oice-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 line is that the teacher unions’ greatest power is not the ability to get what they want, but rather the ability to stifle reforms that threaten their interests. School choice is not the only reform they oppose-for union interests are deeply rooted in the status quo, and most changes of any consequence create problems for them. The result is that, as our nation has struggled to improve its public schools, the teacher unions have emerged as the fiercest, most powerful defenders of the status quo, and the single greatest obstacle to the reform of American education.
For reform to succeed, something concrete must be done to remove the education system from the unions’ grip. This won’t be easy, because the unions can (and regularly do) use their power to “persuade” reformers to turn their sights elsewhere. Most Democrats, in particular, would be committing political suicide by trying to alter the unions’ current role in public education, and they will resist any efforts to do so. In a political system of checks and balances, this alone will be enough to block most reform proposals most of the time.
If the future holds a solution to the problem of union power, it will probably develop as a by-product of the school-choice movement. The best bet is that, despite union opposition, school choice in various forms will gradually spread. As it does, the unions will be faced with an increasingly competitive environment. Children and resources will begin to flow to nonunion schools, and unions will find themselves with fewer members, less money, and a growing number of schools and teachers that are outside the traditional system and difficult to organize. Competition spells trouble for unions. It undermines their organizational strength-and with it, their political power.
Whether choice and competition will ultimately win out remains to be seen. In the meantime, the teacher unions will reign as the preeminent power in American education, and they will continue to give us public schools in their own image.
-Terry M. Moe is a profe