One thing is perfectly clear after Tuesday’s midterm elections:
The long-and-fruitful relationship between Democrats and teachers
unions is no longer mutually beneficial.
Congressional Democrats angered centrist school reformers,
MoveOn.org-style progressives, and other party activists in
August when they voted to ladle $10 billion in federal
subsidies (funded from future cuts to the Food Stamp program) to
school districts in order to stave off layoffs of 160,000 teachers
(or just 2.6 percent of the nation’s 6.2 million school employees).
In turn, the National Education Association and the American
Federation of Teachers poured more than $40 million of their hefty
campaign war chests (including more than $15 million by the NEA in
the last weeks of the election season alone) to help the Democrats
keep full control of Congress.
It didn’t work. Most of the endangered Democrat
congressmen backed heavily by the NEA alone — including Tom
Perriello in Virginia and Nevada’s Dina
Titus — were still tossed out; only the victories of
wishy-washy Colorado U.S. Senator Michael
Bennet (who was backed with $1.4 million of the NEA’s largesse)
and soon-to-be-minority leader Harry Reid staved off a full
shellacking. The biggest hits came in state races as Republicans
captured
full control of 19 statehouses — including those in
once-teachers union friendly states such as Indiana and Michigan —
and teachers union-supportive governors in Pennsylvania and other
states were replaced with new chief executives less to their
liking.
The fact that NEA and AFT efforts yielded little fruit is
one more sign to Democrats that their alliance with the unions —
already frayed over President Barack Obama’s school reform
initiatives — is no longer of much value. Although education
wasn’t anything close to the defining electoral issue school
reformers thought it would (and should) be, Obama’s efforts to
expand charter schools and improve teacher talent were the one
aspect of his agenda that actually found favor with voters of all
stripes. One could dare say if Obama only focused on education (and
stayed away from passing healthcare reform), congressional
Democrats would have actually kept seats and avoided the political
carnage they suffered within the past year.
For the NEA and the AFT, there is at least one silver
lining. They may benefit from the ascent of Minnesota Congressman
John
Kline to the chairmanship of the House Education and Labor
Committee. Like the NEA and AFT, the suburban
Minneapolis representative is a critic of the No Child Left
Behind Act and Obama’s Race to the Top initiative to expand charter
schools and subject teachers to private-sector style performance
management; he may unintentionally help the unions frustrate
President Obama’s school reform agenda.
But the loss of reliable teacher union supporters on the
House panel — including Titus, New Hampshire’s
Carol Shea-Porter and Joe Sestak (who lost to Pat Toomey in the
race to replace Arlen Specter) — means that school reformers
within the Democratic base (including Colorado Congressman Jared
Polis) will have more sway over the party’s education agenda. It
may also give George Miller, the congressional Democrats’ leading
policy overlord on education (and co-architect of No Child) more
leeway in breaking ranks with the two unions.
The fact that centrist and progressive Democrats think
that improving the quality of teachers is as critical a civil
rights issue as integration was during the 1960s also means a
long-term break is coming. The NEA and the AFT are the most
obstinate opponents of teacher quality reform efforts such
developing alternative teacher training programs — especially
Teach For America, a vanguard of the school reform movement — and
using student performance data to evaluate teacher performance.
Last month, the Economic Policy Institute — a think-tank cofounded
by Community Reinvestment Act author Robert Kuttner that has
benefited from more than $1.3 million in NEA largesse — issued a
petition against
stronger teacher performance management.
At the state level — where the NEA and AFT have
traditionally wielded even more clout — the damage couldn’t come
at a worse time. President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative
(along with the accountability measures contained within the No
Child Left Behind Act) has given school reform-minded governors of
both parties cover to expand charter schools (the nation’s
most-successful form of school choice), and allow the use of
student test score data in evaluating teacher performance. Although
the NEA and AFT have given some dollars to statehouse Republicans
— most notably North Dakota Governor (and now senator-elect) John
Hoeven — their ties to GOP lawmakers are still much weaker. Expect
efforts to enact performance pay plans and eliminate tenure in some
of those states; this includes Florida, where teachers’ union
savior
Charlie Crist will be replaced by the less-supportive Rick
Scott.
Meanwhile the NEA and AFT face a longer-term threat to
their influence — the $1 trillion in lavish public pensions and
retired teacher healthcare benefits that are now pressuring state
budgets. New Jersey, Vermont and even New York State took small
steps to force rank-and-file teachers to contribute more to
their retiree benefits and retire at ages more in line with what is
acceptable in the private sector. More steps will come by 2018,
when states have to figure out ways to finance increasingly
underfunded pensions for teachers and other state
workers.
Considering that the traditional system of near-lifetime
employment, degree- and salary-based pay scales and seniority
privileges have done little to improve the nation’s woeful public
schools or attract talented people into teaching, the NEA and AFT
will have difficulty defending the status quo.
Democrats and teachers unions may soon be looking for new
partners.
