Subscribe to our Blog
Big Education
This Education Next article describes the enormous political power of American teachers’ unions. This power is arrived at by means of two different tactics: spending and mobilizing teachers. In terms of spending, in the 2007-08 election cycle American teachers’ unions spent $71.7 million on candidate and issue campaigns, considerably more than any other federation, association or mega-corporation. In terms of mobilizing teachers, each election sees the union marshalling hundreds of thousands of their members to knock on doors, stuff envelopes, staff phone banks, attend rallies, and make donations in support of the unions’ preferred candidate (almost always left-leaning).
The teachers’ unions are the number one political player in the United States, frequently playing the role of king-maker in both controlling who gets elected and then influencing what he or she does once elected. Of course, the unions work to influence education policy in terms of opposing such things as school choice, testing, and merit pay, but they also take an interest in many other issues - including higher taxes, liberalized labour laws, wide-open campaign spending regulations, single-payer health care, legal gay marriage, and much more.
If you think that things are different in Canada, I have this bridge I’d like to sell you. To the best of my knowledge, there is no database of political spending in Canada (and, because I’m on dial-up at the cottage all summer, I can’t research this), but it’s clear that Canadian teachers’ unions have proportionately just as much as or more money than their American counterparts, and they are equally active in Canadian politics.
The question we need to ask is whether democracy is well served when a single group can wield so much political power. Paraphrasing the famous quote by Georges Clemenceau to the effect that war is too important a matter to be left to the military, we say that education is too important a matter to be left to the teachers’ unions.
Teacher unions are also very good recruiting parental concern for their kids into support for whatever the union is advocating even though there are lots of times when there’s evidence one group will benefit at the expense of the other.
Consider the enormous amount of money spent cutting class sizes to an arbitrary 20. The jury is still very much out on whether a minor reduction in class size provides significant and permanent benefit yet the McGuinty Liberals made it a top priority. What other resources could that money have funded? Who was promoting this as a top priority? Isn’t this a defacto reduction in teacher workload if we’re paying him/her to teach fewer kids? Who determines what should be expected?
Then you had McGuinty setting aside the recommended staffing model in the Pascal Report in favour of one more advantageous to the unions without ever explaining the rationale, nor being asked to….
Teachers are, ultimately, employees of the education system not owners. I think the problem is that when you have a McGuinty, or someone like him, who acts more as an advocate for the unions than a counterbalance to them there’s no one acting on behalf of the public interest.
A real problem is that the unions have enormous abilty to use kids as bargainning chips for whatever they want and most parents, understandably, will fold rather than challenge what’s being demanded.