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Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools

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You know the teachers unions are losing in the court of public opinion, when the card-carrying, unionized director of the liberal documentary An Inconvenient Truth - Davis Guggenheim - almost wins another Oscar for his shred-job on the teachers unions in Waiting for Superman. While Davis does an admirable job of making the emotional case for public school reform, Terry Moe's timely empirical analysis goes a mile deeper into the "systemic pathologies" in public school organization, focusing on the enormously powerful and completely self-interested teachers unions. A quote from former AFT President, Albert Shanker, says it all: "When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children." Unequivocally, if every parent in America read this book from cover to cover, they would take up pitch-forks and torches and storm their state capitals demanding the end of archaic union rules like "last-hired, first-fired" that persist under the current tenure system. Terry does a wonderful job distinguishing, importantly, between the personal feelings of teachers - which are almost always intrinsically motivated to benevolence towards their pupils - and the outcome of their collective bargaining, which always results in protecting solely the interests of teachers first and foremost. Expecting a union to embrace reform is like asking a cat to bark - its just not going to happen. If you analyze the teachers union for what it is, there is virtually no chance of it changing on its own, without being subject to outside forces. Incentives matter, and unions have every incentive to myopically watch out for the interests of its own members - not school children. You'll need anti-depressants for the first 90% of the book, which focuses on the horrid current state of affairs, how we got in this mess (liberal democrats opening the legislative floodgates for unions to gain power and influence that became self-perpetuating) and how it is unlikely to change in the absence of a big exogenous shock. Fortunately, the final chapter, "A Critical Juncture," leaves readers with hope that the second-derivative from here is positive due to the disruptive potential of emerging technology on the education process. If Terry is right, the teachers unions are about to follow the atrophying arc of the United Auto Workers, though it will likely take a long time to erode their current level of influence. Bottom-line is that this book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in education reform and improving the future human capital capacity of the United States. Be sure to also Google "The Widget Effect" and read that paper, along with watching "The Lottery" and "The Cartel," which are both excellent and very similar to Waiting for Superman, just without an Oscar-winning director doing the PR. Spread the word on Terry's excellent work here - I literally bought a case of "Special Interest" books to distribute to 'thought leaders' in my community, hoping his work and conclusions will go viral.

Collecting a colossal amount of data, Terry Moe has authored an extraordinary book about our nations' teachers unions. While much has been written about these unions in the last ten years or so, nothing has been written with the rigorous attention to detail that we find in Dr. Moe's Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools.

The unions are examined in a myriad of ways - their relationships to teachers, effect on school boards, insistence on collective bargaining, rise as a unified powerful political entity, etc. Researched over a period of years, there are ninety pages of end notes.

This work should be required reading for education reformers, policy experts, taxpayers, parents and anyone else who is interested in how American public education works... or doesn't. At points during the book, you might experience feelings of despair about the future of public education, but toward the end of the book, Dr. Moe offers us some real reasons for hope.

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 goals it attempts to achieve. Moe has identified a problem and pinpointed a likely source of some of the difficulty. In places, I thought that the book overreached in its conclusions.

Robin Friedman

While this book is a bit of a slog, it's only because it's so well-researched and scholarly. But you still want to just curl up in the bathtub and open up a vein. As the other reviewer said, this should be required reading for every taxpayer in this country who's footing the bill for an education system that is abysmal, despite the fact that we spend approx. half of our tax dollars on it. There is nothing more important to our country than educating the next generations -- not even the economy -- and what the unions have done to it in our urban areas, where the most vulnerable children live, is a crime. If these actions had been imposed upon us by another country, it would be considered an act of war (what genius said that?) Terry Moe has done a magnificent job educating at least his readers.

Why are America's public schools falling so short in educating our children to meet today's global competition? Why, after tripling inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending since 1970 is pupil achievement nearly unchanged? (Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress - NAEP indicate that achievement growth over the last 35 years for 17-year-olds has been virtually nil.) Why do they waste so much money on proven ineffective practices? Why is it nearly impossible to get even the worst teachers out of the classroom?

'Special Interest' opens with the story of New York City's public school rubber rooms' where some 700 teachers were paid (some more than $100,000/year) for years of doing nothing, thanks to 'more due process than O. J. Simpson.'

A Detroit benefactor was willing to donate $200 million to set up additional charter schools. The union shut down the schools, went to Lansing and got the politicians to turn down the $200 million. In New York they went to Albany and got the legislature to make it illegal to use student test scores in evaluating teachers for tenure.

Terry Moe's "Special Interest" demonstrates that the answers are largely attributable to the teachers unions using their unmatched political power (the nation's top contributors to federal elections from 1989 - 2009) in promoting their own interests at the expense of our children. They are the nation's top contributors to federal elections, and ensure that school elections are scheduled when there will be low voter turnout.

Teacher salary schedules pay teachers based on their seniority and formal credits that have nothing whatever to do with pupil learning. Teachers do make a difference - researchers Hanushek and Rivkin found that if students had good teachers rather than average for 4-5 years in a row, the increased learning would be sufficient to eliminate the achievement gap we have struggled to over come for decades. They also concluded that replacing the bottom 5-10% of teachers with an average teacher would move the U.S. 'from below average in international comparisons to near the top.'

Prior to the 1960s, administrators and school boards held the power in our schools. In 1955 there were 26.9 students for every teacher, in 2007-08 it was 14.2. Now, more than 90% underestimate how much their school districts spend - in 2007, with the average district spending more than $10,000/year per pupil, more than 40% sampled estimated annual spending of $1,000 or less. On average, they underestimate how much their local teachers are paid by 30%. One estimate concluded that the average teacher salary in 2008-09 was $53,910, for 38 weeks, and an average 35 hours/week.

Most Americans do not receive any pension upon retirement other than Social Security. Some 96% of teachers have access to 'defined-benefit' retirement programs, vs. 21% in the private sector. About 95% of teachers are also provided medical coverage, vs. 71% of private workers and 85% of private sector professionals. Forty-three percent of teachers pay no monthly premium for these benefits, vs. 24% int he private sector.

Author Moe believes that ultimately technology will undo the teacher unions. Pupils will be able to be taught by superstars spread all around the nation, and there will be far fewer of them. The Rocketship program in San Jose is already experimenting with computerized individualized instruction. Hopefully, in addition parents will become engaged and enraged, as Joel Klein puts it.

One suggestion, per Hess-Meeks - give parents a K-12 spending account, and allow half the money saved to transfer into a college account while the other half returns to taxpayers.

I have only the highest possible praise for this ground-breaking book. I gush about its insights at least every week on my EDOBSERVER blog and have bought at least 20 copies -- putting my hard-earned money where my mouth is -- for friends to read.

Just read it. That's all I can say.

Terry Moe, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of numerous books and studies on education policy in America, is one of the most qualified person in America to write a book about teacher unions and their impact on education policy.

The sheer volume and quality of information in Special Interest: Teachers Unions and American Public Schools makes it a major and timely contribution to the debate. As one reads about how teachers unions operate, it becomes harder and harder to tolerate this state of affairs one moment longer.

The book begins by telling the reader the hard truth about unions: "As the most powerful group in American education, they use their power to promote [their] special interests - in collective bargaining, in politics - and this often leads them in to do things that are not good for the children or the schools."

The unspoken question is why we, as a society, tolerate this. One answer might be the slow process by which we all acquiesced to their control.

Public school unionism originated in the "progressive" belief that the nation needed to first centralize, and then professionalize, the delivery of education. The National Education Association (NEA) was originally designed to be a tool of administration, not unionization. It was set up to improve the quality of teaching. This centralization, however, made it much easier for unions to organize, and they gradually gained the power necessary to subvert, and then control, the entire system. Had America's schools remained decentralized and independent, they would not have been so easy to unionize.

Special Interests demolishes many of the myths surrounding teachers and their unions. The most important of these is the myth that teachers are unhappy with their unions and yearn to shed their yoke. Not hardly. Teachers strongly support their unions. While 55 percent of teachers agree that "tenure and teacher organizations make it too hard to weed out mediocre and incompetent teachers," the same group opposes removal of tenure by a 77 to 23 margin.
Are school boards a check on unions? No, they are easily captured and controlled by unions. Local control is an artifice, not a fact.

Are teachers underpaid? Not when you take benefits and staffing demands into account.

Does collective bargaining increase the cost of education without any appreciable benefit for the student? Yes.

Is there such thing as "reform unionism," where leaders are willing to cede some ground for the benefit of the children? No. Reformist union leaders are quickly cashiered. Concessions are overturned by their successors.

The book shows that teachers unions are an inexorable force imposing their will on education policy at the federal, state and local level. Reforms and reformers are blocked at every turn by a political juggernaut built over decades and intricately designed to block reform.

The only good news comes in the closing chapter, where the author talks about the two powerful forces that are undermining union power. The first is described as endogenous, an internal battle of shifting political alliances, primarily in the Democratic party. The second is exogenous, and comes in the form of radical disruption by technological advances in the delivery of education. The slow economy, which promises declining resources for the education bureaucracy, is a force multiplier for both of these phenomena.

The political discussion is informative, but the impact of digital learning, on-line education, and technology-driven delivery is far more fascinating. Moe argues that the changing political landscape and economics alone would not be enough to defeat the unions' grip on education. He argues, on the other hand, that "education technology is a tsunami that is only beginning to swell." It can't come soon enough.

This brings me to my only complaint regarding this valuable and informative book. After detailing the havoc visited upon American children and taxpayers by unions, Mr. Moe says that the coming changes "will happen gradually," with "much of it coming over two (or three) decades." Decades?! Why not two or three years?

As deeply researched, well-written, and informative as this book is, it is missing a sense of outrage that many of us working the trenches of school reform have been feeling and expressing for years. Why should another generation or two of children be forced to attend poor quality schools when we know, from books like this one, what the underlying causes are? Where is the outrage? It is time to challenge the moral legitimacy of union power as Reagan challenged the now defunct USSR.

There are reasons to be optimistic. Dr. Moe writes that "the most potent and direct way to undermine the teachers unions power, for example, is to pass new laws prohibiting collective bargaining in the public schools." He says that "this is unlikely to happen." He apparently penned that concession before Wisconsin's new governor did exactly that. Ohio and Idaho have followed suit. And Utah has just passed an aggressive digital learning bill, with money following the child to the on-line providers.

Dr. Moe has given us the data and facts we need to take on teachers unions in the most important political battle of our lifetimes. It's up to us to supply the outrage, not just at teachers unions, but the entire bloated "Government-Education Complex."

Terry Moe is the most respected name in education reform today. He is the William Bennett Monroe Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Moe has been involved with education reform scene for many years, both as an educator, and as a member of the Hoover Institution's Koret Task Force on K-12 education. He is a political scientist with a strong interest in the structure and power of teacher unions, in how they wield their power, and in how pervasive the teacher union influence has become in American education.

Moe has also written extensively on broad issues involving the structure and power of politics and government. This background allows him to bring a dispassionate eye to his analysis. His well-written, straightforward prose gives the reader confidence that this book, "Special Interest" is not an ideologue tract about teacher unions. It is instead a call to everyone concerned with education to roll up their shirt sleeves and get on with the job. Like Joe Friday, Moe aims to present "just the facts."

Moe does a excellent job of explaining how and why collective bargaining, better described as monopoly bargaining, how it must be abolished, how it is the root of teacher union power, and how teacher union monopoly has stymied education reform for years.

As Moe shows, monopoly bargaining, the root of teacher union power, is so embedded in the organization of our schools that nothing short of surgery will get it out. Union monopoly bargaining prevents administrators from running their schools. School board members, elected with teacher union money, make for win-win bargaining as both sides of the table are on the same team. Salaries and benefits continue to grow while taxpayers stagger under the weight of the taxes needed to support all the public employee benefits.

Moe explains that teacher unions are about teachers' interests. These interests can be legitimate but they do not always coincide with the interests of the children in education. In fact it is difficult to tell if the interests ever do fit together. Yet, Moe is careful to distinguish between teacher as union officials and teachers trying to perform their important jobs. This book is no hatchet job on teacher unions, but rather a critique of their extensive power.

The timing of this book is excellent. State governors across the country are attempting to stave off state bankruptcy and taxpayer furor and are boldly undertaking reforms in public sector bargaining.

Moe should become a hero of all students, and parents, when he offers strong factual evidence showing that monopoly bargaining with the teacher unions tends to work to the detriment of children. He explains how teacher unions will pursue job interests single-mindedly without regard to the best interests of the child or the educational process.

This book should encourage parents to pay attention to school board elections and to understand the difficulties in the current system of collective bargaining.

I have studied teacher unions for the past 20 years and believed I understood the difficulties collective bargaining posed to the rights and interests of students and of brave teachers with the gumption to challenge forced unionism. But I was still shocked by the Moe's careful findings and documentation in this book.

For all the difficulties he sees, the most important part of Moe's book is his prediction about the future of education and the structure of schools. If Moe's predictions come to pass, it is likely that there will be massive support for education reform which will drastically change the role of teacher unions. Moe ultimately offers a message of hope for the future of education.

The book will stand as a reference manual for teacher union power. Every education reformer should keep this book on their shelves, and refer to it frequently. "Special Interest: Teachers union and America's Public Schools," is, on every level, a MUST READ for parents and taxpayers and those interested in the future of education.

If you never read another book on education, please read this one.

Where Moe's agenda is crystal clear, his ability to provide evidence is unclear. This book lacks in anything substantial or positive regarding teachers. Much like a recent film that places blame on teachers this book unfairly does the same. Moe does not provide positive solutions to the problem he sees and, more so, does not provide factual evidence to substantiate his attack. If you have an agenda then this book may match it.
Ronald Reagan once said:"Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost."
The court of public opinion has made teachers the scapegoat and this book only fans the flames. Shame on Moe for putting forth this work.

Why is this union not like any other union? Why do high performing teachers make hourly rates below minimum wages, whereas low performing teachers gain hourly rates that are completely in excess of their contribution. The unions are focused on the lowest performers because no one eles care about their jobs -- if you're a high-performing young teacher driving a class forward, and you get fired, you will immediately be rehired in better paying job. So, you don't care. The union knows that, so they spend their time and energy on protecting those who need protecting -- the lame professionals who assign all multiple point in class and let studets grade each other. This is what the great labor movements of the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s have come to.