The Education Exchange: Democratic Voters Have Been Driven into the Arms of Teachers Unions

PAUL PETERSON, HOST:

This is the Education Exchange with Paul Peterson. I am the director of the program on education policy and governance at Harvard University. Thank you for joining us. Political parties and interest groups play a different role in American politics. Interest groups push agendas, while parties want power. But in recent years, the distinction between parties and interest groups is breaking down. The National Rifle Association is heavily weighted towards the Republican Party and the Sierra Club and other environmental groups lean Democratic. But how about education, is this the case there? Traditionally, all Americans wanted good schools and all politicians promised to deliver them, whether they were a Republican or a Democrat. But in recent years, that has changed. And to discuss the politicization of education, I have with me on the Education Exchange today, Michael Hartney. He’s a professor at Boston College and the Bruni Fellow at the Hoover Institution. And he’s the author of a book entitled How Policies Make Interest Groups: Government, Unions, and American Education. He’s recently written an essay for the 74 with a headline, “How Democrats Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Teachers Union.” Thank you, Michael, for joining me on the Education Exchange.

MICHAEL HARTNEY: Thanks, Paul. Glad to be here.

PETERSON: Michael, you present some data on the connection between Democrats and their views of teacher unions. Can you share your findings with our listeners?

HARTNEY: Certainly. So, the real starting point here is that we’ve got great data going back actually to the 90s on a simple question that asked the public whether they think on balance teachers unions play a positive role in American education. Are they good or bad for schools? And so, what I’ve done with the data is I’ve looked at what I call the net positive or net negative attitude of different groups, Republicans and Democrats, toward teachers unions. So you’re net positive if you said that teachers unions either have a strong positive effect on schools or a somewhat positive effect. And you’re net negative if you say the opposite, that they have a negative effect. And what’s really interesting about the data is there’s been a significant but asymmetric shift in partisan change on that question. What I mean by that is that, of course, it’s always been true that Democrats have been a little warmer toward teachers unions than have Republicans. But in recent years, we’ve seen a sharp change, but only among Democrats. So, for some context here, from the 1990s, at the time that Bill Clinton was president, Bob Dole was attacking teachers unions. Democrats like teachers unions, but they didn’t love them. There was about a net 20-point positive feeling towards them. And that net 20-positive feeling pretty much stayed there until Donald Trump’s first term. And then in Donald Trump’s first term, under Secretary DeVos, you saw Democrats get a little warmer toward the teachers unions and that net positive figure went up to about 30 percentage points.

PETERSON: So, it went from 20 to 30 is what you’re saying.

HARTNEY: Right. 20 to 30, and that happened during the first Trump term.

PETERSON: And that’s the difference. So that’s a big that’s a big thing. It’s the difference between their positive and their negative views jumps about 10 percentage points.

HARTNEY: So, you had a shift to 30 percent, you know, 30 percent here, pretty high number. But then it doubled after the pandemic. So you get Democrats being a net 60 percent positive toward teachers unions in the aftermath of the pandemic. And so that’s before, mind you, the second Trump term. Sort of interesting. It seems like the first Trump term pushed Democrats to ally themselves more with teacher unions. And then during Joe Biden’s term, you saw that number double. And again, the important point here is that Republicans, at least in the public—

PETERSON: So, you say it’s before the second Trump administration, but it’s after the first Biden administration. In other words, the Biden administration must have been. aligned with the union in a very clear and definite way, in the way that Obama probably was not.

HARTNEY: Right. Absolutely. And I think that’s one of the important things that is worth talking about here in terms of the policy implications. Right. We’re just talking about public opinion data. And the question always is, is how does public opinion data circle back into our political system and affect policy? And I think the answer there, and I imagine this is something you want to talk about, is that there are folks right now in the Democratic Party. Probably the best example is Rahm Emanuel. It looks like he’s running for president. He’s out on the stump and he’s trying to make the case, that the Democratic Party would be better off if it returned to the era of accountability that his former boss, President Obama, ushered in when President Obama oftentimes found himself on the opposite side of issues with the teachers unions.

PETERSON: How big is the teachers union? What percentage of the voters are they? I mean, do you have to be for the teachers if you’re a big political party? Or is this such a small group that you can…you know they’re dispensable without they’re not gonna affect your situation

HARTNEY: Well, that’s a good question. Of course, there’s always the issue of electoral capture. I mean, nobody really thinks seriously that teachers and their unions are about to start voting strongly for the Republican Party. So on the one hand, you know, maybe that’s why President Obama felt, look, after he’d wrapped up the nomination, he could tack a little more to the center and push policies that he thought were good in the education realm, irrespective of how that might influence his political relationship with the teachers. But on the other hand, it certainly seems that if rank and file Democrats, particularly those who are participating in primaries, who are going to donate to primary candidates, feel a very strong affection towards the unions, which is what the data are suggesting. It may be the case in our current political climate that Democratic elites are going to move away from that. And so, you’re going to see fewer and fewer Rahm Emanuels, and you’re going to see a lot more candidates who are cozying up to the teachers unions.

PETERSON: Well, there’s 3 million teachers, I think, about 3 million teachers in the United States. So that’s not a lot of people. What’s that? Of the adult population, what percentage is that? Is that 1 percent or 2 percent?

HARTNEY: Maybe about 2 percent of the adult workforce. So, if we weren’t counting retirees or people who aren’t in the labor force, it represents a few percent of the workforce. So, you’re right. It’s not—

PETERSON: 2 percent of the workforce. Now, of course, there’s a lot of other people who work for the school system. How about what if you…do the unions represent just teachers? Or do they also represent paraprofessionals and teacher’s aides or whatever you want to call them? And then the many other employees who work for the school system.

HARTNEY: Right. So, I think two things are important here. Yes, the unions represent other school employees. It’s not always the same union, to be clear. But so look, there is this non-trivial percentage of potential voters that you can mobilize. And I don’t want to dismiss that. But you’re also right that it’s not enough to win these elections on their own, which is why I think what the unions have been trying to do here is to expand the tent. In other words, I think that a lot of what’s been happening is the unions have been speaking about topics that traditionally maybe they haven’t spoken about. So we’ve heard a lot about common-good bargaining. You know, I also want to get to the fact that the AFT and the NEA just had their conventions this summer. And if you listened into those conventions, it’s not an accident that union leadership was talking about a lot of things that had very little to do with what happens in school buildings. Right. And I think part of that is the unions see an ability if they talk a more…if their rhetoric is more about sort of progressive, political agenda in general, that then they can tap into a larger constituency of voters who are not school employees themselves.

PETERSON: So what are they talking about? Inflation? Is that what they talk about? Or do they talk about gender issues? Or what are they?

HARTNEY: Well, I mean, so, you know, I think a great example of this is Randi Weingarten’s book. You know, she has fascists in the title, you know. And if you read the book, you’ll see that very little of it actually talks about schools. A lot of what the unions have talked about in the last few years, not to say they don’t talk about school issues at all, but a lot of what they’ve talked about is democracy being under attack from Donald Trump. They’ve tried to really sort of put themselves in the vanguard of defending the progressive agenda, sort of trying to be a bulwark against the Trump administration, which I think is partly, I want to say partly why their favorables have gone up among rank-and-file Democrats who aren’t school employees. But I also want to highlight something else this isn’t survey data that I presented in the piece for the 74 but I think It’s survey data that tells a similar story. So, I know you’re familiar, but some of our listeners might not be with the concept of public-school ideology, which is a concept that Terry Moe wrote about in his book on vouchers in the 1990s. And basically, the idea is that Americans really like their public schools as institutions. And one of the questions that’s asked about when we try to get at public school ideology is the question is, do the public schools deserve our support, even if they’re performing poorly? And what’s interesting is that when that question was asked in the 1990s, Democrats and Republicans in the public were pretty similar. Democrats agreed with about 40 percent of them, strongly agreed with that sentiment. And about one in three Republicans did. But I recently reran that item a couple of years ago and I found a big partisan gap. So now, over 55 percent of Democrats are saying, even if our public schools aren’t performing up to par, we really need to support them. And that number now is down to just one in four Republicans. So, I think that A, the unions are talking about things other than education, but B, when they’re talking about education, they’re not talking about student academic achievement. They’re talking about the public schools as a valued institution in and of itself. And they’re trying to link that more generally to an agenda that Democrats seem to really get excited about. And so that’s why when topics like closing schools in places like Chicago come on the agenda, you don’t hear a lot about academic achievement. Instead, you hear about how we can’t close schools because they’re important community institutions.

PETERSON: We have been talking a lot about the Democrats, but how about the Republicans? You said that something has not happened on the Republican side. So what do your data show us as far as the Republicans are concerned?

HARTNEY: So, at the rank-and-file level, not much. Republicans are, you know, about 20 to 30 percent points underwater. So net negative. But they’ve been that way back since the 1990s. So, nothing’s really changed with rank-and-file Republicans. But I do want to highlight one thing that’s a bit speculative. And that’s about Republican teachers or at least teachers who don’t consider themselves strong Democrats. This is one area where I wish we had better data. But so, for example, like in the early 2000s, we have a really nice survey, nationally representative survey of teachers that showed that unionized teachers were about two to one for the Democratic Party. But there was a non-trivial share of unionized teachers who themselves were Republicans. But the thing is that since the Janus Supreme Court decision was handed down in 2018, those Republican and moderate teachers don’t have to be union members anymore. They don’t have to support the union financially. So, we have some good reasons to think that the union’s own base of members has become much less Republican. Now, we can’t prove that. We don’t have a great data set to look at it, but it would make sense based on what we’ve seen in the past with surveys of teachers. In states where they have to be a union member, you see more Republicans, right, because there was an incentive to join. And so why does that matter, Paul? It matters because it gives the teachers unions more of an incentive to double down on pursuing a Democratic Party alliance and Democratic Party agenda because they have fewer and fewer Republicans in their base. And so, again, to answer your question, not a lot happening at the mass level. Ordinary Republicans pretty much look the same in terms of how they think about teachers unions. But at that teacher level, I think there are probably some important dynamics going on.

PETERSON: Well, how about the Republican political leadership? The appointment of Betsy DeVos introduced the Republican Party to a pro-choice educator inside the Trump administration. And she was very vocal, very committed. She didn’t hesitate to say that really the public schools were failing and we need to look at other options out there. And she just…she campaigned on that day, after day, after day. Wasn’t that driving a lot of Democrats to a different view of the unions, the constant support for school choice among Republicans?

HARTNEY: I’m not sure because, I mean, the school choice issue is tricky, right? We know, and I’ve written on this with Vlad Kogan, as you know, that public opinion polling on school choice is oftentimes very different than how taking a stance on it and having real world political fights like we’re having right now over the new federal law or we’ve seen with state ballot initiatives is a very different thing. So, if you actually look at the polling data, lots of Democrats are in favor of school choice, now not as many as Republicans, and lots of teachers are in favor of school choice. So, the polling shows that on the one hand. On the other hand, when these political battles do percolate up, the union and teachers oftentimes do seem to be mobilized. Are Democrats also mobilized in a way that leads them to feel more strongly in embracing teachers unions, say if they’re in a state where you have a Republican put school choice on the ballot. I’m not sure about that, but I think it’s plausible.

PETERSON: Well, let me put another question from the other side of the political spectrum, and that is the Democratic Socialists or the Socialist Democrats or whatever they call themselves, the SDA. Are they the same thing as the teacher union leadership? Is the union pushing the socialist agenda?

HARTNEY: Yeah, this is one of the questions that I wish we had better data on. But what I can say is that in a certain select number of urban school districts, and Chicago is probably a prime example of this with the rise of the core caucus in the Chicago Teachers Union several years back, that if you look closely at a lot of districts, Oakland is another one that comes to mind, you’ve had groups that are adjacent to the Democratic Socialist organizations that have become the leading caucus within the union. So unions just like political parties have different groups inside of them you know we can take the Republican Party and say you have the Freedom Caucus and then you have more moderate Republicans. That’s true of unions, too. And there’s oftentimes a constant battle within the union for who’s going to take over leadership. We don’t have real systematic data on where this has taken place, say, in the largest 100 school districts. But we do know that there are certain large districts, Los Angeles would be another one where you’ve had leadership takeovers from caucuses within the union that subscribe to and hold politics that are much more closely aligned with someone like the new mayor in New York City than they are with traditional Democrats. So I certainly think that’s something to watch. And it would make sense for why many of these teachers unions, when they get out there or they go on strike, they’re not just talking about, I want a higher salary and I want better benefits. They’re also talking about racism and homelessness in the city and the need to build housing and affordable health care. And it just sounds like a kind of progressive grab bag of issues. And I think, heck, we’re even hearing them talk about Israel-Palestine. So the more you see caucuses take power in these large urban districts that have leadership that come out of that DSA mold, I think we are going to see more and more of that. Now, whether that percolates up to the very top of these organizations. And you end up with whoever, you know, Randi Weingarten’s replacement is or the NEA, where we just had a new president, Princess Moss is now the new president of the NEA. I wouldn’t necessarily put her in that DSA mold. She in some ways seems to be maybe a continuation there. So at the top level, I’m not so sure. But in some important urban districts, yes, I do see that trend of sort of DSA interest coming—

PETERSON: Yeah, but Mamdani did not have the teacher union in the primary contest, at least in the key early stages of that contest. He was not supported by the union. They had one or two other candidates they preferred. So, I think it’s sort of, as you suggested, it’s certainly not, you can’t equate the teacher union leadership with the SDA.

HARTNEY: No, no. But a lot of their members particularly the younger members, are increasingly drawn to that sort of politics. And I will just add, you’re right, in New York City, I wouldn’t say that that New York City teachers union, that the caucus that runs the show there is allied with the DSA. That’s definitely not true. But I would also point to Washington, D.C., where you have a new mayor in D.C. that seems to be more of that branch who was strongly endorsed by the teachers unions there, in part pledging to roll back a lot of those reforms that Michelle Rhee had put in. to place so long ago that had done so much good things for the children of Washington, D.C.

PETERSON: Yeah, so the surprise with her is that she actually does not oppose the charter schools. About half the kids in D.C. go to charter schools, and she actually said they need more money in her political campaign. So, on the one hand, she wants to… eliminate accountability for teachers and eliminate the extra pay that teachers get if they perform particularly well. But on the other side, they’re actually support charters. So even she’s sort of a mixed bag.

HARTNEY: Yeah, well, I think that all goes to show it’s one thing is to be running for office and it’s another thing to govern. It’s nice to get on the other side of the politics of all this when maybe you don’t need the endorsement. And I and I would just say another example of that is the governor of Virginia who, you know, the current governor of Virginia came into power with strong support from the Virginia Education Association. And a couple of minutes after she was elected, she said, maybe not so fast on a strong collective bargaining law for the state. So, you know, you never know how these things. are going to work out when you move away from the elections and more toward the governing.

PETERSON: So, what do you think will be the effect of the new federal scholarship program? This is something backed by the Trump administration. They’re trying very hard to get all the states and all the governors in the states to help facilitate the implementation of this program, which will allow people to get a federal tax break if they contribute to private schools and to a school choice program. Is this going to accelerate this tendency that you’ve already identified?

HARTNEY: I do think it may be a real bellwether on the Democratic side for those jockeying to run for the Democratic nomination in 2028, much the same way that we saw, you know, you had a lot of Republican governors who We’re worried about being seen as endorsing Obamacare and accepting the expansion in their states. The politics internally for their state are difficult, right, because you’re turning down free money that otherwise, you know, the subsidies will go to other states. So internally for these Democratic governors. They don’t really probably want to do that. But if they’re going to be on that debate stage and you’re going to, you know, and you really want the support of the union in the primary, that puts them in a difficult position. And the union has been pretty clear about this. They’ve said, look, we’re watching what you’re doing, and you should reject this money because if you support it, then you’re for school vouchers and you’re against public schooling. And that’s not a tagline that any candidate who’s running for the Democratic nomination in 2028 really wants to have.

PETERSON: Well, you talk about running for the nomination because actually I think where the unions are particularly influential is in those primary races where money makes a lot of difference because if you don’t have money, you can’t get that name recognition. And secondly, not many people vote. So, if you can mobilize the teachers, they can make a difference in a primary. They might not make it in a general.

HARTNEY: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you just think about those Iowa caucuses, those cold nights there. Who’s going to stay out all night? You know, the costs of doing that are high. The types of people who do it are the ones who are more committed, that care more about the party, about the process. And, you know, teachers are going to be one of those groups and their unions are good at mobilizing people on that front.

PETERSON: So what do you say is the future? Is there going to be a fusion of the Democratic Party and the NEA and the AFT?

HARTNEY: Well, maybe the place to conclude is kind of where you started. I think the point that you made at the outset is really interesting and it goes beyond teachers unions. You know, you talked about the NRA as an example. I think we’re seeing more and more of, you put it, sort of a fusion of interest groups and political parties. But I think I would even add to that and say we’ve seen more and more these interest groups that formerly were seen as single issue interest groups, right? Like the NRA was about. gun policy. The NEA was about school policy, in particular, getting teachers better salaries and benefits. The ACLU was narrowly about free speech, period. And kind of what you’re seeing in the American political landscape these days is these groups are just picking a side and then they’re sort of supporting the entire party’s agenda on all of their issues, even outside their little narrow issue orbit. And I think that’s one of the bigger changes we’ve seen in American politics. I don’t see any reason for it to slow down anytime soon. The parties are polarized and the ability for single issue groups to kind of endorse candidates across the aisle; those days have really dried up. We don’t see the NRA endorsing a ton of Democrats and we don’t see the NEA endorsing a ton of Republicans. And it’s still occasionally some at the state and local level but not like they used to.

PETERSON: So, let’s talk about teacher salaries, because in teacher salaries, you would think the unions would be focused on that, would be concentrating on that. But when I look at the data, I don’t necessarily see teacher salaries keeping pace with the cost of living and with the wages that other people are making, especially people with a college degree. So, have unions lost their focus on what is really important to teachers?

HARTNEY: Yeah, you know, that’s a great question. I certainly. agree with your premise. You know, the data show after inflation; teacher salaries have not gone up. Of course, we also know that education spending has gone off and the tradeoff has been that we’ve hired more school employees. And we’ve also had a lot of that funding have to be eaten up by pension obligations to pay retired teachers who have pension benefits promised to them. So, there are structural issues at play. And of course, the union really can’t change that dynamic. And the union itself faces some constraints here. In order to remain powerful, it needs to grow its membership. So, it really can’t abandon the idea of hiring more school employees. But on the other hand, it needs to convince its membership, especially in an era where it has to compete for members because you know, post Janus, you don’t have to be a member. It also has to suggest that it’s bringing some bacon home. I think that this has been a challenge for the unions. And maybe they’re trying to solve some of that dilemma by leaning into the progressive politics because they think, well, we can at least keep the progressive teachers locked in as members and they’ll be enthusiastic about what we’re doing. But at the end of the day, progressive politics don’t pay your mortgage. And so, I think that at the low level, we are going to continue to see teachers unions pushing on the salary piece. I’ll just mention one data point in California. I analyzed some data a year or so ago, looking at which candidates the teachers union endorsed in local school board elections. And I actually found a really strong relationship between the incumbents that the union endorsed for the school board and whether teachers got a nice salary increase before the election. I think that’s some evidence that at the local level, teachers unions are still paying attention to salaries. And I saw less attention paid to whether they increase the hiring and the staffing at the local level. So, I think there might be a disconnect here where what happens at the local level with the local union, probably a lot of emphasis on salary and at the national level and at the state level, probably more of an emphasis on national and state political issues.

PETERSON: Well, then how about student achievement? You know, that was at one time the issue in American education. That was what gave rise to the report of Nation at Risk back in the 1980s. How important is student achievement to the politics of education today?

HARTNEY: Well, not as important as it ought to be. I mean, look, let’s start with the teachers unions. You know, in my book, I went back to the 80s and the 90s and found all sorts of evidence that the teachers unions were extremely concerned about the state of student achievement. And oftentimes their concern was political in nature. They worried that if they were seen as anti-reform, that they would be marginalized politically. Well, those days seem to be gone. They don’t seem to be paying a price for, frankly, not showing a lot of interest in the issue of student academic achievement. And so, what’s my evidence for that? Well, look at what they’re talking about. If you do a content analysis of their social media accounts, if you look at the resolutions and the agendas that they voted on in their recent summer meetings in July, it’s a very small fraction of amendments and rhetoric that are talking about the moribund state of student academic achievement in the United States. In the 1990s, in contrast, the unions really, you know, they went to the National Press Club. The NEA said, we need to be at the forefront of trying to improve student academic achievement in the United States. And you’re just not hearing that anymore. I think there are a lot of reasons for that. And they’re not paying a political price for that either, I will say. And I think that’s in part because sometimes it can be difficult to get voters to care about student academic achievement. It’s very easy to say, oh, this is just about test scores. It’s more important that our schools are well-funded, that there’s social and emotional health among students. And like all those things are important too, but I’m not hearing a large chorus of elected officials outside of the sort of Rahm Emanuel example that I gave early on that are really talking about the centrality of student academic achievement. And right now, we’re not where we were when George W. Bush was running for president and pushing for No Child Left Behind where one out of 10 Americans back then in the early 2000s said, the state of our schools was the single biggest problem facing the country, and that’s just not what we’re hearing. There are other issues on the agenda, and to the extent that voters are talking about schooling issues, they’re not talking about test scores.

PETERSON: Well, thank you, Michael. That’s an illuminating conversation about the state of the political parties and the interest groups and the role of teacher unions. Thank you very much for joining me on the Education Exchange.

HARTNEY: Thanks, Paul. My pleasure.

PETERSON: I have been speaking with Michael Hartney. He’s a professor at Boston College and the Bruni Fellow at the Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He’s the author of a recently released book entitled How Policies Make Interest Groups, Governments, Unions in American Education. On September 17th and 18th, the program on education policy and governance is hosting a conference that’s attracting homeschoolers from across the country. It’s called Emerging School Models, Broadening the Landscape for Choice. Daniel Hammond, he’s the incoming dean at the School of Education at the University of Texas. He and I will be the moderators for the conference, and you can learn more by going to the PEPG website. I am Paul Peterson. Please join me for a new Education Exchange podcast released on the Education Next website every Monday at noon Eastern time.