Democrats (Accidentally) Make The Case Against Teachers’ Unions

I & I Editorial Board

June 15, 2020

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All this applies equally, if not more so, to teachers’ unions. Through the collective bargaining process, they’ve made it nearly impossible to fire a teacher, unless the school wants to spend roughly two years and $200,000 doing it, according to Stanford Professor Terry Moe

Teachers themselves admit that this is a problem. A survey by NPR and Ipsos looked at the views of K-12 teachers across America, with roughly half members of teachers’ unions and half non-unionized. Among the findings: 62% of organized teachers and 64% of non-unionized teachers agreed that the unions make it harder to fire bad teachers.

A study by the Fordham Institute looking at what it takes to fire bad teachers found that “For the most part, state and local policies create a tortuous maze of paperwork, regulations, and directives. Teachers who receive years’ worth of ineffective ratings are given multiple chances for improvement and reevaluation, and a single procedural violation by the administration starts the process over again.”

Teachers’ unions are the biggest and most relentless obstacle to education reforms such as charter schools and education savings accounts that would put more control in the hands of parents and break the union stranglehold over public education.

But don’t expect Democrats to ever extend their reasons for hating police unions over to teachers, for the simple reason that teachers’ unions dump far more money on Democrats than police unions.

While police unions give heavily to Democrats, they also support Republican candidates.

As one House Democratic leadership aide told Axios, “Police unions are very different. They’re very conservative, a lot of them are even Republican. They don’t have the same progressive beliefs.”

But teachers’ unions? In the past 28 years, they gave 96% of their campaign contributions to Democratic candidates. And they are huge contributors. In 2016, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association gave $64 million in political donations.

The result: student test scores have stagnated while per-pupil costs continue to climb. Millions of children remain stuck in failing schools. But hey, it’s mainly a real problem only for those in poor, minority neighborhoods. Why would Democrats care about that?

Now that the public is opening its eyes to the harm done by one public-sector union, perhaps it will start to realize that being anti-teachers’ unions isn’t the same as being anti-education.