Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (20 page)

Guggenheim documents the effects of teachers unions in the film and what a big part chance has in the outcomes of these children’s lives. Most heartbreaking, he shows five students sitting, biting their nails at those lotteries, waiting for their names to be called. One young girl wants to be a veterinarian, but she’s stuck in a dead-end school, and doesn’t win the lottery to attend a charter school; another young boy also doesn’t win the school lottery and has to stay in his failing school, while his brother has the opportunity to attend a successful charter school; a few others win spaces in better schools and perhaps also win the chance for a better life.

And what are the chances of kids in failing schools getting into better ones? Unfortunately, their chances are very slim. For example, one charter school in Harlem had 792 applications for forty spots, and its numbers are fairly typical. There are far too many kids who want to go to successful charter schools than spaces at those schools. Clearly, kids want to learn; parents want them to learn; teachers want to teach them. But the teachers unions are keeping most of them in rotten schools.

The teachers unions have carefully framed the debate about spending on education as taxpayers not willing to pay their fair share for the education of our nation’s children. But their attack on spending is just smoke and mirrors. Every year, Americans spend more and more cash on education—and the teachers unions always claim that to fix K–12 education, we just need to throw more money at the problem. More money at the problem, of course, generally translates into more union dues for the teachers unions.

The United States spends almost $10,000 a year per elementary schoolchild.
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We spend 68 percent more per schoolchild than Germany, 33 percent more than Japan, 84 percent more than Korea, and 14 percent more than the United Kingdom.
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And yet, our children finished far behind these nations in math and science over the last decade.
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What do we get for enormous spending? An educational system that no one, certainly not teachers unions, wants to take credit for. Our rates of high school graduation have shown no improvement, and even declined slightly, over the last forty years.
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There is basically no good news on the educational horizon whatsoever in terms of our spending producing measurable educational gains for our students. Except, as one commentator notes, “American students get terrible math scores compared to their international peers, but they think they’re great in math—in fact, they have more confidence in their math skills than students from any other country.”
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But while confidence is great to have, it is no substitute for real student performance.

Many public school teachers are tremendous educators, motivated and caring people who want the best for our children. But behind the friendly principal at your school, the loving teachers that instruct your children, and the civic-minded school board that makes decisions about schooling in your district lurk their Shadowbosses—teachers unions and their bosses. The two national teachers unions are two of the largest unions of any type in our country. Not coincidentally, they are also among the largest financial contributors to Democrat Party politics. Their grubby fingerprints are all over America’s dysfunctional education system, all over Congress, and all over the Obama Administration.

If the fifty individual states developed their own educational policies, you could expect a wide range of models for education in America—a thriving diversity of schooling ideas that would reveal startlingly different models for teacher pay, school schedules, and subject matter content. But in fact, public schools across America share almost uniform characteristics. And—surprise, surprise!—those characteristics typically benefit teachers unions.

With their immense dues income, teachers unions extend their political influence across all fifty states, even the right-to-work states. They are able to keep educational policies remarkably consistent across most school districts in America. Policies common to most school districts include: paying teachers based on seniority and educational attainment rather than merit and performance; seniority-based layoff policies known as “last in, first out”; and tenure policies that make it very difficult to fire bad or underperforming teachers. All of these policies are beneficial to teachers unions, but none are in the interests of our children. Worst of all, teachers unions keep many of our kids in failing school systems and give them very few real chances for success.

The story of teachers unions is a story about power and money. The money comes from teachers in the form of union dues payable to the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and their state and local affiliates. The NEA, headed by Dennis Van Roekel, is the single largest and most powerful labor union in America. Its rival and sometimes partner is the much smaller AFT, headed by lawyer-turned-educator Randi Weingarten.
A veteran of many teachers union battles, Weingarten took over as head of AFT after eleven years at the helm of New York City’s teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). The NEA and the AFT generally act in concert to control our educational policy through their political activity and propaganda. Local and state teachers unions are generally affiliated with either the NEA or the AFT, or in some cases both unions.

The teachers unions—the NEA, AFT, and their state and local affiliates–collect an estimated $2 billion in dues and fees from educators every year.
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Just how extensive is the teachers union control over our nation’s teachers? Two-thirds of America’s three million K–12 public school teachers are now under union monopoly bargaining control, and an estimated three-quarters of teachers are members of a teachers union.
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How many current teachers actually voted in an election to have a union in their district? Not even 10 percent of current teachers have.
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States granted unions the power to unionize teachers in the school or district in the late 1950s and held elections in the school districts. If more than 50 percent of the teachers voting in the election chose the union, then the teachers union was certified as the teachers’ exclusive bargaining representative. From that day forward, the teachers union represented
every
teacher in the district—even those teachers that voted no or didn’t vote at all. And all future generations of teachers in that district are also bound by this
fifty-year-old
union vote. No recertification of the teachers union has likely ever been required since then. The teachers union in their school was there before most current teachers at the school were born and will likely remain there well after they die. And this works exactly the same for all other government employee unions. The Communist Party in the former Soviet Union would have been pleased with this type of arrangement.

Take a look at the map in which we gave each state a letter grade based on how much control the state gives teachers unions over the state’s teachers (which correlated strongly to how much control the state gives unions over all its government workers).
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The F-grade states give teachers unions extensive powers over their teachers. In these twenty-two states plus the District of Columbia, state law grants the teachers unions collective bargaining power over teachers. This means that the teachers unions will represent teachers in all their contract negotiations and all other dealings with their employer. But the big advantage for the unions in the F-grade states, versus the other states, is that teachers are forced to pay dues to the union or be fired (and here you thought this was a free country).

In these forced-dues, F-grade states, teachers don’t have to actually join the union. But if they don’t join, they still have to pay agency fees about equal to union dues.
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So, in these forced-dues states, teachers usually join the union to get the benefits of union membership (some liability and other insurance, camaraderie) since the cost is almost the same. Although these F-grade states employ less than half of our nation’s teachers, teachers unions collect over three-quarters of all their dues and fees from these states.
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The twelve C-grade states give teachers unions collective bargaining over all or almost all teachers in the state but don’t give them the power to collect forced dues from these teachers. In these states, the teachers union will be a big presence in teachers’ working lives, and there will be a lot of pressure to join the union. But if a teacher declines joining the union, she doesn’t have to pay dues.

The nine B-grade states allow individual school districts to decide whether or not to impose collective bargaining in their districts, but these states don’t have state-level collective bargaining laws. In these states, unions do not collect forced dues even in the districts where they have collective bargaining power over teachers. The teachers unions’ strategy in these states is to increase the number of districts under their control, because more teachers join the union where unions have collective bargaining power over them. If the union already represents you in contract negotiations and grievances against your employer,
you already feel the power of the union in your workplace, and you are more likely to join the union than if no union represents you.

Adapted from data provided in Terry M. Moe’s
Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2011), and updated for changes in the law.

Chart courtesy of Milton L. Chappell, the National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation

Finally, there are the seven A-grade states, where there is no collective bargaining or forced dues for teachers. As one would expect, far fewer teachers join teachers unions in the A-grade states than other states.
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This suggests that if all states operated like the A states, the unions would collect less than one-sixth of the dues that they collect now, a huge financial blow for the teachers unions and their power.
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Data from the Education Intelligence Agency and Terry Moe,
Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools
, table 2-2

You might expect that all right-to-work states would be A-grade states that don’t allow unions to have collective bargaining power over teachers. But this is not the case. Sixteen right-to-work states do have collective bargaining over at least some teachers. Right-to-work laws don’t protect teachers and other workers from having collective bargaining imposed on them. But teachers in
these states are protected against having to pay dues and fees as a condition for getting or keeping their jobs. And right-to-work laws hit unions where it hurts—in the pocketbook; only about 18 percent of total teachers union dues are collected in right-to-work states, although about 44 percent of teachers work in right-to-work states.
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