One would think that Alabama, a state in which teachers unions
don’t have the power to force school districts into collective
bargaining, would be a bastion of school reform. But within the
past year or so, the National Education Association’s Cotton State
affiliate has shown there’s more to wielding influence than sitting
at negotiating tables.
In November 2009, then-Gov. Bob Riley and school
reformers, looking to push for school choice (and to get a share of
the $4.3 billion in federal money provided by President Barack
Obama’s Race to the Top school reform effort) attempted to advance
school choice by ending the Cotton State’s status as one of the few
states that don’t allow public charter schools. At the time, Riley
declared: “This gives us an opportunity to do something that 40
states say has made a tremendous difference in the quality of
education.”
Three months later, Riley’s effort went to seed as the NEA
affiliate and local school districts convinced committees in both
houses of the legislature to kill the charter school bill. By
mid-year, the union all but assured that charter schools would
never be a part of any governor’s plans in the near future by
backing both winners of the state’s Democratic and Republican
primaries, including Robert Bentley, the eventual
winner.
This should give pause to both school reformers and those
looking to clip the wings of other public sector unions by rooting
for efforts by governors such as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and
legislatures in Ohio and other states to abolish collective
bargaining requirements. Ending forced labor negotiations can
weaken the influence of teachers unions. But through the sheer
force of campaign war chests, armies of rank-and-file teachers, and
strong alliances with other defenders of traditional public
education, the NEA and its sister union, the American Federation of
Teachers, still retain more than enough influence to thwart efforts
to end the compensation deals that has made teaching even more
lucrative than other professions in the public sector.
School reformers and foes of public sector unions will
need to take on all aspects of union influence in order to achieve
their respective goals — including taking on the other ways the
NEA and the AFT, along with their allies, influence education
policy and even control school spending.
The battles over collective bargaining come as state
governments struggle to close $260 billion in budget shortfalls in
this fiscal year and 2011-2012, and wrestle with the long-term
costs of traditional teacher compensation — including at least $1
trillion in teachers’ pension deficits and another $400 billion or
so in unfunded retired teacher healthcare costs. The recognition
that traditional teacher compensation is ineffective at rewarding
high-quality teachers and spurring student achievement has also
given impetus to restricting collective bargaining (and the pay
raises that teachers unions tend to win at the negotiating
table).
At the same time, the nation’s school reform movement has
succeeded in fully exposing the low quality of America’s public
schools. For taxpayers and legislators, the steady evidence of
academic failure — including yesterday’s news that 44 percent of
fourth-graders in the nation’s 14-largest cities (and 29 percent of
all American students) scored Below Basic on the 2009 National
Assessment of Educational Progress — and efforts by teachers union
locals to protect poor-performing teachers (including the push by
the AFT’s Beltway local to reinstate 75 teachers tossed out last
year by D.C. Public Schools) are proof enough that the defenders of
traditional public education can no longer be trusted with schools
or children.
There is plenty that is appealing to many school reformers
and to those generally opposed to organized labor about abolishing
collective bargaining. For states and districts, it would weaken
the clout of the NEA and AFT in structuring work rules,
compensation deals, and layoff policies that have made it difficult
for them to move toward private sector-style performance management
and to ditch degree- and seniority-based pay scales, which have
long ago been proven ineffective in improving student achievement.
More importantly, it would also allow for school reformers,
especially those in big-city districts, to move more aggressively
on reform. This is because NEA and AFT locals tend to use their
campaign cash essentially to pick the winners in school board
elections, thus ending up on both sides of the negotiating
table.
But the clout of the NEA and AFT doesn’t rest on
collective bargaining and school board races alone. Despite their
weakened status, the two unions remain the biggest players in
federal and state elections; they ladled out $59 million in
campaign donations during the 2009-2010 election cycle and $277
million over the past 11 years, according to the National Institute
on Money in State Politics. Although last year’s spending spree was
largely a bust, the unions managed to throw their weight around for
high impact, including spending $1 million on an ad blitz that
helped defeat D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty in his bid for
re-election.
This spending, along with the rank-and-file members they
deploy, also allow the NEA and AFT (along with smaller unions) to
wield tremendous clout in state legislatures even in the few states
in which they cannot technically conduct collective bargaining or
where union influence is at first glance rather weak — and
structure state laws and policies that
restrict what school districts can actually do. In South Carolina,
the otherwise-floundering
NEA affiliate there, along with other unions and professional
associations, have successfully opposed school reform efforts and
have continued to make it one of the easiest states for teachers to
gain near-lifetime employment through tenure. Virginia’s NEA local
also wields significant influence, including helping to weaken the
effort by Gov. Bob McDonnell’s last year to ease the rules
restricting the expansion of charter schools.
As I noted in a 2008 study I
co-wrote for the National Council on
Teacher Quality, the NEA and AFT long ago mastered the art of using
their war chests and lobbying heft to enact state laws governing
many of the key aspects of teachers’ contracts. Near-lifetime
employment in the form of tenure, for example, is covered in the
contracts of just a third of the nation’s 100 largest districts.
Rules for dismissing teachers are often not even covered in
contracts. If anything, lobbying and campaigning actually works
better for their cause than collective bargaining because they no
longer have to slog through negotiations with hundreds of
districts. Through their influence on legislators, they can simply
have state laws crafted that are more to their liking.
Meanwhile the NEA and AFT share
common cause with allies who are just as opposed to the school
reform movement. Suburban school districts have spent the past two
decades opposing expansion of charter schools, and have been among
the loudest foes of standards-and-accountability moves such as the
No Child Left Behind Act. The two unions have also spent millions
of member dues on subsidizing like-minded groups. The National
Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, which lobbies
on behalf of the nation’s university colleges of education, has
benefitted from more than $1.5 million in NEA funding between
2005-2006 and 2009-2010, according to the union’s disclosures to
the U.S. Department of Labor. Another beneficiary, the left-leaning
Economic Policy Institute (whose studies always manage to support
NEA positions), has received $1.3 million in union
largesse.
What school reformers and foes of public sector unions
must do is attack the very pools of money that help sustain NEA and
AFT coffers. Most of the $622 million in dues collected by the two
unions is forcibly collected; ending automatic deductions, as
Wisconsin’s Gov. Walker seeks to do, would go a long way in
reducing the financial clout. So would restricting the use of
school funding for subsidizing teachers union activity; in New York
State, for example, the AFT affiliate there is allowed to provide
teacher training in school districts through its Education &
Learning Trust.
So long as the NEA and AFT have the dollars and the bodies
to push for their cause, they will remain a key (if increasingly
less-relevant) influence in education policy. School reformers and
those seeking to end the drag of public sector unions on taxpayers
altogether need to focus more on mounting the kind of lobbying and
campaigning that will end this influence (and
overhaul the teaching profession) in the long run.
That’s if the bipartisan coalition of centrist
Democrats and
conservatives that have long fought
for reform can hold.
