2 - Teachers Unions in the United States: The Politics of Blocking

Summary

The teachers unions are a powerful force in American education. They shape the public schools from the bottom up through collective bargaining, and shape them from the top down through their extensive involvement in state and national politics. In combining these bottom-up and top-down sources of power, and in combining them as potently as they do, the teachers unions are unique among all actors in the educational arena.

In this chapter, I will discuss the unions’ historical rise to power, how they have exercised that power in collective bargaining and politics, and the constraining effects they have had on more than a quarter century of attempted reform. Throughout, I will take advantage of the theoretical framing set out in the Introduction, emphasizing the key importance of vested interests and institutional veto points, to offer perspective on why these developments have occurred as they have.

The Formative Era of American Education—and the Late Rise of Union Power

The American public school system began to emerge in roughly its present form a little over 100 years ago, an outgrowth of the Progressive movement during the early 1900s to bureaucratize and professionalize American government at all levels. The national government was not the driving force behind this new education system. Under the Constitution, all responsibilities not specifically assigned to the federal government are reserved to the states—and public education is one of these. From the beginning, the American education system has been radically decentralized, with the states holding primary authority and using it to set up local districts with much discretion to staff, organize, and operate the schools.

Teachers in this new system clearly had vested interests in their jobs, with strong incentives to get organized in protecting those interests. Yet throughout the school system's era of institutional formation and expansion—lasting roughly half a century—hardly any teachers got organized into unions, and there was no collective bargaining. In this respect, the United States was unique among Western nations, where teachers universally got organized into unions as their education systems developed. The prime reason for American exceptionalism is that in the US, collective bargaining for public sector workers—of all types, not just teachers—was typically prohibited by law and practice, and the political environment for the unionization of public workers was quite hostile.