Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools

A Nation Still At Risk

In 1983, the President's Commission on Excellence in Education published a report titled "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform". The report warned of "a rising tide of mediocrity" in public schools in the United States, and it resulted in extensive efforts at reform. Despite these well-intentioned and expensive efforts, United States public schools are still putting children and the nation "at risk" in failing to teach basic skills in reading, mathematics, and science and in failing to prepare too many young people for lives in which they will be informed citizens, happy with themselves, and useful to others.

Terry Moe's book "Special Interest: Teacher Unions and America's Public Schools" (2011) is written against the backdrop of the continued difficulties in American public education. Moe argues that the teachers unions and the power they have amassed since the late 1960's bear substantial responsibility for the continued poor state of American education. Moe is the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has written extensively on the American political process and on American education.

In examining a problem as pervasive as educational failure, it is tempting to conclude that many and broad-based factors are involved. Thus, Moe observes, many people find to sources of students' failure to learn in social conditions which do not require restructuring schools as much as "ameliorat[ing] poverty, educat[ing] parents, and mak[ing] schools into community service centers that can meet an array of health, dental, nutritional, psycological, family, and other social needs." (p. 12) While Moe acknowledges the need to address social inequities, he insists that these considerations "cannot be allowed to distract from the pursuit of effective schools." (p. 12) He finds that schools themselves have a large impact separate from social conditions, and that effective learning can take place in properly structured and managed schools even when the students suffer from social and economic disadvantage. As Moe also points out, the claim that a problem results from "a number" of factors is ultimately no answer at all and works against trying to correct a situation. Moe's book thus argues that the teacher unions, the work rules they impose in the schools the power they exercise in the political process, and their ability to block reform, must shoulder a great deal of responsibility for the state of American education.

Moe is a careful student of American politics, and he is has thought well about its interaction with American education. He has a great knowledge of interest groups and the way in which such groups promote their own agendas beyond what their strength in numbers might indicate. His discussion of interest politics, separate from the way he applies it to the teachers unions, is instructive in its own right. Moe is at his best as an empirical scholar who has amassed a great deal of information about the membership in the teacher unions, their finances, their large contributions to the political process, and the state-by-state differences in their organization and function. This information is valuable and important. Moe contends that the teachers unions, for all their rhetoric about working for the child, are devoted to the pursuit of the economic well-being of their members, the teachers, and that the interests the unions promote frequently undermine effective education.

In the early chapters of the book, Moe discusses the history of the two primary teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the smaller American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Prior to the 1960s, these were largely administrative organizations rather than collective bargaining units for teachers. When public employees obtained collective bargaining rights, the unions amassed great power. Their power was assisted by the ability of the unions, to varying degrees, to control the make-up of the school boards with which they bargained and by the rather lax way in which school boards tended to bargain with the unions, granting them heavy concessions, particularly in matters not involving immediate out-of-pocket expense and in matters involving the running of the schools.

The heart of the book lies in Moe's treatment of collective bargaining in chapter 6, which makes many thoughtful points. The unions bargained successfully for salaries, overtime, restrictions on work, protections for all teachers, including the obviously incompetent, seniority rules, control of teachers over transfers, and many other matters. Moe opposes many of the concessions granted to the unions in collective bargaining. Moe still needs to show that these concessions, questionable as many of them undoubtedly are, were determinative factors in what children learn. I am not sure he fully does this. In the concluding sections of chapter 6, Moe acknowledges the difficulty of establishing a causual relationship between student performance and collective bargaining contracts. He points to two detailed academic studies, one by a scholar named Caroline Hoxby and one by Moe himself (pp. 211 --212) He admits that the question of causation is difficult and messy while insisting that the evidence is more than sufficient to fault collective bargaining contracts. As a layman reading the chapter, I thought that Moe made many strong points about collective bargaining contracts as well as some questionable points (Moe objects, for reasons unclear to me, to rewarding teachers for pursuing advanced degrees, such as an MA in their speciaties). I thought, in reading the study, the the collective bargaining contracts were probably detrimental to education in many ways, but the the depth and single-mindedness of Moe's critique outstripped his evidence.

In subsequent chapters of his book, Moe describes increasing public concern with teacher unions, including concerns in its natural political home, the liberal wing of the Democratic party. He discusses well-publicized and expensive efforts to break the power of the union contracts in New York City and in Washington, D.C. These efforts resulted in large financial rewards to the members of the teachers unions in exchange for concessions which may not survive the political process. The success of these efforts remains questionable. Moe also discusses effectively "reform unionism" which he finds unlikely to succeed given union structure and the strength in the American system of interest politics.

In the final chapters of his book, Moe returns to the political process which he knows well. Readers may be surprised about the large financial contributions the teacher unions make in both national and state politics. Moe explains the politics of "blocking" in which it is ordinarily easier for a minority group to thwart legislation than it is to enact new legislation. He uses the discussion of "blocking" to show how teacher unions have the power to stymie reform. Moe discusses efforts on the national level that have had some success, including the "No Child Left Behind" act and the innovative "Race to the Top" program of President Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Overall, Moe is not optimistic about the possibility of achieving reform of teacher unions and collective bargaining contracts in the short term. In the longer term, Moe predicts, for reasons that remain unclear, that the growth of Information Technology and computer-based systems of learning will render the teachers unions largely obsolete.

Moe has written a difficult, thoughtful book about the American political process, the teacher unions, and American education. The book should encourage readers to reflect on what they understand the purpose of education to be and why education is important. It should also encourage reflection on the nature of American public education and the diverse