The 1990 publication of John Chubb and Terry Moe's Politics, Markets and American Schools marked the beginnings of a new school of thought in education policy. Rather than engage the existing field of educational research on its own terms, Chubb and Moe utilized an institutionalist version of rational choice theory to make an overarching argument about the organizational structure of public education. Proceeding from first principles of a Hobbesian-styled “market man” and the organizational superiority of markets, they argued that the democratic governance of American public education was “inherently destructive of school autonomy and inherently conducive to bureaucracy.”Footnote 1 If educational innovation and mission-driven schools were to flourish, they contended, school leaders must be “emancipated” from democratic control and oversight and given the autocratic powers of a corporate chief executive officer over the educational enterprise. To accomplish this end, an educational marketplace must replace the public provision of education.
A small but politically influential circle of academics took shape in the wake of Chubb and Moe's analysis, employing similar methodology and espousing similar policy prescriptions for the commodification of schooling in an educational marketplace. From the start, the work of these academics was marked by policy advocacy and political commitment: It provided not disinterested scholarly analyses but intellectual engagement on behalf of the market transformation of American education. As a consequence, it quickly came into conflict with teacher unionism. There is no more central value to teacher unions than their dedication to public education, rooted in their belief that education is a public good, essential to the development of an educated citizenry and to the democratic self-rule of that citizenry. In the teacher union creed, all Americans must have access to a free, quality education that is publically provided and democratically accountable to the public.
While the conflict between these two opposed visions of education is certainly a matter of intellectual contestation, it has a more important dimension, as it is directly implicated in actual political struggle over the direction of American education. In recent years, a remarkably cohesive political coalition of wealth and power has been mobilized on behalf of market reforms of public education; if it were not for the countervailing political power of teacher unions, that policy agenda would certainly have been victorious.Footnote 2 As the balance of power in this political struggle became clear, the market school extended its criticisms of American education into a critique of the teacher unions that advocated for public education. Terry Moe spearheaded this emerging critique: His Special Interest is the culmination of more than a decade of work that has been closely aligned with political attacks on teacher unions. Its jacket cover includes endorsements from high-profile antiteacher union partisans Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee.
Forced Unionism?
Moe's argument begins with Mancur Olson's rational choice analysis of unions. Through analysis of the “free rider” problem, Olson declares that “the essence of unionism” is “compulsory membership and picket lines.”Footnote 3 Following Olson, Moe (pp. 30–1) declares that unionism is coerced:
Workers can be forced to contribute to the group effort. This can be accomplished by union activists themselves, through violence, intimidation, and other means of making recalcitrants pay dearly for refusing to contribute … But there is a more genteel and effective way of accomplishing the same thing, if public officials can be persuaded to pass laws that, in one way or another, require workers to support unions (original emphasis).
This argument challenges the very legitimacy of unions in a free and open society. “Individual freedoms,” Moe declares, “are surely being restricted” by the existence of unions (p. 64).
Do American teachers and workers view unions as forced and coercive? Empirical research has shown that they see unions in a very different light. Studies by Richard Freeman and Seymour Martin Lipset demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of American workers in unionized workplaces, as high as 90%, say that they would vote for union representation in an election; moreover, consistent numbers of nonunionized workers, almost half of the workforce, indicate that they would elect to have a unionized workplace if they had that opportunity.Footnote 4 Studies by the nonpartisan Public Agenda and the pro–market reform Education Sector have shown that overwhelming majorities of American teachers believe that teacher unions ably represent their common good, and that without them, their salary and teaching conditions would be considerably diminished.Footnote 5 Unions are seen as vital for the teaching profession, and an essential protection against abuses of authority and the imposition of political agendas on schools.
These studies tell us that American teachers understand the “economic freedom” of Olson and Moe to be an economic state of nature characterized by radical inequality. None of their economic rights or freedoms would be secure in such a state, since as isolated, atomized individuals they would be powerless before the great concentrations of wealth and power they would confront. Teachers require a social contract, much like Locke's pact of association, to combine and act collectively: Only through such an association can they interact with the wealthy and powerful on a more equal basis and realize their economic rights and freedoms. Moe's “genteel” coercion of law is, in reality, the legislative establishment of democratic rules for this pact of association: Unions can only be established and disestablished through expressions of the will of the majority; once democratically established, unions must be recognized by management as the collective voice of their membership; and once established, union leadership must be democratically elected by and accountable to their membership. Pace Olson and Moe, no one is forced to be a member of the union, but those who choose not to join must pay the equivalent of taxes under a social contract, a discounted “agency fee” for the services they receive from the union.
The irony of charges of “forced unionism” is that in America, coercion has been exercised on the part of wealth and power, with the objective of thwarting the democratic will of workers to form unions and bargain collectively.Footnote 6 The initiatives to eviscerate the right of public-sector workers to unions and collective bargaining undertaken during the last year in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan are only the most recent attempts to undermine the freedom of association of American workers.
Moe is well aware of the empirical studies that cast discredit on the idea of forced unionism. He cites the Public Agenda and Education Sector studies in Special Interest, and he commissioned Harris Interactive to do a 2003 survey of American teachers, with his own findings confirming the results of those two studies. According to Moe's survey, well over 90% of teachers view their membership in unions as “voluntary,” not coerced; over 75% of teachers are satisfied with their representation by the union; and teachers are strongly supportive of collective bargaining—even in right-to-work states that prohibit it (pp. 71, 77). On wedge issues such as tenure and standardized testing, teachers and their unions are on the same page (pp. 102, 105). Short of a contention that teachers are victims of “false consciousness,” too witless to understand that they are being coerced to belong to their unions, it is hard to see how such evidence can be squared with the Moe-Olson view of unions. Yet far from suggesting that teachers do not understand their “true” interests, Moe argues that teachers and their unions are closely aligned around the defense of those interests. Teacher unions do “what teachers want them to do” (p. 111). He even notes that teacher union leaders have good reasons to be responsive to members' needs, as they need solidarity among their members to move the union agenda, and they can be—and are—voted out of office in democratic elections if the members decide that they have lost touch with their concerns. The incongruity of this reality with the idea of forced unionism is left unresolved.
The Power of Teacher Unions
For Moe, the problem with teacher unions is not just that they oppose his market model of educational change with their model of educational change, but that they possess the political power to “block” the adoption of market reforms. The root of this teacher union political power is that they are “fabulously wealthy” as a result of the membership dues they collect (p. 280). If one combines the political action committee (PAC) expenditures of the NEA and AFT, he argues, the total far exceeds that of any other interest group (pp. 282–3): Teacher union wealth buys political influence.
Moe's claims are extraordinarily misleading on three counts. First, by law, union PACs cannot be funded though membership dues; their monies must come from voluntary member contributions that are made in addition to regular union dues. This legal requirement is common knowledge among political scientists who study interest-group politics. To misrepresent these funds as derived from dues is a significant point for Moe's argument because, if ever a free-rider problem should arise for teacher unions, it would most logically appear here, where members are being asked to make additional contributions to unions solely for political purposes. The fact that teacher unions use such mechanisms to raise significant amounts of money for their PACs suggests that free-rider issues do not have the significance for teachers that the rational choice theory of Moe and Olson would posit.
Second, Moe manipulates the data on national PAC expenditures to overstate the relative financial power of teacher unions. It is common knowledge among political scientists who study interest-group politics that business expenditures on politics far exceed labor expenditures. The Center for Responsive Politics, the source for Moe's data on national election money, lists unions as the tenth-largest sector for campaign expenditures, well behind business sectors in finance, health care, communications, energy, and construction, and barely ahead of business sectors in agriculture and transportation; combine the business sectors, and labor accounts for a fraction of the total business expenditures.Footnote 7 In order to present teacher unions as the single-largest interest group spender on national election campaigns, Moe amalgamates the NEA and AFT PAC expenditures on the theory that they represent the same “teacher interests” (p. 282). Yet he leaves all other interest groups uncombined: If the theory Moe used for teacher unions was applied across the board, the ranking of teacher unions would fall well below such corporate combinations as investment banking interests and telecommunication interests.
Third and most importantly, what is missing entirely from Moe's account is the slightest acknowledgment of the billions of dollars that are now flowing into education every year to pursue the market policy agenda and do battle with teacher unions. Corporate foundations—Gates, Walton, Broad, Robertson, Icahn, and Fisher Foundations—are the most prominent actors.Footnote 8 Wealthy individuals, such as Rupert Murdoch and the hedge-fund managers behind Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), are also major financiers. To grasp just how significant this funding is, and how inexplicable Moe's failure to discuss it is, consider the following: In a matter of days after she publicly announced the formation of her explicitly antiunion organization StudentsFirst, Special Interest endorser Michelle Rhee raised more than $100 million on its behalf from Murdoch, Robertson, Fisher, and Ken Langone, among others.Footnote 9 For a frame of reference, the sum that Rhee raised is $40 million more than what Moe says the “fabulously wealthy” AFT and NEA together spent on federal elections over the last 20 years combined. The same reality holds true in the realm of state politics. In New York, the strongest bastion of American teacher unionism, a single organization—DFER's Education Reform Now (ERN)—outspent the New York state and city teacher unions in 2010, spending $6.6 million to the unions' $6.2 million; moreover, ERN is on track to surpass its 2010 benchmark in 2011, having spent $3.8 million at the half-year mark.Footnote 10 Rhee's StudentsFirst is only one of a cohort of well-funded antiunion organizations nationally, and ERN is only one of a cohort of well-funded antiunion organizations operating in New York.
Teacher unions will never come close to matching the financial resources now at the disposal of their opponents. Yet the political power of teacher unions is real, even if Moe's explanation of it is entirely unconvincing. Teacher unions have a political resource that cannot be bought: millions of well-educated, politically aware members who understand education issues from firsthand experience. Teachers vote and participate in election campaigns and political action in disproportionately high numbers. A significant portion of teacher union PAC money is spent on getting those politically active members into the field, where they staff phone banks, canvass election precincts, attend election rallies, organize get-out-the-vote drives and lobby elected officials. But in a 66-page chapter on teacher union political power, Moe dedicates a single sentence to the union's “activists,” offering as his sole observation the claim that union political work of this nature is “difficult to document” (p. 280).
The flaws of Moe's work on teacher unions are laid bare with his discussion of union power. Moe allows the political commitments and ideological prisms he brings to the subject of teacher unionism to so color the substance of his analysis that Special Interest ultimately fails as a piece of scholarship. That is unfortunate, as teacher unions have rarely been the subject of serious, in-depth study: There is a real need for solid research on them. With the publication of this book, it remains a need unmet.
