Public employees have been active in American politics for more than a century. Initially they lobbied elected officials for better compensation, improved working conditions, and more control over their activities—at times to great effect apparently.Footnote ¹ Yet the nature of this activity changed dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s, when the federal government and most states adopted policies granting their workers the right to bargain collectively over the terms and conditions of their employment. The institutionalization of collective bargaining within government opened to public employees a new avenue of influence, one that stands apart from conventional interest-group politics. Membership in public sector unions exploded, enabling them to emerge as an influential contingent within the American labor movement.Footnote ²

Nowhere was this transformation of bureaucratic politics and policymaking more profound than in public education. Prior to the 1960s, the National Education Association (NEA) was an administrator-dominated professional organization in which teachers held little sway. As states enacted laws sanctioning collective bargaining, however, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) launched a vigorous campaign to organize the nation's teachers. The NEA quickly converted itself into a union in order to compete. By the 1980s, as Terry Moe explains in this remarkable new book, “virtually all districts (outside the South) were successfully organized, collective bargaining was the norm, and the teachers unions reigned supreme as the most powerful force in American education” (p. 7).

Special Interest offers the first systematic treatment of the consequences of this development for the organization and, ultimately, the performance of American schools. In painstaking detail, Moe documents myriad ways in which union power leads school districts to be “organized mainly to benefit the adults who work there” (p. 387), rather than the students they are intended to serve. He shows how typical collective bargaining agreements make it all but impossible to dismiss incompetent teachers, impede efforts to assign teachers to jobs based on fit or performance rather than seniority, and contain detailed work rules that boost costs and stifle innovation without demonstrably improving teachers' ability to serve students. He also describes how unions use their political resources to block the adoption of reforms such as merit pay and expanded parental choice, which, he contends, would spur better and more equitable student outcomes. While not denying that factors such as concentrated poverty contribute in important ways to the nation's educational problems, Moe argues that teachers' unions “are at the heart of these problems and, therefore, that the unions themselves and the various roles they play in collective bargaining and politics need to be much better studied and understood” (p. 6).

Criticism of teachers' unions is hardly novel, but never before has the case against them been made so forcefully—nor given so solid an empirical foundation. The core of the book is a series of cleverly designed and carefully executed studies that shed new light on the internal operations of teachers' unions and the extent of their influence in local elections. First is a comprehensive survey, conducted in 2003, of a nationally representative sample of 3,328 teachers concerning their attitudes toward collective bargaining and their unions. The second is based on interviews of successful and unsuccessful school board candidates from a stratified sample of 253 California districts. The third uses county voter files to examine turnout in school board elections among teachers and other district employees in nine geographically concentrated California districts.Footnote ³

These studies yield a number of compelling findings that should inform subsequent research and debate on the role of teachers' unions. For example, Moe's survey shows that a vast majority of teachers join unions voluntarily, are quite satisfied with their local's performance in promoting their occupational interests, and are strongly supportive of collective bargaining. Although Republican teachers are decidely less enthusiastic about the political activities of their state and national unions (whose campaign contributions tilt heavily Democratic), this does not diminish their support for their locals' efforts at the bargaining table. This evidence should not be surprising, given that unions are democratic organizations whose leaders have strong incentives to attend to the common interests of their members. Yet it is inconsistent with the widely held notion that union leaders do not in fact advance the perceived interests of most teachers—and that the problems associated with union power would dissipate if union leaders became more responsive.

Moe's studies of California elections, which are innovative both methodologically and in their approaches to data collection, illustrate the capacity of local teachers' unions to influence the outcomes of school board elections and thereby “play a role in selecting the very people they will be bargaining with” (p. 112; original emphasis). The first confirms that union-endorsed candidates are far more likely to win their elections than are unendorsed candidates and that the candidates endorsed by unions view collective bargaining more favorably. Variation in these patterns across districts highlight some constraints on unions' electoral influence: Unions in large districts have greater organizational resources but face a more pluralistic political environment; unions in heavily Republican districts appear to satisfice by endorsing candidates less sympathetic to collective bargaining than those they endorse elsewhere; incumbents, who have their own electoral advantages, come to view collective bargaining less favorably over time. The picture that emerges, then, is “hardly … of pure dominance” (p. 143), but clearly demonstrates that teachers' unions are “by far the most powerful groups” (p. 144) participating in school board elections. The second study reveals a key source of their power, showing that teachers and other district employees vote at dramatically higher rates in school board elections than do registered voters as a whole. Intriguingly, this disparity is most pronounced among teachers who live (and therefore vote) in the district in which they work, suggesting that their elevated participation reflects their personal stakes in the election's outcome.

This last finding resonates with Moe's central theme: Although union leaders often frame their demands in terms of the public interest, their organizations function primarily to advance the occupational interests of their members. In this sense, they are not so “special” after all. Like the behavior of other organized interests in American politics, that of teachers' unions reflects the incentives and opportunities created by their institutional environment. In particular, it stems from the foundational characteristics of unions as organizations—“their need to survive, their reliance on member solidarity, the ability of members to toss out ineffective leaders” (p. 21).

The remainder of Moe's highly readable book surveys recent developments in education politics through this institutionalist lens. While acknowledging the “small victories for sanity” (p. 215) achieved in recent high-profile contract negotiations in New York City and Washington, DC, the author notes that the unions fought these developments tooth and nail and were handsomely rewarded for acquiescing to relatively modest concessions. As important, he points out that there has been no general trend toward the negotiation of less restrictive contracts over the past decade—at least among a sample of large school districts for which the relevant agreements are available. Of particular interest is Moe's dismissal of “reform unionism,” or the notion that progress can best be achieved by engaging unions collaboratively in the process of reform. He argues that this approach is naïve about the constraints placed on union leaders by their members' views. Although anecdotal, the examples he compiles of reformist union leaders who have been replaced in representation elections suggests that these constraints are very real.

The book as a whole offers a bleak perspective on the politics of American education, but Moe finds cause for hope in two nascent developments. First is the emerging fissure within the Democratic Party's electoral coalition between the teachers' unions and civil rights groups pressing for aggressive reform measures that unions have long opposed.Footnote ⁴ Because of this split, he argues, “the unions are increasingly isolated, blamed for the system's poor performance, and forced to make compromises they would never have made in the past” (p. 346). The second and, in Moe's view, more fundamental threat to union power is the ongoing worldwide revolution in information technology. Moe believes that online instruction has the potential to vastly improve the quality of education, while at the same time making it less labor intensive, reducing the unions' power, and remaking the politics of education.

Although Moe and John Chubb have developed the latter argument in detail elsewhere, the educational potential of online learning remains unproven.Footnote ⁵ Moreover, Moe's own evidence in this book suggests that teachers' unions will have ample opportunity to ensure that technology is incorporated only in ways that do not limit their influence. As to reasons for optimism, I would point instead to the unsustainable growth in spending on public education in recent decades, the full extent of which has become clear only recently with the adoption of new accounting standards that reveal the problem of unfunded pension and retiree health-care obligations facing school districts and other local governments. Indeed, it is budgetary pressures that are now driving both interest in new instructional technologies and efforts to limit collective-bargaining rights for public employees in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere.

But Moe wrote this book not “to offer a solution to the problem of union power” but, rather, “to describe and document the problem—and to try to understand it” (p. 385). In these respects he succeeds admirably. Not everyone will accept Moe's characterization of unions as the primary obstacle to improvement in American education. Skeptics will point to examples of relatively high-performing states and countries with a strong union presence—a phenomenon demonstrating that unionization is not a sufficient condition to prevent at least limited educational success. The book's signal contribution, however, is to convert the debate over teachers' unions from one conducted primarily through anecdote and assertion to one that is richly informed by both data and the theoretical insights of the new institutionalism. Those who wish to answer Moe's critique will have to gather new data of their own.