Nearly 200,000 teachers now belong to independent unions, and the movement is growing.
In the Spring issue of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor Sol Stern points out that the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers together represent three million public school teachers. With $1.3 billion in annual revenue from dues and 6,000 fulltime staff members, these two teachers' unions "cast a giant shadow over not just American public education but also Democratic Party politics."
Stern emphasizes that the more than $9 million in PAC money that the teachers' unions contributed to Clinton and company in 1996 was "just the visible tip of a vast iceberg of soft money, independent media buys, thousands of fulltime campaign workers paid with union dues, and in-kind services such as phone banks and direct mail advertising." At the 1996 Democratic Convention, he recalls, "the teachers' union caucus constituted 11 percent of all delegates -- a bigger share than the delegation from California."
That powerful influence subverts reform movements that "focus on the basic unit of education -- that human interaction between an adult and a group of children that we call teaching. The big teachers' unions, through the straitjacket of work rules that their contracts impose, inexorably subvert that fundamental encounter," says Stern. "These contracts structure the individual teacher's job in ways that offer him or her no incentives for excellence in the classroom -- indeed, that perversely reward failure."
The problem is that "the $250 billion public education industry behaves precisely like any other publicly protected monopoly. Union negotiators in the private sector," Stern observes, "know that if they insist on protecting incompetent workers and cling to outdated work rules, especially in the global economy of the nineties, the company will begin losing market share, and union members will lose their jobs. In public education, by contrast, collective bargaining takes place without the constraining discipline of the market."
That lack of market discipline inevitably leads to excess and self-indulgence. "When school board representatives sit down with union officials to negotiate a labor contract," Stern explains, "neither party is under pressure to pay attention to worker productivity or the system's overall competitiveness: if the contract allows some teachers to be paid for hardly working at all, and others to perform incompetently without penalty, there is no real economic danger for either side. After all, most of the monopoly's customers, the schoolchildren, have nowhere else to go."
The arrogance of the unions may be their undoing, however. "Not only are the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers clearly out of touch politically with the majority of the American people, but they have also positioned themselves far to the left of their own members," Stern asserts. "The difference in political outlook between the teachers themselves and their union leaders has given rise to some upstart organizations that, though still small, represent a serious enough challenge to the big unions' monopoly to make them uneasy."
