Report: Union Power and the Education of Children-"Education News has linked to this report by Terry M. Moe of the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
Moe has also published this report: Collective Bargaining and the Performance of the Public Schools
The introduction in the report on Union Power begins:
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Between the 1960s and the early 1980s, the American system of public education was transformed by a dramatic shift in its balance of power.
In earlier times the system’s key power holders were the administrative professionals charged with running it. Teachers had little power, and they were unorganized aside from their widespread membership in the National Education Association (NEA), which was controlled by administrators. But in the 1960s states began to adopt laws that, for the first time, promoted collective bargaining for public employees. And when the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) launched an aggressive campaign to organize teachers, the NEA turned itself into a labor union to compete, and the battle was on in thousands of school districts.
By the time the dust settled in the early 1980s, virtually all districts of any size (outside the South) were successfully organized, collective bargaining was the norm, and the teachers unions—with millions of members and loads of money— were by far the most powerful force in American education.1
This new system, defined and protected by union power, has been in equilibrium now for more than 20 years. On the surface it looks very much like the system of school boards, superintendents, and local democracy bequeathed us by Progressive reformers nearly a century ago.2 But the Progressives did not bequeath us a system of union power. This is a modern development, one with profound consequences that make the modern system qualitatively different from the one it replaced.3
The unions now shape the public schools from the bottom up through collective bargaining agreements that affect virtually every aspect of school organization and operation. They also shape the schools from the top down by influencing the education policies of government and blocking reforms they find threatening to their interests. It is difficult to overstate how extensive a role they play in making today’s schools what they are, and in preventing them from being something different.4
With few exceptions, education scholars take this pervasive union influence as one of the great givens of public education. They don’t challenge or question it. They don’t even study it. This is a serious mistake with far-reaching consequences, and not simply because the unions are too important to overlook. For there are persuasive reasons to think that the power of the teachers unions is in many ways quite bad for public education and ultimately works to the disadvantage of children. I will be arguing that the problems associated with union power are inherent to the unions as organizations, are very much to be expected, and cannot be eliminated by some sort of “reform unionism” that relies on the unions themselves to adopt a more enlightened, public-spirited approach. It follows that, if public education is to escape the stultifying drag of the unions’ grip on the system—and if the system, therefore, is to evolve into a new form that is better suited to providing a quality education to children—it will happen only through reforms that weaken or eliminate union power over the schools."

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