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Prepared by the Minnesota Education League Foundation
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If there is any issue that cuts across all demographic and political lines, it is education. Young or old, male or female, Liberal or Conservative, single or married, it doesn’t matter; we all want the very best education possible for our kids. Education has been the keystone to America’s economic and political success for the past 230 years, and in an increasingly competitive world economy its importance can only grow.
And yet education policies and spending are among the most highly emotional and politicized issues of the day. Once you get past agreeing that we all want high quality in education for our kids, you start getting into the much more difficult and divisive issues of how to get there from here. We start arguing about funding, about what is taught, about pay for teachers, numbers of administrators, and a whole host of decisions which are not mere details, but the essence of education policy.
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We all agree on education quality; the disagreements come when it comes to education policy.
Educating our children is not just a value, but a process. Teaching is not just a calling, it is a job; schools are not just the place where children go to learn, but a workplace and a government building; education is not just what we give our kids to help them succeed, but also one of the largest industries in America, costing over $500 billion a year just for our public K-12 system.
It’s no wonder we have big disagreements about how best to do it.
Education is not just a thing we give our kids…
We all want to think of education as something apart, somehow better and more altruistic than most jobs and industries. And there is obviously something to that. We all can remember that special teacher who made a difference in our lives, that “aha!” moment when some important concept broke through and changed the way we view the world.
But that’s not the whole story. If it were, education would not be the hot political issue it is today. Although you might have heard that education has been chronically under funded, in reality spending on education has risen dramatically over the years even after adjusting for inflation.
Getting more money into the system has not been an especially difficult problem. What has been tough is getting improving results from all that money we do spend.
Education reform has been one of the toughest political nuts to crack. We have succeeded mightily in pouring more money per pupil into the system, and dramatically lowered the student-teacher ratio by almost 25% over the past 30 years.
Despite these facts we have seen no significant gains in student performance.
Source: National Center for Eduational Statistics, US Department of Education
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress there has been no significant performance change in student achievement since testing began 37 years ago, despite a huge real increase in funding.
Education is an industry
We all want every teacher to be as good and as selfless as the very best are, but it is simply impossible for that to be so. There are great, average, and below average teachers just as there are great, average, and below average workers in any profession.
And just like many large industries, the workers are unionized. In fact, the teachers’ union is one of the largest unions in the State of Minnesota, representing 70,000 workers.
Unions exist to collectively bargain, push for better pay and working conditions, and ensure workers have the most leverage possible in dealing with management.
Unions, experience tells us, are rarely if ever concerned about ensuring that the highest quality product is produced at the lowest cost to consumers. They are paid to care about the immediate economic interest of their members, not about the industry and its future, or its customers. As anyone who has followed the woes of the American auto or airline industries can immediately understand, while unions may do a good job of representing their workers, they can often be an impediment to needed reforms in industries adjusting to changing times.
“When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children.”
— Al Shanker, former American Federation of Teachers President
The Teachers’ Union in Minnesota
Minnesota’s teachers’ union, “Education Minnesota.” was created in 1998 by the merger of the Minnesota Education Association (local affiliate of the National Education Association) and the Minnesota Federation of Teachers (local affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers). According to the Star Tribune, Education Minnesota is perhaps the most powerful political entity in Minnesota today.
Not only does it represent 70,000 workers, it commands a budget of more than $22 million and has 58 registered lobbyists who roam the halls of the state capitol every year to influence the state budget and policies. The Mayo Clinic, which is Minnesota’s largest private employer, has 3 lobbyists at the Capitol. The Minnesota Realtors, of whom there are 24,000, are represented by 3 lobbyists. 3M has 5 lobbyists, Target has 9, and the Chamber of Commerce that represents all businesses in Minnesota has a grand total of 11. The teachers’ union has 58.
No other political group even comes close to wielding the kind of money and power that the teacher’s union does.
It has members in every legislative district in the state, and its political endorsements are among the most highly sought after of any group. Not only because the endorsement influences members of the teacher’s union, but also because many citizens automatically assume that the union has as its primary concern the quality of education provided to Minnesota’s students.
But is that assumption correct? Can we automatically assume that the union, which after all exists to promote the economic interests of its members, is at its heart an altruistic desire to do what is best for students?
What the Union Does
Is the teachers’ union more like a neutral public policy organization, or more like a traditional union? We would all like to think that teachers are in a category all their own, and unlike most unionized workers their primary interest is the welfare of our children. For many individual teachers that is indeed the case. However, it is quite clear from a quick look at union activity that the same cannot be said for the teachers’ union.
Like most unions, Education Minnesota is very politically active. Only more so. Education Minnesota has taken to spending millions of dollars a year on public relations advertising, and has one of the largest political action committees in the state. The PAC administrator alone has a salary of over $10,000 a month, and according to campaign finance reports it will spend over $1 million this year to influence the outcome of state elections.
And despite the fact that the political party affiliation of teachers basically reflects the partisan divide of the country as whole, the union itself concentrates its political giving almost entirely on Democrat candidates for office. Only 5% of the candidates they support are Republicans, and even a smaller percentage of the money is spent on Republicans and their causes.
Even Education Minnesota’s public relations television ads have been criticized by some reporters as unfair and misleading (Pat Kessler, WCCO Reality Check), and no wonder. They suggest that politicians who oppose the union agenda are in favor of slashing education funding, and actively seeking mediocrity in our schools.
Source: Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board
The Union Agenda
What is that union agenda, and how closely does it represent what parents would expect of their children’s teachers?
Let’s first take a look at some of the questions from Education Minnesota’s candidate questionnaire. The union asks politicians to:
- Support the right of teachers to strike during the school year
- Oppose changes to the current rules regarding hiring and firing teachers
- Offer ideas on how best to raise teacher pay
- Ensure the continuing ability of the union to collect dues for political purposes
- Support an amendment to the Minnesota Constitution guaranteeing “affordable” health care for all citizens
- Increase pension benefits for teachers
- Ensure a continued defined-benefit pension plan for teachers
- Consider and promote state and local tax increases
Most of these issues make sense as part of a union agenda. But they are not clearly related to improving the education of our children. And that is the point: Education Minnesota does a good job representing the economic interests of its members; it simply is a mistake to assume that its agenda is to improve educational outcomes for our children.
While the student teacher ratio keeps going down, actual class size reduction hasn’t naturally followed. How many stories have you heard about packed classrooms with 30 or more students?
What has happened is that the union has negotiated lighter workloads for teachers, and a larger number of teachers have found their way into school administration and other, non-classroom activities.
What we have seen, in other words, is an increase in the number of union members with better pay and benefits than before, but no real corresponding increase in what we thought we were paying for: face time between students and teachers.
And like other unions, the teachers’ union often strays into political issues that go far beyond what you would normally expect. The National Education Association, Education Minnesota’s parent organization, takes stands on issues and lobbies for issues far removed from normal education policy.
The NEA currently supports a nuclear freeze, abortion rights, the United Nations, granting of legal status to illegal immigrants, strict gun control laws, opposing English as an official language, and even strays into such issues as Social Security reform.
In short, the teachers’ union is exactly what you would expect of any union: a powerful organization pushing for the economic interest of its members, with a strong leftward political bent.
Schools First vs. Kids First
The current public relations campaign of the union is called “Schools First.” That may sound good to the average parent’s ears, but it doesn’t necessarily mean what you would think it does. Schools are a workplace, the infrastructure of the education industry, not the end product. In other words, “schools first” is a long way from “kids first” or “education first.” If parents and lawmakers want to focus on improving educational outcomes, they have to abandon the notion that the teachers’ union agenda is the best or only way to do so.
The Minnesota Education League Foundation is a non-profit, non partisan grassroots organization dedicated to increasing real accountability, student achievement and parental choice in education. Since its inception in 2001, the Education League Foundation - a project of the Taxpayers League Foundation - has become a highly effective voice for parents and taxpayers who support education reform. |
