School Boards – Part 1

Local union politics, nationwide.

Following on the previous series of essays on the influence teachers unions have on American public schools, this series of essays explores how teachers unions generally control local school board elections.

As Michael Hartney writes in his book How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American Education, “organized teacher interests have a valuable political firewall in American education: lowly contested local-school-board elections.”

Terry Moe, in his book Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, writes:

What roles do teachers unions actually play in school board elections, how do they compare to other groups, and how successful are they in selecting the very people they will be bargaining with? … [P]recisely because the teachers unions operate in the public sector, they are fortunate to have another avenue of influence that is typically not available to private sector unions at all. Indeed, to say that they are fortunate only begins to convey just how profoundly beneficial this avenue stands to be. Here is why. The school board members who hold authority over district policy—and over the entire collective bargaining process—are elected by the public at-large. By participating actively in electoral campaigns, then, and by using their members, money, and organizations to get favored candidates elected to office, the unions can play a role in selecting the very people they will be bargaining with. This is nothing like collective bargaining in the private sector, where labor unions must square off against management teams they can't control. If the teachers unions can exercise political power in elections, they will wind up bargaining with management teams in which some of the officials, and possibly all of them, are their political allies … The teachers unions, needless to say, are well aware of the enormous opportunities that local elections open up for them, and they have strong incentives to develop a capacity for local political power—and to use it. 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.”

As Moe explains, teachers unions have vast power to elect school board members even in states that don’t allow collective bargaining:

I want to underline a simple fact: in southern and border states, whose districts typically do not have collective bargaining, democracy is similarly turned on its head. In those districts too, the teachers unions can use their political power to help choose the very people who will be running their districts and making all the authoritative decisions about money, personnel, and policy. Just like their counterparts elsewhere, these unions have compelling incentives to mobilize for political action—and to use democracy to make the governance of schooling their own … [T]he underlying dilemma of democracy is quite general and applies to all districts. Whenever and wherever district employees get organized, they are driven to try to control the people who, in a democratic system, are supposed to be controlling them in the name of ordinary citizens.  There are some 14,000 school districts in this country, almost all of them governed by elected school boards. These boards are not entirely free to run the schools as they see fit. Over the last half century or so, the state and federal governments have expanded their roles in funding, programs, and regulation, and the autonomy of the locals has declined along the way. Nonetheless, school boards are still responsible for much of what happens on the ground in American education. They build schools, select textbooks, design curricula, recruit teachers, award diplomas, set rules for discipline, and oversee a vast array of operations, plans, and policies that shape the educational experiences of some 90 percent of the nation's children … [T]he equation of school boards with government by the people is one of the enduring myths of public education. But myth it is. During the early years of the twentieth century, school boards were often under the thumb of party machines. Later, as Progressive reforms weakened the parties, local governance of the schools shifted to newly powerful groups— business, middle- class activists, education administrators— with their own special interests to pursue. Then came the 1960s and 1970s, when the unionization of teachers led to yet another shift in the balance of power, and school boards found themselves under strong, special interest pressures from their own employees. The history of American school boards has never been a history of grassroots democracy. It has always been a history of special interests … The essence of it—which is simple, but exceedingly profound in its implications—is that the teachers unions stand out from all other interest groups in the local politics of education and have inherent advantages that are quite general. As this chapter shows, various aspects of the local context seem to condition their influence. But the takeaway point is that, overall, they are distinctly and heavily advantaged.

Moe recaps the institutional subsidies enjoyed by teachers unions under law, and how those subsidies are used in local school board elections:

As individuals, district employees have strong incentives to get involved in school board politics. The things they want are simple and straightforward and need have nothing to do, at least directly or intentionally, with what is best for children or quality education. They want job security. They want better wages and fringe benefits. They want better retirement packages. They want work rules that restrict managerial control. They want policies (like smaller classes) that make their jobs easier and increase the demand for employees. They want higher taxes. And so on. But unlike parents and other citizens, who are typically atomized and ineffectual as political forces, most school employees have the advantage of being organized into unions. The teachers unions are the most powerful and active of the employee unions (by far) … They have the resources to do just that. While they are nominally collective bargaining organizations, they can readily turn their organizations toward political ends. They have guaranteed sources of money (member dues) for financing campaigns, paid staff (in the larger unions) to coordinate political activities, and activist members to do the invaluable trench work of campaigning. These are resources that, in most districts most of the time, are not available to other groups to nearly the same extent, giving the unions extraordinary advantages in getting sympathetic candidates elected to office … [I]t is far from clear that mayors can succeed in bringing major reforms that will stick and truly transform the system. In the end, after all, a strong mayor eventually leaves office. The union never leaves.  n any event, control of the schools by mayors is not the norm. Control by school boards is.

Moe draws on several of his own studies to show the influence of teachers unions on local school board elections:

The first study is drawn from interviews with school board candidates in the state of California—526 candidates (equally balanced between winners and losers) from 253 different school districts … I organize the analysis here around four additional aspects of the local context that also help us to understand district politics and union power. They are the size of the district (and therefore the union), political pluralism, political culture, and the incumbency of candidates … The relationship between union political activity and the size of the district (and thus the union) is quite dramatic. In districts with enrollments of less than 5,000, teachers unions often seem to play little or no role in school board elections … As districts get larger, however, the unions themselves become larger and more politically capable as organizations … The unions support candidates for office in 92 percent of these districts. They make phone calls in 97 percent, they campaign door-to-door in 68 percent, and they provide mailings and publicity in 94 percent … [U]nions emphasize other kinds of political activities—making phone calls, getting out the vote, distributing literature—that in the context of local elections turn out to be more effective at influencing outcomes … These are the sorts of things that, as a practical matter, money really can't buy, but that are tremendously valuable in producing support at the polls, particularly in elections where voters are often poorly informed about the candidates and (in off years) not inclined to turn out. The candidates essentially say as much. They were asked, “To the extent that the teachers union is important in school board campaigns, is it mainly because of the money it can provide candidates or mainly because of these other support activities?” They overwhelmingly said that union power stems from these other activities, and thus from the coordinated human effort that the organization can offer during a campaign … Most of the time what really matters in these local elections is the manpower, not the money … On average, 76 percent of endorsed candidates win their elections, compared to just 31 percent of the unendorsed candidates … [A] fascinating pattern in the data that observant readers may already have noticed[:]  incumbents in general — whether endorsed or unendorsed, winners or losers — tend to be much less sympathetic to collective bargaining than nonincumbents. This is true even though all incumbents were at one time nonincumbents, which suggests, assuming there is continuity to these patterns over time, that something happens to nonincumbents after they take office that changes their attitudes and makes them less sympathetic to collective bargaining. That such a thing might happen makes perfect sense. When nonincumbents take office — and thereby become incumbents — their new jobs require that they represent management and deal with the unions across the bargaining table, experiencing firsthand (and probably for the first time) what collective bargaining is all about, and how the interests of unions and teachers can come into conflict with the interests of districts and children.

Regarding teacher voting patterns, Moe writes:

[W]hy teachers are voting in the first place. What are they trying to achieve? Are they (and other employees) turning out for reasons that are essentially public-spirited—because they want what is best for children, say, or want to promote public education? Or are they turning out to promote their own occupational self-interest—and thus doing what is best for them? … In the study I describe here, I restrict my attention to nine of these districts, all located in Los Angeles and Orange counties. These nine are analytically useful because, as they are clustered in close proximity to one another, teachers who don't live in the district where they work often show up as residents of one of the other districts … For both types of elections [general elections and school board elections], turnout among the local population is downright abysmal, even in the more affluent districts. In the off-year school board elections for which I have data, 1997 and 1999, the median turnout of registered voters is 9 percent. This percentage would be even lower, obviously, if the denominator were the voting-age population as a whole, because many people in the electorate—about a quarter—are not even registered. For bond elections, the turnout is 23 percent. In both cases, low turnout gives the unions an opportunity to mobilize support and tip the scale toward candidates they favor.  Do teachers vote at higher rates than average citizens? The answer is clearly yes … If we compute the turnout gap between teachers and average citizens in each district, the median gap over all districts and elections (both school board and bond) is 36.5 percent, which is a huge number given the very low turnout overall. In 1997, for instance, only 7 percent of registered voters in the Charter Oak school district voted in their school board election, but 46 percent of the teachers who live there did. In Claremont, 18 percent of registered voters went to the polls, but 57 percent of the teachers who live there did. Similar figures can be recited for every district, and the conclusion is the same whether we look at 1997, 1999, or bond elections. Teachers who live in their districts are from two to seven times more likely to vote than other citizens are … Why do teachers turn out at such high rates? The answer may well be that they have an occupational self-interest that other citizens don't have. But this claim needs to be tested, for there is clearly a plausible alternative: that because teachers are better educated and more middle class than the average citizen, and possibly more public-spirited and more committed to public education, they are more likely to vote in school board elections anyway, regardless of their personal stakes. Can the evidence show that occupational self-interest, and not these other motivations, accounts for the turnout gap? … The data offer a revealing test. Many teachers in the sample live in one school district but work in another. These teachers are presumably just as middle class, public-spirited, and committed to education as other teachers are, but, because they don't work in the district where they live, they do not have an occupational stake in their local school board elections. Do these teachers vote at the same high levels as teachers who do have such an occupational stake? Whether we look at the 1997 elections, the 1999 elections, or the various bond elections, the answer is the same: in every case that allows a comparison, the teachers who live in a district but don't work there vote at lower rates than the teachers who both live and work there. The size of the difference is almost always substantial (and statistically significant). In Claremont, to take a rather typical example, 57 percent of the teachers who both live and work there voted in the 1997 election, but only 23 percent of the teachers who live but don't work there voted … Now consider the other district employees. This is a heterogeneous group that includes administrators, nurses, and librarians as well as janitors, secretaries, cafeteria workers, and bus drivers … In every district with available data, and for all three sets of elections, other district employees who live and work in their districts vote at substantially higher rates than ordinary citizens do—rates that, on average, are just a shade lower than those of teachers who live and work in the district … Clearly, something else is going on here. And that something is probably that these other employees, just like teachers, approach elections with their own self-interest in mind, and their unions mobilize them on those grounds. This interpretation is bolstered by the fact that, when we look at other employees who live in a district but don't work there, and thus do not have an occupational stake in the elections, their turnout is decidedly lower on average than that of other employees who both work and live there.

Regarding teachers union support for preferred candidates, Moe writes:

A multivariate statistical analysis shows that, for candidates who are not incumbents, teachers union support substantially increases their probability of winning—indeed, it is roughly equal to, and may well exceed, the impact of incumbency itself … [W]hen incumbents are endorsed by teachers unions, they are even more likely to win (by a good bit) … When the two factors are combined, and thus when union winners run for reelection as incumbents, the candidates are virtually unbeatable. As shown earlier, union success in local elections does not necessarily translate into complete control over school boards, because once candidates take office—and have to deal firsthand with union demands—they seem to become less prounion. This may well be why, in the current study, fully 46 percent of the incumbents running in contested elections were not endorsed by the unions: a clear indication that the unions were not happy with their performance in office. There is a continuing need, then, for the unions to stay active in school board elections. They need to defeat incumbents who aren't sufficiently sympathetic, and they need to replace them with new candidates who are.

While teachers unions set the table in school board elections. parents, on the other hand, are behind the eight ball.  As Moe writes, “Parents are typically only organized through the local parent-teacher association (PTA), if then, but the PTA is not solely a parent organization, and research shows that it rarely opposes the teachers unions.”

Michael Hartney writes of a survey he performed with school board members that included different priming prompts in an attempt to determine whether support of a policy by teachers or parents altered subsequent support of that policy by school board members:

The experiment tests whether school-board members are more responsive to teachers’ policy preferences when board members are primed about the intensity of those preferences. In the experiment, I randomly assigned school-board members to one of three conditions (one baseline, two treatments). Board members assigned to the baseline condition were asked: In some school districts, information about a teacher’s impact on their students’ test scores is made available to parents and the general public. What do you think about this idea? Would you be inclined to favor or oppose such a policy in your district? These board members did not receive any additional information. In contrast, board members assigned to one of the two treatment conditions were given additional information about the views of either (1) their parent constituents or (2) their teacher constituents. Specifically, board members in one of the treatment conditions were informed that, according to a recent public opinion poll conducted by Harvard University researchers, a majority of the parents/teachers in their state favored/opposed the policy proposal. Board members in the parent treatment were no more likely to support reform, even after they learned that the vast majority of parents supported it. In contrast, board members who were randomly informed that teachers opposed the proposal showed considerably less support for it. Specifically, support dropped a full 10 percentage points (to just 45 percent) when board members learned that the majority of teachers were strongly opposed (a statistically significant difference, p<0.05). Why were school-board members more responsive to teachers than to parents? One plausible reason—consistent with the argument of this book—is that board members have strong incentives to line up behind the policy preferences of the most politically active and organized groups in their district. If that is correct, we should expect the main treatment effect—that board members are more inclined to respond to teacher opinion—to grow stronger in districts where teachers engage more reliably in political activity … When parents and teachers both participate consistently, board members are still inclined to respond more to teachers, but less so. Under this competitive scenario, the teacher treatment drops board-member support for transparency by 14 percentage points. Finally, in the rare handful of districts where parents are politically active but unions are not active, the teacher treatment has no effect on board members’ attitudes. However, even in this unlikely scenario, board members are not responsive to parents … The finding that many school-board members will abandon a policy proposal popular with parents simply by virtue of being informed of teachers’ opposition to it has significant implications for our understanding of democratic accountability in local school politics.

Hartley also examines the influence of teachers unions in my own state of Virginia at a time when public school teacher collective bargaining was prohibited (collective bargaining in Virginia has since been approved by a Democratic Governor and state legislature in 2001), showing its influence is powerful even in the absence of collective bargaining:

Though teachers in states without CB [collective bargaining] laws operate at a disadvantage, they can still draw on the support of the NEA’s federated interest-group network, mobilizing teachers in politics even when they are shut out of the bargaining table … I examine organized teacher political activism in Virginia, a state where, until 2021, teacher bargaining had been prohibited since 1977. Specifically, I analyze how Virginia’s NEA affiliate—the Virginia Education Association (VEA)—coordinated a political effort to protect continuing contracts (tenure) at a time when the political currents on this issue were running strongly against teachers unions nationwide. The story begins in 2012. That year, Virginia’s Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, was as well positioned as any state executive to win legislative approval of his signature education-reform package. Virginia’s teachers had good reason to be worried when McDonnell proposed to eliminate their continuing contracts, the commonwealth’s equivalent of tenure.43 In a warning shot, McDonnell told teachers, “You perform well, you keep your job. You don’t perform well for an extended period of time, you don’t get a guarantee.” The challenges for the VEA were manifold. Republicans held a governing trifecta, enabling them to advance McDonnell’s agenda without Democratic support. Public opinion on the issue was not favorable for teachers. Polls showed that a majority of Virginians favored the elimination of continuing contracts … That his proposal was ultimately defeated testifies to the impressive strength of organized teacher interests in education politics, even where we least expect them to be powerful. As McDonnell and his allies worked to build legislative support for his reform proposal, the VEA responded with a two-front counterattack. First, the VEA lobbied its supporters in the statehouse, leaning on legislators who had personal connections to educators and those who hailed from districts where VEA members were especially active and engaged. Second, it mobilized a massive grassroots lobbying campaign targeting the state’s 132 school boards. Working through its local associations, the VEA asked boards to adopt resolutions declaring their opposition to the governor’s proposal and their intention to support continuing contracts. The VEA carefully monitored the status of board support for its resolution, publicly praising boards who agreed to defend and preserve continuing contracts. Altogether, the VEA succeeded in convincing twenty-one local school boards—from districts that represented 40 percent of the state’s public school students—to adopt its pro-tenure resolution. Due to the VEA’s dogged efforts, the governor’s proposal to eliminate continuing contracts died in the Virginia senate in 2012. Although the bill had passed in the general assembly (55–43), ultimately, three Republican senators defected to kill the tenure-repeal measure for good. Importantly, two of the three Republican defectors had close personal connections to VEA members. “‘I’m married to a teacher, for cryin’ out loud. Blood runs thicker than water,’ [Senator John] Watkins [one of the GOP defectors] said after the floor session.” … [In 2020] after Democrats had won a governing trifecta of their own, they passed a law returning the state to a three-year probationary policy for all teachers. What’s more, after a fifty-year ban on teacher bargaining, this new Democratic majority accomplished the unimaginable. They authorized teacher bargaining. By 2021, a new era of teacher influence was dawning in Old Dominion.

My kids will be out of the public schools in Virginia by the time the full brunt of the negative effects of collective bargaining for public school teachers hits, but younger Virgnia parents may be in for a rude awakening when their kids enter the public schools here in the coming years.

In the next essay in this series on school boards, we’ll look at one particular national teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, and, in a subsequent essay, examine how its reach extends to local school board elections where I live.