How Teachers Unions Co-Opted School Boards – The American Spectator

On Jul 12, 2023

In a recent opinion piece published in USA Today, Randi Weingarten delivered the following cri de cœur: “MAGA Republicans are destroying our public schools. Teachers and parents must fight back.” Weingarten is, of course, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the country’s second-largest teachers union. If her dire warning about the fell designs of the GOP seems semi-hysterical, it’s important to remember what she means by “our public schools.” For the ATF and its larger counterpart, the National Education Association (NEA), this term is synonymous with “union-controlled schools.” And, as we discovered during the COVID-19 lockdowns, they intend to remain in control.

Moreover, this control is by no means limited to the “teachers” we entrust with our children’s education. Throughout the past thirty years, these unions have used their enormous financial resources to take over local school boards, whose members ostensibly run our public education system for the benefit of students, parents, and the community. Before the pandemic, most voters ignored school board elections, and the unions exploited this apathy to pack these all-important bodies with people who could be counted on to put the agenda of the unions before any other consideration. How did they accomplish this? Stanford University political scientist Terry Moe explains in his 2011 book, Special Interest:

The Michigan Education Association, for example, distributes a forty-page instructional (and hortatory) document to its local leaders, filled with operational details about how to evaluate and screen school board candidates, recruit friendly ones, run entire campaigns, set up phone banks, engage in door-to-door canvassing, get out the vote, and more. Its title: “Electing Your Own Employer, It’s as Easy as 1, 2, 3.”

This manual was in circulation well over a decade ago, and it was not unique to Michigan. By the time parents learned during the pandemic that public schools had been promoting leftist dogma, pseudoscience, revisionist history, and transgender ideology, the teachers unions already controlled the school boards. Consequently, when concerned parents began appearing at school board meetings to express their unhappiness with what their children were being taught, they were shocked to learn that they were considered interlopers with no right to question ideologically tendentious curricula. As one father discovered in Virginia, parents are even discouraged from protesting policies that endanger student safety.

Michael T. Hartney of the Manhattan Institute has done extensive research on the teachers unions and their ongoing effort to dominate school board elections. Hartney tracked the success rate of nearly 5,000 union-endorsed candidates in California, Florida, and New York, and his findings clearly indicate that they win the vast majority of school board races. Moreover, the success rate of union-endorsed candidates has been just as high in Republican-leaning states as in Democratic-leaning ones. In other words, no matter where you live, it is quite likely that some teachers union controls the composition of your local school board. As Hartney writes in City Journal, four distinct patterns stand out:

First, union-endorsed candidates win roughly 70 percent of all competitive school board races. Second, union support helps both incumbents and challengers, offering a greater electoral advantage than does incumbency. Third, union-friendly candidates tend to win in both strong (California, New York) and weak (Florida) union states, as well as in conservative and liberal school districts. Fourth, union endorsements can propel losing candidates to victory.

Hartney also shows that the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which precluded unions from forcing nonunion employees to pay “agency fees,” has not eroded the power of teachers unions to dominate school board elections. What has begun to do so is the parents’ rights movement, which first gained national attention in Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial election. This is what prompted the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to imply in a 2021 letter to President Joe Biden that parents who protested at school board meetings were domestic terrorists. As the New York Post reported at the time, the letter asked for federal protection: “NSBA specifically solicits the expertise and resources of the US Department of Justice.”

This letter backfired badly, energizing the parents’ rights movement and contributing to GOP governor Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Old Dominion. This movement continued to chip away at union control in 2022, particularly in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis aligned himself with “Moms for Liberty” before the August school board elections. An Associated Press report quoted DeSantis as saying: “We got involved to help candidates who were fighting the machine, fighting the lock-downers, fighting the forced-maskers, fighting the people that want to indoctrinate our kids.” Two-thirds of the candidates he endorsed won. And as Newsweek reports, Moms for Liberty made even further gains on November 8, 2022:

About 61 percent of the group’s 67 endorsed candidates in Florida, where Moms for Liberty spent $50,000 in total on campaigning, were victorious on Tuesday. With votes in some states still to be counted, the organization expects roughly half of the more than 200 candidates they endorsed in other states will be elected, even though it spent zero helping them. In the next election cycle, Moms for Liberty intends to spend money in every state, co-founder Tiffany Justice told Newsweek.

Moms for Liberty is one of the most active parents’ rights organizations in the country. In 2022, it nominated 500 candidates for school boards, 275 of whom won. They successfully flipped seventeen school boards that had been dominated by the teachers unions. And their reach goes far beyond the seven boards they flipped in Florida. They also flipped school boards in California, Indiana, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The teachers union empire is, however, about to strike back. The Daily Signal reports, for example, that the Pennsylvania State Education Association has already devoted conference time to a session titled “Combatting Moms for Liberty Attacks on our Teachers and our Schools.”

The description of the session on the conference registration form reads as follows: “This session will explore the dark-money origins of this astroturf organization and its real long-term goal, as well as provide strategies on how to defeat them in the ballot box and at the board meeting.” Formulations like “dark-money origins” and “its real long-term goal” contain more than a whiff of conspiratorial thinking. The teachers unions obviously use this kind of language to delegitimize any group that threatens their control over school boards. But parents’ rights groups are not going away. As Jarrott Skorup writes in the Hill, Moms for Liberty boasts 195 chapters in thirty-seven states with almost 100,000 members.

This is what Randi Weingarten is really worried about when she makes wild claims like “MAGA Republicans are destroying our public schools.” And when she calls on parents to “fight back,” she doesn’t mean the folks who belong to Moms for Liberty. Why not? Because such people want “politicized” classrooms. Yep. That’s what Weingarten says. In reality, of course, she knows that they are a threat to the enormous political power that the teachers unions amassed while parents weren’t looking. Weingarten and her fellow union bosses blundered when they pushed for school closures and remote learning during the pandemic. Now the parents are on to them, and they are planning to take their local school boards back.

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