Ever since Bob Dole criticized the teachers unions in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, the role of the National Education Association, or NEA, and the American Federation of Teachers, or AFT, has emerged as a campaign and public-policy issue. Dole said: "I say this not to the teachers, but to their unions: If education were a war, you would be losing it. If it were a business, you would be driving it into bankruptcy. If it were a patient, it would be dying. To the teachers unions I say: When I am president, I will disregard your political power for the sake of the children, the schools and the nation. I plan to enrich your vocabulary with those words you fear -- school choice, competition and opportunity scholarships -- so that you will join the rest of us in accountability, while others compete with you for the commendable privilege of giving our children a real education."
Was Dole's swing at the NEA and AFT justified? Yes -- probably more than Dole himself realized. Take, for example, the union impact on student achievement. When Professor Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago tried to identify the factors that were responsible for the decline in student achievement from 1960 to 1990, he came up with only two: the shift from local to state funding and the growth of teacher unions. A 1996 study by Caroline Minter Hoxby, published in the Quarterly Review of Economics, analyzed the union impact on costs. Hoxby, affiliated with Harvard University and the National Bureau of Economic Research, concluded that unionization has increased costs of public education but not improved outcomes.
How do the NEA and AFT (including their state and local affiliates) raise the costs while lowering the levels of student achievement? To answer this question, one must understand what the NEA/AFT try to achieve in legislation and collective bargaining. A partial list of union objectives includes the following:
If your child does not have a qualified mathematics or science teacher, you can thank the NEA and AFT for the salary policies that are to blame. Teachers unions advocate single-salary schedules -- paying all teachers the same salary regardless of subject. Under single salary schedules, teachers are paid solely on the basis of their years of teaching experience and their academic credits. The teachers unions have made sure that teachers' salaries are not based on merit or the type of subjects taught. It is a fact -- frequently cited by NEA and AFT officials themselves -- that school districts are unable to find and hold qualified mathematics and science teachers.
The obvious solution is to pay mathematics and science teachers more to attract qualified people in these fields. Unfortunately, the unions are opposed to this commonsense solution. They cite the shortage of teachers in mathematics and science as an argument to raise the salaries of all teachers, even those in fields where there is a plentiful supply.
Higher-education administrators know it would be practically impossible to operate a university by paying all professors, regardless of subject, the same salary. Universities would be unable to employ qualified medical professors if their salaries were the same as for English professors. Similarly, people who can teach mathematics and science can earn more in occupations outside of teaching. Thus, when the teachers unions insist that all teachers be paid the same regardless of subject, they help create shortages of qualified teachers of mathematics and science.
Needless to say, the teachers unions claim that their collective goals contribute to academic achievement. Higher salaries are supposed to attract more talented teachers and reduce turnover. Tenured positions for teachers are supposed to protect competent teachers. More preparation time during the regular school day should result in better-prepared teachers. The NEA-PAC even refers to itself as "education's defense fund."
The union's arguments have a superficial plausibility but cannot withstand scrutiny. Take, for example, the union's claim that smaller classes are the key to improving student achievement, since they allow individualized instruction. Actually, class size largely is overrated as a factor in student achievement. In many nations whose students outperform ours, classes are much larger than those in the United States. Of course, smaller classes mean that more teachers are needed, and more teachers mean more union revenues.
The question policymakers should be asking, however, is whether the expenditures required to lower class size are the most productive way to use the money. In many cases, they are not. The funds used to lower class size often could be more productively spent for laboratory equipment or textbooks or supplies. In most situations, reductions in class size benefit the union and teachers much more than they benefit pupils. The same point applies to the other union objectives that allegedly help students.
No matter who is supposed to benefit from a union policy -- the poor, the disabled, the preschool child, minorities, whatever -- the union proposals always benefit teachers and teachers unions simultaneously. The union litmus test is not whether a policy benefits students; it is whether it benefits teachers or unions. Granted, teachers are not the only group in our society that accords its special interests the highest priority. The teachers unions, however, have been extremely successful in packaging teachers and teachers-union benefits as benefits to pupils or to "education."
"Education's defense fund," it may be argued, is a defense fund for about 6,000 union officers and staff, more than a third of whom I estimate to be earning at least $100,000 a year in salary and benefits. Some citizens wonder whether the union's officers and staff are still in touch with the lifestyle and culture of mainstream Americans when the median household income in 1993 was $31,241. At any rate, we can see why the NEA and AFT are so adamantly opposed to school choice. School choice is not a threat to teachers, but it is to the affluent union bureaucracies; it is much more difficult to organize teachers in private schools, especially denominational schools. Needless to say, the unions say nothing about this in their campaigns against school choice.
What has been the union impact on the cultural and lifestyle problems -- teenage pregnancies, drug use, juvenile crime -- during the past 30 years? It isn't a pretty picture. virtually every social indicator has been characterized by negative trends. Of course, some of these partly are due to television, divorce rates, the drug trade and a host of other factors. Nonetheless, it is revealing to note which cultural battles the unions decided to fight: abortion on demand, condom availability, domestic partnerships and the legitimacy of all lifestyles -- no matter what their long-term consequences. While union leaders argue that schools merely reflect but do not cause family breakdown, NEA and AFT political support goes overwhelmingly to candidates who support agendas that have contributed substantially to it.
For instance, the teachers unions support condom availability in schools, arguing that many students will be sexually active, hence the schools should do everything they can to ensure "safe sex." In fact, teenagers are notoriously ineffective users of contraceptives; providing them with condoms is a sure way of encouraging sexual activities that are virtually certain to culminate in pregnancies or venereal diseases or both.
Meanwhile, in the last decade the teachers unions have painted the religious right as posing the greatest danger to a democratic society. To hear the unions tell it, the religious right is trying to abolish public education to impose theocratic education upon our young people. In practice, the religious right turns out to be those denominational groups that are fed up with public schools that undermine traditional family values.
And yet, the NEA and AFT attacks on the religious right may spell greater tragedy for American education. In a society increasingly addicted to instant gratification, religion is one of the few institutions that encourages young people to adopt a long-range view and the habits and attitudes that reinforce it. This is why inner-city pupils consistently achieve better in denominational schools than they do in public schools. Denominational schools provide the structure and stability needed by pupils from broken homes and unstable communities. In depriving such children of their best -- perhaps their only -- opportunity to get the kind of education they need, the NEA and AFT are responsible for an educational as well as a cultural tragedy.
Today, the NEA and AFT have a 25-year track record that was not available in the 1960s, when teacher unionization was emerging on a large scale. Looking at this record, the only conclusion possible is that they are, as Dole asserted, the major obstacle to educational improvement in the United States.
