levance to union interests.
The details of local politics can vary across districts, due to their individual histories, demographics, and problems. But certain characteristics are common to most of them-and give teacher unions great advantages in the struggle for influence.
• School-board elections usually occur in off years or times and thus tend to attract very low turnout, often in the range of 10 to 20 percent. By getting their own members and supporters to the polls, unions are well positioned to prevail.
• These elections are typically nonpartisan: candidates are not identified by party affiliation. Voters are thus denied the key information that running under a party banner conveys, and this enhances the ability of unions to control how candidates are perceived and who is elected.
• Local politics is not very pluralistic. Teacher unions tend to be the only organized force in school politics. They almost always overshadow business and civic groups, and they always overshadow parents, who are not organized (outside the PTA, which has long been under union control in politics) and who vote in low numbers.
• Teacher unions are flush with political resources. They have money for campaign contributions, and they control an army of political workers (teachers) who are educated, informed, have a direct stake in the issues, and are organized for political action.
• Most candidates run for school board on a shoestring. This being so, candidates endorsed by the unions and boosted by their money, manpower, and organization are very likely to win.
For these and other reasons, unions are formidable powers in local politics. The upshot is that, when school boards make decisions about policy or money or about the myriad rules governing school operations, they tend to give heavy weight to the interests of unions-and may often depart, as a result, from what is best for children and effective education.
State and National Politics
Important as local politics is, the teacher unions have good reason to think more broadly about the exercise of political power. Increasingly, the big decisions on education are being made by state and (to a lesser extent) national governments, and many of these decisions have a direct bearing on union interests. Active involvement in state and national politics is more than an attractive option for the unions. It is a necessity.
The great value of higher-level politics is that state governments, especially, are in a position to adopt virtually any requirements, programs, and funding arrangements they want for the public schools. Whatever policies they adopt, moreover, are typically applied to all the districts and schools in their jurisdictions. When unions use their political power at these higher levels, then, they can achieve many objectives they might be unable to achieve through local collective bargaining, from more money to smaller classes to stricter credentialing requirements. One political victory can accomplish what hundreds of decentralized negotiations cannot.
Over the past few decades, the NEA and the AFT have acted aggressively on these incentives, and they have emerged as extraordinarily powerful players in state and national politics. A recent study at the state level asked experts to rank interest groups according to political influence, and the teacher unions came out number one, outdistancing business organizations, trial lawyers, doctors, insurance companies, environmentalists, and even the state AFL-CIO affiliates.
One reason for the unions’ success is that they spend tremendous amounts of money on political campaigns and lobbying. They regularly rank among the top-spending interest groups at both the state and national levels, and in many states they are number one. Probably the key to their political firepower, however, is that they have literally millions of members, and these members are a looming presence in every electoral district in the country. Candidates are keenly aware that the unions invest heavily in mobilizing their local activists and have considerable clout in seeing