 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 friends elected and enemies defeated.
The teacher unions are in the astounding position of being able to determine who sits on local school boards, and thus with whom they will be bargaining.
Almost all of this firepower is employed to the benefit of Democrats, whose constituencies already incline them to favor policies the teacher unions want-more spending, higher taxes, higher public employment, more regulations, more job protections, more restrictions on competition, more collective bargaining-and who, with union backing and pressure, can usually be counted on for support.
Within Congress and the state legislatures, the teacher unions are aggressive, omnipresent participants. This is often true even in right-to-work states. They monitor all relevant legislation, propose bills, carry out background research on issues, attend committee hearings, keep scorecards on legislators, and bring their formidable power to bear in getting legislators to vote their way. On education, teacher unions are the 500-pound gorillas of legislative politics.
On occasion, they also use the initiative process to put their own bills on the ballot for a direct popular vote. Here, they can use their financial resources to bankroll signature-gathering and media blitzes, and they can unleash an army of volunteers during the campaign. No other organizations are so well suited to initiative politics, and the unions have gone this route when legislatures have failed to give them what they wanted. A good example: California’s Proposition 98, which was successfully promoted by the California Teachers Association in 1989, and since then has required the state to spend at least 40 percent of its annual budget on the public schools.
The teacher unions also exercise their power in administrative arenas. The national and state departments of education, in particular, oversee countless education programs, distribute billions of dollars, and have substantial discretion in deciding what the details of education policy will be and how the money will be