third,
(35:34):
an area of interest of mine, andthat's school governance reforms.
And maybe we'll talk a littlebit about Michelle Rhee and
what she managed to do in Washington, DC.
But there's been an effort to point outthat maybe what we ought to do in some
cases is give serious considerationto new forms of governance,
like mayoral control, right?
Because mayors serve a much broaderpolitical constituency than do school
(35:57):
boards, more people votein those elections.
And so the degree to which teachers'unions political activism can curry
the same sort of power may look differentwhen we turn over power to governors or
to mayors in schooling than ifwe rely on a more parochial
elected political bodylike a school board.
So we've seen unions tend to resist thosesorts of reforms under the guise of
(36:21):
calling it not in keeping with democracy.
But of course, ironically, as I saida moment ago, a lot of these reforms that
they've been opposing are supportedby large batches of the public,
which itself raises fundamental questionsabout whether teachers unions are actually
leading to more orless democracy in American education.
>> Terry Moe (36:40):
So it sounds like what you're saying is that from the beginning,
the unions have opposed anduse their power to oppose the major
school reform efforts comingout of a nation at risk.
Those are accountability and choice,that both accountability and
(37:01):
choice have threatened the interestsof teachers and unions.
Would they ordid they oppose these reforms
even though they may wellhave been good for kids?
Would they oppose reformsthat are actually good for
(37:21):
kids just because theythreaten the jobs of teachers?
>> Michael Hartney (37:25):
Yeah, I mean, look, the reality is, and
there have been union leaders in momentsof honesty over the years who have said
various quotations to the like of that,the interests of teachers and
the interests of studentsdon't always align.
Now union advocates tend to say theyalign more than they don't align.
But I don't think anyone argues that thereare some major issues where what would be
(37:49):
good for a child's educationruns into conflict with what I,
as a school employee mightwant occupationally.
I mean, I can make it personala little bit and say, look,
I'm on faculty at Boston College.
It might be nice for five years to be ableto not have to teach a single class and
just focus on my research.
But that's not in the best interest of thestudents at Boston College that are there
(38:13):
trying to learn political science.
And so you could imagine thatthe assignment that a teacher prefers in
a school district might not be the onethat their principal thinks is the one
that would be most effective forthe school as a whole.
You could imagine that a teacher whodoesn't wanna be a part of a pay system
that's going to look at their performancecuz they're concerned that their
(38:35):
performance might not be up to snuff.
And occupationally,
those teachers have a very obviousreason then to oppose reforms.
But those reforms are veryobviously good for kids, right?
It's obvious that the only interestchildren have when they attend
school is having year in andyear out the very best possible teacher,
the most effective teacherthat they could have.
And so to the extent that teachersunions have an inherent incentive
(39:00):
to defend low performing teachers,that runs directly and
obviously into the interestsof what's good for children.
>> Terry Moe (39:09):
So when you listen to the defenders of the existing system and
opponents of choice and of accountability,
their claim is that the real powers ineducation reform are the philanthropists,
people like Gates andBroad and others, and
(39:34):
hedge fund people whoare supporters of school reform.
And it's the teachers' unions whoare really standing up for the system and
trying to protect what's good for kids.
What do you think of that,
and what do you think of the role thatphilanthropists have played in all this?
>> Michael Hartney (39:54):
Well, let me start with the sort of positive case for
getting philanthropy involved.
It's very difficult forthe central consumers of education,
especially the disadvantaged,those without means.
The parents without means don't have timeto be a watchdog at every school board
meeting.
They don't have time to start nonprofit orpolitical advocacy groups that try to seat
(40:17):
a reformed group ofschool board candidates.
They may not even have the wherewithalto do it, or certainly not the funding.
So this is a classic collective actionproblem where the unions have a built in
advantage.
They have political machinery andapparatus and a set of members who,
at the drop of a hat, are ready to go andshow up for a school board meeting when
(40:37):
they're gonna talk about something liketeacher tenure or teacher pay policies, or
whether to authorize a charter schoolin a neighborhood, something like that.
But parents don't have a voice,
and philanthropy on those who've gotteninvolved in muscular educational
philanthropy have been one of the rarebright spots in allowing parents to get
a little bit of a counterweightto teachers unions.
(41:00):
Particularly in these large urban schooldistricts where philanthropists have
started to get involved in school boardelections, and in back candidates
who are in favor of charter schools, whenoverwhelmingly the minority community,
much more than the white community,tends to favor choice.
So if no one's going to berepresenting them, I think for
(41:20):
obvious reasons,the role can be filled by philanthropists.
Broad foundation, the Gates foundation,the Walton foundation.
These are groups that have beenin the vanguard of doing this.
Now, as much as their work has beencrucial to trying to help parents and
those looking to reform the system,I don't wanna oversell it.
(41:42):
They're not winning, they haven't won.
And despite the rhetoric that you hear,fewer than 1%, maybe 1%.
It was school choice week last week.
I was at an event the other daywhere I heard 750,000 students right
now are attending schools as a resultof a private school choice program,
a voucher, ESEA or the like,that's a drop in the bucket.
(42:05):
That is not a pinprick.
>> Terry Moe (42:06):
[LAUGH].
>> Michael Hartney (42:08):
If this has been 30 years of big business running roughshod
over teachers unions andthe labor movement and privatization,
they don't have a lot to show forthemselves.
Now, they do have some places,like New Orleans, like Washington,
DC, where there have been some meaningfulreforms that the unions have opposed.
In the case of New Orleans, an entirecharter based system in Washington,
(42:32):
DC, a very, very good teacheraccountability and evaluation system.
But those are rare.
And in one case, as you write in oneof your books, it took a hurricane to
destroy the traditional system andto weaken the union in New Orleans.
And in DC, it took a radical,
a revolutionary school governance reformthat gave a firebrand superintendent
(42:57):
in Michelle Reed just two years oftime to ink an evaluation deal.
But there are just as manygraveyards of reformers.
I mean, don't forget that Mayor AdrianFenty lost his reelection in DC in part
because he was sowilling to take on the teachers unions.
And you can go to a place like Newark,New Jersey,
(43:17):
where the billionaires club ofMark Zuckerberg came in and
basically had to spend $100 millionon a single teachers union contract.
And most accounts of the fallout ofwhat happened in Newark was that
you didn't get the sort ofmeaningful long term reform.
You got a system reverting towhat had been there in place,
(43:38):
the one favored by the teachers unions.
So I just don't think the evidence should.
They have a lot of money.
But money is not the only thingthat you need to be effective.
You need people who are going to vote.
You need people who are going to putthe education issue at the center of their
political universe.
I tell people all the time, a good analogybetween the, is the NEA and the NRA,
(43:59):
right?
The National Rifle association, if youlook at the public opinion polling data,
the NRA is out of step with the publicon a lot of common sense gun control
proposals.
But the NRA wins because the peoplewho will vote on that issue put it at
the center of their political universe.
Folks like Michael Bloomberg,gun control reform advocates,
(44:20):
they've got a base of support thatis a mile wide, but an inch deep.
And that's often been true ofthis education reform movement,
which is much more episodic.
>> Terry Moe (44:30):
Okay, so you hear people talking rightly,
that union membership has droppedlike a stone over the decades.
Now, union membership inthe private sector nationwide is,
(44:50):
I don't know, maybe 7% at best.
And union membership amongpublic sector unions isn't
very high either, although it is higher.
So what's going on there?
And does that mean that the teachersunions are getting weaker and
(45:13):
weaker over time and that in the future,education will be freer
to pursue reforms without havingthem blocked by the unions?
>> Michael Hartney (45:23):
Well, I think that starting during the Great Recession in
2009, and you had a wave ofRepublican Tea Party governors,
a wave of republican trifectas thatswept the states at a time in which
fiscal discipline was the calling card ofthe day because of that great recession.
(45:44):
So for a very brief window,
the unions really were underattack in certain states.
Think of a Wisconsin with Scott Walker,and New Jersey with Chris Christie.
And sort of capping off that decade ofdifficulty for the unions, of course,
was the Supreme Court stepping in 2018in the Janus versus AFSCME decision,
(46:06):
in which the court did overturna 40 year precedent going back to
the 1970s that had donewhat I alluded to earlier.
Which was allowed unions to chargeteachers who didn't wanna be a member
of their union, charge them feesto bolster the union's coffers.
So the court said,you can't do that anymore.
(46:27):
Teachers have a First Amendment rightto not associate their paychecks with
the unions.
So these have been real andmeaningful losses for teachers unions.
But as I step back, andI say in the book, when I was writing it,
in the final twelve months of writing it,when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
I thought it was a real eye openingevent because, among other things,
(46:51):
it showed just how little powerthe teachers unions had actually lost.
Whatever one thinks about how quicklyschools ought to have reopened or
when they ought to have reopened, parents,many of whom had really never paid much
attention to what's with the localeducators association in my district,
they wouldn't have reallythought much about it.
Suddenly were told by theirsuperintendents in many states that we're
(47:15):
literally not allowed to reopenthe school's doors until we sit down and
negotiate out a deal with one otherinterest group in the district about how
willing they are to do it.
And so that's a reminder that so long aspublic sector collective bargaining is
in place and teachers unions have thisspecial seat, or as I say in the book,
(47:35):
permanent reservations at the tableof policymaking in school districts.
And they uniquely have that, they're stillgoing to have more power than any other
interest group in the arena or any othergroup of constituents day in and day out.
So I don't think that's going to change.
(47:56):
I do think that there are some effortsright now I'm thinking about Florida as
an example.
The governor in Florida just last weekactually rallied behind legislation
that would require teachers unionsto demonstrate every year that
they have the support of a strong majorityof teachers in their school district.
(48:18):
And if they don't,
they would lose the privilege of havingthat permanent seat at the table in terms
of being able to representteachers in collective bargaining.
And so I think those sort of transparencysteps where we look under the hood and
we say, well,how much are these teachers representing?
Or how much are these unions representingteachers may lead to a bit of a more of
(48:39):
a retreat, but
I don't see the teachers unions beingknocked off their perch anytime soon.
And I'd also add that when you look atphilanthropy, I said when you'd asked me
about that, that their interest tendsto wax and wane, and it's episodic.
Well, that's another good example.
The Gates Foundation, the BroadFoundation, education philanthropy, more
(49:01):
generally, has pivoted away from the sortof reforms that made unions uncomfortable,
and they've moved on to other things,social and emotional learning, diversity,
equity, inclusion, ornon education things altogether.
So you've seen some loss of power perhapson that side of the equation, too.
So the unions are very much still inthe driver's seat is the takeaway
(49:23):
from the book.
>> Terry Moe (49:24):
Okay, so we just have a few more minutes here, and
I'm wondering if maybe as sort ofa wrap up, you can step back and
give our audience a sense ofexactly what's in your book,
the kinds of new data thatyou bring to bear and
new analysis that you provideon sort of different subjects.
(49:46):
Because it's a very comprehensivebook that talks about many
aspects of the rise of union power,how much power they have,
how they exercise their power, the role ofelections, and also student achievement,
which we didn't even talk about here,but it's all there in your book.
(50:07):
And I wonder if you can justspend a minute or two letting our
audience know what they can expectto find if they get your book.
>> Michael Hartney (50:18):
Great, so the first half of the book painstakingly documents,
by drawing on original primary sourcematerials, teacher labor contracts,
the intricacies of different states,teacher labor laws.
To really dive deep andshow how those changes when they happen,
led to a direct boost in the politicalactivism of teachers and
(50:42):
in the status of teacher union interestgroups in terms of their revenues,
their PAC spending,all of those sorts of things.
And it does it in a very readable way,that compares and
contrasts throughout the book howteachers unions have managed to do all
these things vis a vis other groupsthat haven't been able to do that.
(51:04):
National Parent Teacher Association,American Bar Association,
other sorts of interest groups.
And the second half of the book bringsa lot of original data to bear.
A variety of surveys.
I drawn over half a dozen original surveysof school board members to show, for
example, that when you inform schoolboard members of the positions or
of education reformpreferences of parents.
(51:27):
That it doesn't make a huge difference interms of the willingness of school board
members to support reform, but that whenyou tell school board members that are in
districts with politically powerfulteachers unions the position of teachers,
that school board membersare very apt to listen to them.
So you're gonna get a lot oforiginal surveys of teachers.
(51:51):
In fact, second half of the bookactually has a survey from about 4000
teachers in Wisconsin that I did rightduring the recall of Scott Walker.
So got a lot of interestingfeedback about that.
And it also includes a chapterwhere I summarize the latest state
of the literature on the effects ofteachers unions on student achievement.
(52:12):
And so I won't do too much of a spoileralert, but suffice it to say that the most
recent literature and the mostsophisticated studies are showing that
teachers unions don't have a benigneffect on student achievement.
But in fact, oftentimes, especially forthe, the poorest, most likely to
be minority students, that teachers unionshave a negative effect on the efforts to
(52:34):
boost student achievement among thoseimportant subgroups of the population.
>> Terry Moe (52:39):
Okay, well, I'm afraid that's all the time we have for today.
Thank you, Michael, forwriting such an exciting new book and for
a very interesting and fun discussion.
And I wanna thank all ofyou in the audience for
joining us, andI hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.
(52:59):
You can find Michael's bookon hoover.org for purchase.
You can also, of course,find it on Amazon.
I hope you pursue this, I thinkyou'll find it a really enriching and
eye opening book.
Thank you very much.
[MUSIC]
[MUSIC]>> Terry Moe: Hello, I'm Terry Moe,
a senior fellow atthe Hoover Institution and
a professor of politicalscience at Stanford University.
Welcome to our latest installmentof the Hoover Book Club,
where we bring Hoover fellows and friendstogether to discuss their latest writings.
Today, we're joined by Hooverfellow Michael Hartney,
(00:27):
who has written a new book.
The title is how policiesmake interest groups.
The subtitle is governments,unions, and American education.
Hi, Michael, welcome.
>> Michael Hartney (00:41):
Thank you, good to be here.
>> Terry Moe (00:43):
Yeah, great to see you.
I look forward to our discussion today.
So just to kick this thing off,your book is very much about
the teachers unions,about their rise to power and
the various roles they'veplayed in American education.
So how did this project come about?
(01:05):
Why did you choose tostudy the teachers unions?
>> Michael Hartney (01:08):
Yeah, there's actually quite an interesting story behind that.
This is almost a book that really nevercame to fruition for two reasons.
One, a lot of mentors and other seniorscholars in the field told me when
I was a young graduate student,if you write on teachers unions and
you say anything that's not laudatory oryour research comes down in some
(01:32):
ways that teachers unions might not like,it will be career suicide.
So there were some voices saying,you weren't one of them,
you were one of the sortof rays of light out there.
But most people said, this is a politicalminefield, you don't wanna touch it.
The second reason was that there'snot a lot of data out there.
(01:53):
Most of the best data is heldby the unions themselves.
And so very early in the project,I actually reached out to the director of
research at one of the nation'stwo largest teachers unions and
asked if they would furnish me with somebasic information on the candidates that
they had endorsed forthe school board in a particular state.
(02:15):
And I guess this particular persondid an Internet search on me and
came across a paper that Ipublished in a scholarly journal.
And what's interesting is that the paperI published showed quite clearly
that in states where this teacher'sunion was politically active,
the union was very effective inblocking the policies that it opposed.
(02:38):
And I was sort of, I found it kind ofhumorous when this person told me, we're
not gonna share data with you because wedidn't like that article, because in my
mind, as a political scientist who studiesinterest groups, what I had just shown was
that this gentleman's interestgroup was very effective.
But for whatever reason,it's not easy to get data in this area.
(03:00):
And so for those two reasons, I almostdidn't tackle it, I'm glad I persisted.
And I know we're gonna talk aboutsome of sort of how I did that and
what went into that today.
>> Terry Moe (03:10):
And so would you say that the teachers unions are central
to what happens in American education?
>> Michael Hartney (03:15):
You can't divorce, particularly since 1983.
And those of us who study educationpolitics kind of look at 1983 as this
pivot point in the history of Americaneducation, the rise of the performance
based era of reform, where we sortof looked at schools and we said,
they need to be doinga lot better academically.
(03:36):
You can't understand those efforts toreform American education without putting
the teachers unions at the center of yourarguments, at the center of your analysis.
And other than a book that you wrote,I think, 2011,
that came out really, there was noscholarship among political scientists,
at least not book lengthtreatments on this topic.
(03:59):
So it's unfortunate.
And it's also true, I should say,that there's really not much written with
a political lens,sort of an interest group focus,
a policy influence story inschools of education either.
I mean, there's some rare exceptions,but it's few and far between.
>> Terry Moe (04:14):
So how did the teachers unions become so
important to what happens in education andto the politics of education?
Where did this all come from?
How far back does it go?
What were they like back aroundthe turn of the century and
later on up to the present day?
>> Michael Hartney (04:32):
Yeah, well, one of the most interesting things that sort of,
when I knew that there was a story to betold here that really happened when I,
I made several trips to the NEA'sarchives in Washington, DC,
there at George Washington University,and I came across a very old publication.
It was an internal survey that the NEA,just for folks listening,
(04:55):
the NEA is the nation'slargest teachers union.
It clicks in at about 3 million members,give or take the year.
You're looking at the largest laborunion in all of North America.
And so I'm in the archives and
I come across a survey that the NEAdid of its members in the 1950s.
(05:17):
And the survey revealed that teachersthought that outside of voting in,
say, presidential year elections,
that political activity was somethingthat teachers shouldn't do.
I mean, this was remarkable when we allknow today that teachers unions and
teachers are some of the most likelyfolks to vote in school board elections.
The unions are very active in makingendorsements in those elections and
(05:40):
quite effective.
We'll talk a little bit about that,I'm sure.
But you go back 50 years, and the NEA'sbig problem was that 75% of their
members thought it was even inappropriatefor teachers to talk to their
colleagues about which school boardmembers teachers should support.
So right off the bat, I said,there's a huge puzzle here.
(06:01):
And so I asked the question inthe first half of the book,
how did that all come to change?
And so the answer, in brief, and we candrill down a bit on this, but the answer,
in brief, is government.
Government intervened, and in particular,state governments in the 1960s and
1970s when they adopted public sectorlabor laws that empowered public
(06:22):
employees, not only teachers, of course,but teachers were the largest group,
public employees to collectively bargainwith state and local governments.
And my book argues that that wasa defining point that really ushered in
the sea change where unions were able tomobilize teachers in politics and unions
(06:44):
were able to build a large war chest ofpolitical money to spend and the like.
>> Terry Moe (06:51):
Okay, so let's go back a bit.
If you go back to the early 19 hundredsand working up through that period,
if you look across the world,teachers unions had emerged and
were powerful andvery active in other countries,
(07:11):
in other western nations,western democratic nations.
What were they like here back then?
>> Michael Hartney (07:22):
Well, I can report, I mean, my focus was less, say,
on the collective bargainingprocess in looking at this and
more on how they wereperceived by lawmakers.
And in my research,the quotations that I came across,
the surveys of statelegislatures prior to the 1960s,
there's that period, 1940,1950, is that two points?
(07:46):
One, teachers were consideredto have very little influence
over education policy making.
And two, state legislators did notdeem them a particularly influential
voice in American politics either.
So they were neither perceived.
As powerful in education, norwere they perceived as active and
influential in politics.
(08:06):
And so the result of thatis something that was of
concern to the teachers unions.
But you have to remember that atthis time period before the 1960s,
these associations that existed, andthey referred to themselves more as
associations than unions,certainly in the case of the NEA.
(08:26):
They really represented the interests ofschool administrators, superintendents,
sort of leadership,very male dominated leadership ranks,
and the education workforce, which was,of course, overwhelmingly female.
To the extent that theseorganizations did much for them,
it was really only as an indirectbyproduct of the NEA, say, lobbying for
(08:48):
more educational funding fromthe federal or state governments.
Obviously, there wasn't a lotof federal funding, but
that's something thatthe association would do.
But in terms of representingthe occupational interests of teachers,
that wasn't something that happened untilafter the advent of collective bargaining
in the 1960s.
>> Terry Moe (09:06):
Yeah, so, I mean, I think it's an interesting thing that public and
private sector unions have verydifferent histories in this country.
I mean, the private sector unionshad the National Labor Relations Act
in 1935 that really gave a hugeboost to private sector unions.
(09:27):
By 1953 or so,a third of private sector members or
private sector workers were union members.
So what was going on inthe public sector then?
The teachers unions are part of the publicsector, not part of the private sector.
They weren't covered bythe National Labor Relations act.
(09:50):
So what was happeningin the public sector?
Why weren't public sector unions included?
Why weren't they getting organized?
>> Michael Hartney (09:59):
Well, you have to start with the sort of prevailing ethos
that existed, right?
I mean, as many of those watchingprobably know, Franklin Roosevelt
himself was very skeptical of the ideathat you could transplant traditional
industrial style collectivebargaining to the public sector.
And the reasons, I mean, we're manifold,but quite obvious that when it
(10:23):
comes to government, the governmentis supposed to be representing and
watching out for the taxpayers.
It's supposed to be gettingthe best quality public
service that it can get atthe lowest possible cost.
And so that kind of ran anathema tothe idea that we ought to empower,
and particularly empower publicsector workers with the right to
(10:46):
withhold their services orwhat we would call strikes.
That this was a problem,would be a problem for
public safety if you expanded the right tobargain, to, say, police or fire, and it
would expand to the problem of teachers ifyou wanted them to be in the classroom and
not out on the picket line.
So there was just a prevailingethos against it, and as a result,
because teachers and other publicsector workers were left out, and
(11:10):
the story gets more complicated.
Of course, there have been efforts overtime to pass a nationwide public sector
collective bargaining law.
Those were defeated.
Sometimes it was because the signals beingsent by the Supreme Court were that they
would not allow that, because it wouldtake away the rights of states to define
their relationships withtheir own workforces.
(11:31):
So there's some other idiosyncraticreasons, but the bottom line is
teachers unions were not able to getorganized and get involved in collective
bargaining until state governments oftheir own volition decided to enact
laws that were analogous to that1935 National Labor Relations act.
(11:52):
And then when they did, that's when we seea flurry of teacher union organizing and
activity across the statesin the 1960s and 1970s.
>> Terry Moe (12:00):
Okay, so public sector workers, in terms of unionization,
were sort of late to the party, right?
I mean, in the private sector,
a lot of workers were unionizedstarting in the late.
Actually, they began to get unionizedbefore the National Labor Relations Act,
but afterwards, there was a bigincrease in unionization, but
(12:24):
not among public sector workers.
So when was it that the states,many of them,
started to adopt these labor lawsthat gave public sector workers,
including teachers, the same kinds ofrights that private sector workers had?
>> Michael Hartney (12:44):
So Wisconsin in 1959, became the first state to enact
a mandatory public sectorcollective bargaining law.
And I think it's also important to justbriefly mention what that is, by the way.
[LAUGH] So when a state adoptsa mandatory collective bargaining law for
public employees, what it means inpractice is that once it varies from state
(13:07):
to state the details of their law.
But for the most part, it means thatwhen a majority of employees in a given
bargaining unit, so if we're usingteachers as an example, the majority of
teachers in a school district vote thatthey want to be represented by a union.
That at that point,under that mandatory bargaining law,
(13:28):
the local school district governmenthas to legally sit down and
bargain over salary, wages, andworking conditions with the union.
And then there's a whole set of regulatorylaws and rules, oftentimes governed
by a public sector employee relationsboard, that maps out what that looks like.
But it's a real game changer for
(13:48):
the responsibilities thatthe school board itself,
as the representative of the public,owes to the teacher union employees.
But to return to your question, so 1959,
Wisconsin's the firststate to adopt such a law.
And then we see a lot more ofit in the mid sixties, but
particularly in the seventies.
And when the smoke clears by 1990,I believe it's about 34 states.
(14:15):
Certainly the majority of teachersin the United States were covered or
working in a state with a public sectorcollective bargaining law by 1980.
And then New Mexico, I think,is the last one to add one in 1992.
So it was a real sea change that happenedin a pretty quick period of time.
And I think it's important as wellto mention that the period of time
(14:37):
in which it happened, the timing andsequence is very important.
Because going back to what I mentionedat the outset, to your first question,
a nation at risk,the movement to reform America's schools,
to try things like new accountabilitymechanisms, charter schooling,
all the things that are the talkof reformers today that doesn't
(14:58):
get started until the mid eighties.
And so the teachers unions wereable to get a head start and
sort of get their power built upthrough collective bargaining and
through political activism,well ahead of the reformers.
And that's really hadlarge ramifications for
the battle between teachers' unions andreformers over American education policy.
>> Terry Moe (15:19):
So did teachers get unionized only in states
that had collective bargaininglaw legislation, or
did states that didn't have that kindof legislation, like Alabama and Texas?
Did teachers unionize there,too, and become powerful?
>> Michael Hartney (15:40):
So in regard to, there were only a handful of states, really,
that outright made collectivebargaining illegal, explicitly illegal.
And I think that probably that numbervacillated between maybe four to seven
states, give or take the particular year.
Those states that weren't in the 34 I hadtalked about that adopted those mandatory
Bargaining laws kind of fell into whatwas classified as permissive states.
(16:03):
So if the school board wanted to bargainand agree on a contract, they could.
And in fact, in many cases,we did see that happen.
Colorado is a state that comesto mind that over the years,
some of its larger school districtsbargained collectively with teachers,
even without that mandatory publicsector collective bargaining law.
(16:24):
But there's something else in yourquestion which is really important, and
that is that it's a myth.
A lot of people think it's the case, butit's a myth that teachers unions, or
if you, some people will push back,
you can't call it a union if itdoesn't bargain collectively.
Okay, fine.
[LAUGH] Teacher interest groups orteacher association interest groups,
they're pretty powerfulin almost every state.
(16:44):
Now, that varies, I wouldn't claim thatteachers unions in Alabama historically
were necessarily as powerfulas maybe in California, but
they were also pretty powerful.
And the reason for that is manifold.
But it relates to the fact that, firstoff, as employees, they have a perpetual,
never ending incentive to monitorwhat's going on in education policy.
(17:06):
We look at the percentage of peoplethat turn out to vote in school board
elections or will show up toa school board meeting when there's
a controversial issue on the agenda.
And it's not a big number, so just alittle bit of activism can go a long way.
And obviously, teachers and
other public school employees havean incentive that other citizens don't.
But another reason is that stateslike Alabama, for example,
(17:30):
the interesting case,
the union there became quite powerfuleven without collective bargaining.
And they were able to do thatbecause the state legislature,
which was controlled then by Democratsin a very clever sort of way,
if you will, decided that it wantedto help out its political ally in
the state's teachers union,the Alabama Education association.
(17:53):
So in 1983, the legislatureadopted a law that required local
school district governments in Alabamato automatically deduct the dues and
pack contributions of every memberof the AEA in a teacher's salary.
So you'd imagine,we're out here in Silicon Valley.
Could you imagine how excited Netflix orone of these subscription
(18:15):
companies would be if they knewthat every month out of your and
my paycheck they were gonnaget a membership fee?
Well, that's what the legislature didin Alabama, and it paid great returns.
The percentage of contributions thatteachers in Alabama gave to state politics
went through the roof afterthese laws were adopted.
And it was this symbiotic relationshipwhere the legislature was able to get
(18:37):
a policy in place that helped them andsecured their re-elections.
And the union was able togrow powerful and become
a big player in shaping the tone anddirection of education policy in Alabama.
So big takeaway here is that teachersunions are pretty active and
influential in almost all states andhave been since the 1970s.
>> Terry Moe (18:55):
Yeah, one interesting factoid I'll throw in here is that
even though Alabama doesn't havea collective bargaining law,
roughly 80% of the teachers belong tothe Alabama Education Association.
And in 1992, the president ofthe Alabama Education Association
(19:15):
was the democratic candidate forgovernor, right?
So this is not a weak organization.
And if you look at Texas,cities like Dallas and Houston and
Fort Worth and San Antonio,they all have powerful unions,
even though they don't havecollective bargaining.
(19:37):
So let me ask you another,more general question.
What's the relationship betweenthese laws that the states have and
the things that give unions power,say, in politics, and
also in dealing with school boards andgetting what they want right?
>> Michael Hartney (19:58):
And so this is the heart of the book,
certainly the heart of the first part ofthe book, like I said, basically built on
digitizing old historicalrecords from the NEA's archives,
measuring things across all 50 statesover roughly a 50 year period.
In terms of how many members dida given teachers union in a state have?
(20:18):
How many dollars did they raise for theirpolitical action committee per member
in a given state during a given year?
And the answer is that these laws hada direct influence, a causal relationship
between the adoption governmentdeciding to put its thumb on the scale,
if you will, and adopt these friendly,mandatory public sector
(20:39):
bargaining laws and the ability ofteachers unions to do several things.
So let's walk through those things.
The first is to mobilize theirmembers in terms of turning out for
political activities, knocking on doors,leafletting, making phone calls,
all the way from local school boardelections to state legislative and
gubernatorial elections.
(21:02):
And the evidence for that is quite simple.
I looked at a survey that's usedby many political scientists,
the American National Election Study.
And I identified allthe teachers in that survey.
It's a survey that goes back and asks manyof the same questions to the 1940s and
1950s about how activeAmericans are in politics.
(21:22):
And if you were a teacher working ina state that adopted one of these labor
laws, after the passage of the law,
you were much more likely to reportto the AES that you did that,
knocking on doors that you were morelikely to donate to a candidate.
And I'm able to deduce that thatuptick in political activism,
(21:42):
that there's a direct line betweengovernment subsidy of the unions through
collective bargaining and the union'sability to mobilize their members.
Because these same teachers reported thatafter the onset of collective bargaining,
they were much more likely to receivea recruitment request from their
union to get involved in politics.
(22:03):
And the reason that's important,it might seem like common sense, but
it's important because politicalscientists who study political
participation have long known that one ofthe best predictors for who reliably gets
involved in politics are citizens whoare embedded in social networks or
members of organizations that mobilizethem and ask them to be involved.
(22:24):
So that's what happened at the mass level,that teachers unions were able
to get teachers to jettison that politicalapathy that they had before the advent of
collective bargaining andto get involved in the trenches.
But at the organizational level, and thisis probably even more important than at
the mass level, at the organization level,
after the onset of a publicsector collective bargaining law,
(22:46):
you saw huge increases in the numberof members of a state's teachers union.
You saw a huge increase in the amount ofdues revenue that the union was able to
raise, andyou see big increases in the spending or
the money that was donated totheir political action committees.
And so let me give a contemporary exampleto help kind of give life to this.
(23:10):
So several years ago,
when Arnold Schwarzenegger wasthe governor of California,
he sponsored some ballot initiativesthat the teachers unions opposed.
They were education reformrelated ballot initiatives.
And the teachers unions wanted tobuild a huge war chest to defeat
these initiatives.
And so to raise more money, theyinstantly increased all members dues by
(23:32):
something like $60,I mean, a huge increase.
Now, basic economic theory would predictthat any membership association that
instantly raises dues by that much wouldlose members, would hemorrhage members.
And in fact, one of the things I point outin the book is that we've seen that over
the years, when you look atthe American Bar association,
(23:53):
the American Medical Association,
Bob Putnam documented thisfamously in bowling alone.
That around the time the teacherunions were finding their moxie,
all of these other membershipassociations were cratering.
And so the same thinghappened here in California.
The CTA,the California Teachers Association,
didn't even feel a pinprickwhen it raised dues like that.
(24:14):
And the reason was that at that time,the public sector collective bargaining
law over teachers in California not onlyrequired that if you didn't want to be
a member of the teachers unions,that you nevertheless had to pay a so
called agency fee to support the union,but that was an automatic thing.
The union didn't even have to bargain forthat in California.
(24:36):
It was just the minutea new teacher was hired,
the CTA could count on xnumber of new dollars.
So it wasn't a surprisethat they lost membership.
So it was these laws andthese labor policies and
practices that enabled unions to becomeformidable political organizations and
formidable at the federal,state and local level.
(24:57):
And that's very important, obviously,
because education policy is madeat all three levels of government.
That's something that none of theirpolitical opponents were able to replicate
because they didn't have access to thissort of governmental subsidy that helped
them build themselves up.
>> Terry Moe (25:13):
Okay, so I think you've given a good discussion now of
governmental subsidy, andthat's a key concept in your book
because it provides a key explanation forunion power.
Another key concept in yourbook is policy feedback.
And I'm sure this is a conceptthat most people in the audience
(25:35):
are not familiar with, in a way,it's political science jargon, right?
But it's really a very straightforward andimportant thing.
So maybe you can explain that.
>> Michael Hartney (25:46):
Well, what we mean when we talk about policy feedback, and
central to that concept,at least in the context of my book,
is work that you've done sort of termingthis notion of vested interests.
Vested interests in a political system areeven more powerful than a special interest
because vested interests are intereststhat arise from the very institutions
(26:07):
that we're seeking to understand.
So in the case of American education,
school employees are an obvious vestedinterest because the US spends seven,
$800 billion a year on education,which means it's fun, and
80% of that is spent on schoolemployees salaries and benefits.
So those policies, there's a directlinkage between those policies and
(26:32):
the propensity and incentive for schoolemployees under the auspices of their
unions, to be involved in then trying todo political advocacy that shapes policy.
So it becomes this cyclical processwhere the government enacts policies.
It changes the way that vestedinterests and school employees behave.
(26:54):
They get active in school board elections,they show up at school board meetings,
their interest groupsshow up in Washington and
engage in grassroots lobbyingthrough their membership base.
And then that provides an incentive formembers of Congress, governors,
state legislators and school boardmembers to all listen to what they prefer
(27:15):
when it comes to policy in a way thatthose elected officials don't necessarily
have an incentive to listen to othergroups that have an interest in how our
schools look like parents and taxpayerwatchdog groups and so on down the line.
>> Terry Moe (27:31):
Okay, so
how does all this relate tothe American education reform movement?
So in 1983, a nation at risk sort of kicks
off this huge movement toimprove America's schools.
In some sense,it's still going on today, but
(27:51):
it's really sort of peteredout to some extent.
But it's decades, right,decades of attempts at reform.
How does government subsidy andpolicy feedback,
how do they help explainthe union's role in all that and
the actual success orfailure of the reform movement, right?
>> Michael Hartney (28:14):
Well, the most important thing to understand in regard to
how teachers unions influenceeducation policy is that
we really need to bifurcatewhat we're talking about into
the efforts of teachers unionsto act as political advocates.
To get government to adopt reforms orpolicies it wants, and
(28:37):
separate those from efforts thatthe teachers unions, as an interest group,
undertake to block the reform proposals ofthose in the education reform movement.
And this distinction is critical because alot of times people will read the book or
in conversations that I have onthis work will say, wait a minute,
I don't understand.
(28:58):
How can you say teachers unions are sopowerful?
Teachers make a modest salary,
an average of a little under60,000 are around there a year.
If they were really so powerful,wouldn't they all be making a quarter
million dollars [LAUGH] Andso on and so forth.
And the answer is that when it comes totrying to get the things that they want,
of course teachers unions aren't allpowerful because they're just like every
(29:20):
other interest group out there trying tofight for the common pool of resources.
I mean, there's only so much money to goaround, but where they're very powerful.
And this isn't a controversial point.
I should point out that the notedhistorian David Tyack, in his 1974 book,
famously said that the teachersunions are the single entity in
(29:41):
education that has the most powerto block reform and change.
And so that's really what I explore inthe book as it relates to the American
education reform movement, that unions,particularly at the state and
local levels, and that's reallykey to what I unpack in the book,
that when we're talkingabout national politics.
(30:02):
It's no accident that you're able to sortof have a breakthrough with no child left
behind because the political constituency,there's more competition in Washington.
Elected officials in Washington have tocare what the Chamber of Commerce thinks,
what those civil rightsorganizations think.
But oftentimes, when these policy issuesare pushed down to the state level, and
particularly like the localschool district level,
(30:25):
where one in ten Americans are votingin school board elections.
The union's persistent political activismin their organization has allowed
them to block the reform policies whereyou would have to implement them.
And so that actually is part ofthe story of no Child Left behind.
So remember, under No Child Left Behind,
one of the things that its authorsenvisioned having happen was that when
(30:47):
school districts failed tomake adequate yearly progress,
when their students weren't doing well andschools weren't improving.
The authors of the legislation had thesebig visions for empowering parents by
providing public school choice,by providing quasi vouchers, say,
that students could take to go gettutoring at Kaplan or Princeton review.
(31:08):
But all of that had to be implementedat the school district level by
administrators and superintendents andschool board members.
Who, when it comes to who they owe theirpresence to, they owe it oftentimes to
teachers unions, who, as I show in thebook, when the unions make an endorsement
in a school election,they win seven out of those ten contests.
(31:29):
So education reform did get off with abang in 1983, but we really got a whimper.
I think Rick Hess of the Americanenterprise institute puts it
really well when he says, if we startedthe education reform movement on maybe
the 20 yard line in 1983,if we're doing a football analogy.
Maybe today in 2022,other than some bright spots,
(31:50):
we've moved the ball five yardsin about 30 something years.
And a lot of that, not all of it, buta lot of that is owed to the vigorous
resistance of teachers unions to Change,which is just a natural thing, right?
If somebody's proposinga massive change and
these are things you're uncomfortablewith and you don't wanna take a chance,
whether it's reimagining teacher pay orteacher tenure.
(32:12):
You're gonna be risk averse andyou're gonna hunker down and
you're gonna have your interest group thatrepresents your occupational interests be
a lot more risk averse inthe way that parents and
those desperate for a better system aremuch more open to reform experimentation.
>> Terry Moe (32:26):
Well, in addition to being uncomfortable with change, what is there
about the interests of teachers'unions that would drive them to be
opposed to the kinds of changes that werecentral to the school reform movement?
>> Michael Hartney (32:43):
Right, so here I think it's most helpful to break this up into
the sort of two major planks of reformthat we've seen since a nation at risk.
Maybe we could argue there's a third ofschool governance reforms, but the two big
ones, of course, are the movement forinfusing standards and accountability.
(33:03):
Well, really standards, accountability andassessments into education,
holding schools accountable forhow much students learn, and
the second one beingthe school choice movement.
And if you look directlyat those two movements,
if you follow through the logic ofthose reforms, to their endpoint,
(33:24):
they both involve risking orputting at risk teachers jobs,
putting at risk money that goesinto traditional public schools.
Taking accountability is very obvious,until the great Recession,
until President Obama's presidency.
There were very few states in this countrythat when they evaluated a teacher,
(33:45):
which could happen every couple of years,
or when they decided to make a tenuredecision and give a teacher some.
Some permanent or some real jobprotections, they would do that without
looking one iota at how effectivethe teacher was in the classroom.
And so the accountability movement,which started by saying,
(34:06):
let's hold schools accountableafter a few decades,
said, well, we should be holdingteachers accountable, too.
By the way, I should point out that thesereform proposals at the time were very
popular with the public,60, 70% of the public.
And many Democrats said it does make a lotof sense to pay teachers who do a good
job in the classroom more than teacherswho don't do a good job in the classroom.
(34:27):
Very common sense,apple pie supported reforms.
But obviously, labor unions, they can'tget on board with that because their job,
by definition, is to represent theinterests of every one of their members,
not just the one that'shelping students learn and
is very effective in the classroom.
But the union's perspective is, no, let'sgive that teacher a third, fourth, fifth,
(34:49):
sixth, seventh chance.
We can't allow the loss of any jobs.
So that's kind of the storyon accountability.
On choice, the story is similar,but only slightly different,
that charter schools andother new models of schooling,
whether it would be through school voucherprograms or education savings account.
These offer the opportunity forparents to take their education dollars to
(35:12):
another school,a school that might do great things for
their kid, but a school that's going, weknow, is much less likely to be unionized.
And so what that, again,
means is that dollars are flowing intoschools that are not unionized, which,
again, means fewer dollars in termsof union dues and union power.
So when it comes to both of those things,and then let me add a third,
(35:34):
an area of interest of mine, andthat's school governance reforms.
And maybe we'll talk a littlebit about Michelle Rhee and
what she managed to do in Washington, DC.
But there's been an effort to point outthat maybe what we ought to do in some
cases is give serious considerationto new forms of governance,
like mayoral control, right?
Because mayors serve a much broaderpolitical constituency than do school
(35:57):
boards, more people votein those elections.
And so the degree to which teachers'unions political activism can curry
the same sort of power may look differentwhen we turn over power to governors or
to mayors in schooling than ifwe rely on a more parochial
elected political bodylike a school board.
So we've seen unions tend to resist thosesorts of reforms under the guise of
(36:21):
calling it not in keeping with democracy.
But of course, ironically, as I saida moment ago, a lot of these reforms that
they've been opposing are supportedby large batches of the public,
which itself raises fundamental questionsabout whether teachers unions are actually
leading to more orless democracy in American education.
>> Terry Moe (36:40):
So it sounds like what you're saying is that from the beginning,
the unions have opposed anduse their power to oppose the major
school reform efforts comingout of a nation at risk.
Those are accountability and choice,that both accountability and
(37:01):
choice have threatened the interestsof teachers and unions.
Would they ordid they oppose these reforms
even though they may wellhave been good for kids?
Would they oppose reformsthat are actually good for
(37:21):
kids just because theythreaten the jobs of teachers?
>> Michael Hartney (37:25):
Yeah, I mean, look, the reality is, and
there have been union leaders in momentsof honesty over the years who have said
various quotations to the like of that,the interests of teachers and
the interests of studentsdon't always align.
Now union advocates tend to say theyalign more than they don't align.
But I don't think anyone argues that thereare some major issues where what would be
(37:49):
good for a child's educationruns into conflict with what I,
as a school employee mightwant occupationally.
I mean, I can make it personala little bit and say, look,
I'm on faculty at Boston College.
It might be nice for five years to be ableto not have to teach a single class and
just focus on my research.
But that's not in the best interest of thestudents at Boston College that are there
(38:13):
trying to learn political science.
And so you could imagine thatthe assignment that a teacher prefers in
a school district might not be the onethat their principal thinks is the one
that would be most effective forthe school as a whole.
You could imagine that a teacher whodoesn't wanna be a part of a pay system
that's going to look at their performancecuz they're concerned that their
(38:35):
performance might not be up to snuff.
And occupationally,
those teachers have a very obviousreason then to oppose reforms.
But those reforms are veryobviously good for kids, right?
It's obvious that the only interestchildren have when they attend
school is having year in andyear out the very best possible teacher,
the most effective teacherthat they could have.
And so to the extent that teachersunions have an inherent incentive
(39:00):
to defend low performing teachers,that runs directly and
obviously into the interestsof what's good for children.
>> Terry Moe (39:09):
So when you listen to the defenders of the existing system and
opponents of choice and of accountability,
their claim is that the real powers ineducation reform are the philanthropists,
people like Gates andBroad and others, and
(39:34):
hedge fund people whoare supporters of school reform.
And it's the teachers' unions whoare really standing up for the system and
trying to protect what's good for kids.
What do you think of that,
and what do you think of the role thatphilanthropists have played in all this?
>> Michael Hartney (39:54):
Well, let me start with the sort of positive case for
getting philanthropy involved.
It's very difficult forthe central consumers of education,
especially the disadvantaged,those without means.
The parents without means don't have timeto be a watchdog at every school board
meeting.
They don't have time to start nonprofit orpolitical advocacy groups that try to seat
(40:17):
a reformed group ofschool board candidates.
They may not even have the wherewithalto do it, or certainly not the funding.
So this is a classic collective actionproblem where the unions have a built in
advantage.
They have political machinery andapparatus and a set of members who,
at the drop of a hat, are ready to go andshow up for a school board meeting when
(40:37):
they're gonna talk about something liketeacher tenure or teacher pay policies, or
whether to authorize a charter schoolin a neighborhood, something like that.
But parents don't have a voice,
and philanthropy on those who've gotteninvolved in muscular educational
philanthropy have been one of the rarebright spots in allowing parents to get
a little bit of a counterweightto teachers unions.
(41:00):
Particularly in these large urban schooldistricts where philanthropists have
started to get involved in school boardelections, and in back candidates
who are in favor of charter schools, whenoverwhelmingly the minority community,
much more than the white community,tends to favor choice.
So if no one's going to berepresenting them, I think for
(41:20):
obvious reasons,the role can be filled by philanthropists.
Broad foundation, the Gates foundation,the Walton foundation.
These are groups that have beenin the vanguard of doing this.
Now, as much as their work has beencrucial to trying to help parents and
those looking to reform the system,I don't wanna oversell it.
(41:42):
They're not winning, they haven't won.
And despite the rhetoric that you hear,fewer than 1%, maybe 1%.
It was school choice week last week.
I was at an event the other daywhere I heard 750,000 students right
now are attending schools as a resultof a private school choice program,
a voucher, ESEA or the like,that's a drop in the bucket.
(42:05):
That is not a pinprick.
>> Terry Moe (42:06):
[LAUGH].
>> Michael Hartney (42:08):
If this has been 30 years of big business running roughshod
over teachers unions andthe labor movement and privatization,
they don't have a lot to show forthemselves.
Now, they do have some places,like New Orleans, like Washington,
DC, where there have been some meaningfulreforms that the unions have opposed.
In the case of New Orleans, an entirecharter based system in Washington,
(42:32):
DC, a very, very good teacheraccountability and evaluation system.
But those are rare.
And in one case, as you write in oneof your books, it took a hurricane to
destroy the traditional system andto weaken the union in New Orleans.
And in DC, it took a radical,
a revolutionary school governance reformthat gave a firebrand superintendent
(42:57):
in Michelle Reed just two years oftime to ink an evaluation deal.
But there are just as manygraveyards of reformers.
I mean, don't forget that Mayor AdrianFenty lost his reelection in DC in part
because he was sowilling to take on the teachers unions.
And you can go to a place like Newark,New Jersey,
(43:17):
where the billionaires club ofMark Zuckerberg came in and
basically had to spend $100 millionon a single teachers union contract.
And most accounts of the fallout ofwhat happened in Newark was that
you didn't get the sort ofmeaningful long term reform.
You got a system reverting towhat had been there in place,
(43:38):
the one favored by the teachers unions.
So I just don't think the evidence should.
They have a lot of money.
But money is not the only thingthat you need to be effective.
You need people who are going to vote.
You need people who are going to putthe education issue at the center of their
political universe.
I tell people all the time, a good analogybetween the, is the NEA and the NRA,
(43:59):
right?
The National Rifle association, if youlook at the public opinion polling data,
the NRA is out of step with the publicon a lot of common sense gun control
proposals.
But the NRA wins because the peoplewho will vote on that issue put it at
the center of their political universe.
Folks like Michael Bloomberg,gun control reform advocates,
(44:20):
they've got a base of support thatis a mile wide, but an inch deep.
And that's often been true ofthis education reform movement,
which is much more episodic.
>> Terry Moe (44:30):
Okay, so you hear people talking rightly,
that union membership has droppedlike a stone over the decades.
Now, union membership inthe private sector nationwide is,
(44:50):
I don't know, maybe 7% at best.
And union membership amongpublic sector unions isn't
very high either, although it is higher.
So what's going on there?
And does that mean that the teachersunions are getting weaker and
(45:13):
weaker over time and that in the future,education will be freer
to pursue reforms without havingthem blocked by the unions?
>> Michael Hartney (45:23):
Well, I think that starting during the Great Recession in
2009, and you had a wave ofRepublican Tea Party governors,
a wave of republican trifectas thatswept the states at a time in which
fiscal discipline was the calling card ofthe day because of that great recession.
(45:44):
So for a very brief window,
the unions really were underattack in certain states.
Think of a Wisconsin with Scott Walker,and New Jersey with Chris Christie.
And sort of capping off that decade ofdifficulty for the unions, of course,
was the Supreme Court stepping in 2018in the Janus versus AFSCME decision,
(46:06):
in which the court did overturna 40 year precedent going back to
the 1970s that had donewhat I alluded to earlier.
Which was allowed unions to chargeteachers who didn't wanna be a member
of their union, charge them feesto bolster the union's coffers.
So the court said,you can't do that anymore.
(46:27):
Teachers have a First Amendment rightto not associate their paychecks with
the unions.
So these have been real andmeaningful losses for teachers unions.
But as I step back, andI say in the book, when I was writing it,
in the final twelve months of writing it,when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
I thought it was a real eye openingevent because, among other things,
(46:51):
it showed just how little powerthe teachers unions had actually lost.
Whatever one thinks about how quicklyschools ought to have reopened or
when they ought to have reopened, parents,many of whom had really never paid much
attention to what's with the localeducators association in my district,
they wouldn't have reallythought much about it.
Suddenly were told by theirsuperintendents in many states that we're
(47:15):
literally not allowed to reopenthe school's doors until we sit down and
negotiate out a deal with one otherinterest group in the district about how
willing they are to do it.
And so that's a reminder that so long aspublic sector collective bargaining is
in place and teachers unions have thisspecial seat, or as I say in the book,
(47:35):
permanent reservations at the tableof policymaking in school districts.
And they uniquely have that, they're stillgoing to have more power than any other
interest group in the arena or any othergroup of constituents day in and day out.
So I don't think that's going to change.
(47:56):
I do think that there are some effortsright now I'm thinking about Florida as
an example.
The governor in Florida just last weekactually rallied behind legislation
that would require teachers unionsto demonstrate every year that
they have the support of a strong majorityof teachers in their school district.
(48:18):
And if they don't,
they would lose the privilege of havingthat permanent seat at the table in terms
of being able to representteachers in collective bargaining.
And so I think those sort of transparencysteps where we look under the hood and
we say, well,how much are these teachers representing?
Or how much are these unions representingteachers may lead to a bit of a more of
(48:39):
a retreat, but
I don't see the teachers unions beingknocked off their perch anytime soon.
And I'd also add that when you look atphilanthropy, I said when you'd asked me
about that, that their interest tendsto wax and wane, and it's episodic.
Well, that's another good example.
The Gates Foundation, the BroadFoundation, education philanthropy, more
(49:01):
generally, has pivoted away from the sortof reforms that made unions uncomfortable,
and they've moved on to other things,social and emotional learning, diversity,
equity, inclusion, ornon education things altogether.
So you've seen some loss of power perhapson that side of the equation, too.
So the unions are very much still inthe driver's seat is the takeaway
(49:23):
from the book.
>> Terry Moe (49:24):
Okay, so we just have a few more minutes here, and
I'm wondering if maybe as sort ofa wrap up, you can step back and
give our audience a sense ofexactly what's in your book,
the kinds of new data thatyou bring to bear and
new analysis that you provideon sort of different subjects.
(49:46):
Because it's a very comprehensivebook that talks about many
aspects of the rise of union power,how much power they have,
how they exercise their power, the role ofelections, and also student achievement,
which we didn't even talk about here,but it's all there in your book.
(50:07):
And I wonder if you can justspend a minute or two letting our
audience know what they can expectto find if they get your book.
>> Michael Hartney (50:18):
Great, so the first half of the book painstakingly documents,
by drawing on original primary sourcematerials, teacher labor contracts,
the intricacies of different states,teacher labor laws.
To really dive deep andshow how those changes when they happen,
led to a direct boost in the politicalactivism of teachers and
(50:42):
in the status of teacher union interestgroups in terms of their revenues,
their PAC spending,all of those sorts of things.
And it does it in a very readable way,that compares and
contrasts throughout the book howteachers unions have managed to do all
these things vis a vis other groupsthat haven't been able to do that.
(51:04):
National Parent Teacher Association,American Bar Association,
other sorts of interest groups.
And the second half of the book bringsa lot of original data to bear.
A variety of surveys.
I drawn over half a dozen original surveysof school board members to show, for
example, that when you inform schoolboard members of the positions or
of education reformpreferences of parents.
(51:27):
That it doesn't make a huge difference interms of the willingness of school board
members to support reform, but that whenyou tell school board members that are in
districts with politically powerfulteachers unions the position of teachers,
that school board membersare very apt to listen to them.
So you're gonna get a lot oforiginal surveys of teachers.
(51:51):
In fact, second half of the bookactually has a survey from about 4000
teachers in Wisconsin that I did rightduring the recall of Scott Walker.
So got a lot of interestingfeedback about that.
And it also includes a chapterwhere I summarize the latest state
of the literature on the effects ofteachers unions on student achievement.
(52:12):
And so I won't do too much of a spoileralert, but suffice it to say that the most
recent literature and the mostsophisticated studies are showing that
teachers unions don't have a benigneffect on student achievement.
But in fact, oftentimes, especially forthe, the poorest, most likely to
be minority students, that teachers unionshave a negative effect on the efforts to
(52:34):
boost student achievement among thoseimportant subgroups of the population.
>> Terry Moe (52:39):
Okay, well, I'm afraid that's all the time we have for today.
Thank you, Michael, forwriting such an exciting new book and for
a very interesting and fun discussion.
And I wanna thank all ofyou in the audience for
joining us, andI hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.
(52:59):
You can find Michael's bookon hoover.org for purchase.
You can also, of course,find it on Amazon.
I hope you pursue this, I thinkyou'll find it a really enriching and
eye opening book.
Thank you very much.
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