 spent. Within these departments, officials regard the unions as key “stakeholders” who have legitimate, ongoing roles to play in shaping public decisions. The opportunities for union influence are everywhere and virtually unobservable to outsiders unfamiliar with the byzantine world of government bureaucracy.
Often the unions pursue their policy objectives by combining legislative and administrative power. An important example can be found in their recent drive for teacher “professionalism.” This is a goal with obvious political appeal. Who could be against professionalism? The reality, however, is that they are active on this issue because their fundamental interests are at stake. By pushing for stricter licensing, credentialing, and certification requirements and for regulatory boards controlled or influenced by the unions themselves, they are attempting to control entry into their field and thus to limit supply and put upward pressure on salaries. This is a classic political strategy that other occupations, from doctors and lawyers to cosmetologists and plumbers, have long used with great success. The teacher unions just want to do the same.
The Politics of Blocking
Much of what the teacher unions do in politics is not about winning the policies they want. It is about blocking the policies they don’t want-a strategy that the American political system, built around multiple checks and balances, is designed to facilitate. Because blocking is relatively easy, the unions are usually powerful enough to stop reforms they consider a threat to their interests, and thus to protect a status quo that benefits them. In a time of widespread pressure for improvement in public education, this is the way the teacher unions put their power to most effective use. They use it to prevent change.
Consider the movement for school choice, which represents the most far-reaching movement for change in American education. From the unions’ standpoint, it is irrelevant whether choice is a promising reform. The overriding fact is that choice-based reforms naturally generate changes that are threatening to the unions’ interests-and the unions, quite predictably, oppose them. Much of their political activity over the past decade has been dedicated to the simple goal of blocking school choice.
The unions see vouchers as a survival issue. Vouchers would allow money and children to flow from public to private: threatening a drop in public employment and in union membership; dispersing teachers to private schools, where it is much harder for unions to organize; promoting competition among schools, which puts union schools at a disadvantage; and creating a less regulated system in which the unions have less power. Small wonder, then, that the unions have done everything they can to defeat vouchers-even when vouchers are proposed solely for the neediest of children.
The teacher unions are also battling against charter schools-which, while public, need not be unionized, and which draw students and money away from the regular public schools where union members teach. Unions sometimes claim to “support” charter proposals, but these are strategic moves designed to head off something much worse: vouchers. Moreover, they are typically accompanied by demands for strict ceilings on the number of charters, requirements that charters be unionized, and extensive district controls. Charters are on the rise nationwide, but for now most are constrained by laws that have been heavily influenced by the unions.
The teacher unions are also fighting privatization. In the 1990s, for-profit companies sought contracts with districts to run entire schools, typically those regarded as failing. The unions recognize that they have less control over private contractors than over the districts, and that the success of private contractors could well promote the flow of jobs, money, and control from public to private schools. They have done what they can, accordingly, to prevent school boards from entering into such agreements and to sabotage those that get past them.
The bottom lin