For many years education was seen as an apolitical arena due to a belief that Americans shared a basic understanding of the value of education and its ends, with key questions relating to means delegated to education experts. This apolitical view began to erode at the end of the twentieth century and was replaced within the political science literature by a powerful argument that education was not just political, but was dominated politically by one particular interest group: teachers’ unions. Michael Hartney’s new book, How Policies Make Interest Groups, pushes this argument further, investigating why teachers’ unions continue to be such a dominant interest group in contemporary education politics.
Building upon Terry Moe’s contention that teachers’ unions are both vested and special interests, Hartney posits that these unions are also “subsidized interests” due to government support that enabled them to gain sway in American education policymaking. Hartney substantiates this theory with an extensive range of data sources, ultimately concluding that governmental policies promoting teacher unionization have had profound implications for power dynamics in education politics and the efficacy of American schools. This comprehensive investigation contributes significantly to our understanding of the sustained influence of teachers’ unions in education politics.
Hartney explicitly recognizes the political divisiveness associated with the study of teachers’ unions. Though he contends that his subsidized interest theory is not a normative argument about whether or not government policy should subsidize teachers’ unions, many readers may detect subtle normativity throughout the text. For example, in Chapter 1, Hartney likens collective bargaining expansion to the use of illegal steroids in baseball (p. 13) and calls teachers’ unions a “triple threat” (p. 14). Later in the text, Hartney supports the notion that teachers’ unions “are at the heart of the [nation’s education] problems” (p. 213). While some readers may take issue with Hartney’s apparent normative commitments, this comprehensive study nonetheless improves our understanding of the enduring role of teachers’ unions in the politics of education.
In the first part of the book (Chapters 1–5), Hartney builds his subsidized interests hypothesis by examining how labor policies adopted in the 1960s and 1970s have helped teachers’ unions gain and maintain members, money, and organizational maintenance. According to Hartney, the provision of exclusive bargaining rights in American labor law subsidizes union power by providing unions with a seat at the table and support in mobilizing their members in politics. Within collectively bargained contracts, school district policies, such as association rights and security provisions, then furthered union power. This occurred alongside other union efforts, such as national unification, which were also bolstered by favorable public-sector labor laws. Hartney argues that the varying subsidies continue to work together to maintain teachers’ union power in self-reinforcing and cross-cutting ways.
The latter half of Hartney’s book investigates the consequences of teachers’ union power. In Chapters 6 and 7, he draws upon a comprehensive range of data sources to provide evidence that teachers and their unions wield considerable influence over education policymaking. Diverging from Terry Moe’s perspective, Hartney contends that unions are dominant in the politics of education, but does not necessarily imply that they hold the same degree of sway over American politics in general. Although there are moments where Hartney suggests that government subsidies have catapulted teachers’ unions to “the top of the political class” (p. 103), he generally maintains that their advantages are confined to state education politics and local school-board politics. Consequently, the subsidized interests theory could potentially be extended to other interest groups with government-granted protections, particularly other workers with collective bargaining rights. It is worth considering how the subsidized interests theory might be applied to police influence in criminal justice policy or to construction worker influence in development policy. If such applications are invalid, it’s unclear what theoretical constraints would be preventing them.
In Chapter 8, Hartney considers the implications of union power for students. He rightfully challenges the stale debate between those who argue that teachers’ unions are simply rent-seeking organizations and those who counter that they are productive agents of democratic voice. Hartney contends that scholars should conceptualize teachers’ interests and students’ interests as “convergent and mixed” rather than wholly congruent or wholly divergent (p. 197). He presents compelling evidence to substantiate this claim by showcasing two coexisting phenomena: first, many teachers believe that their unions are the best representatives of student interests; second, teachers recognize that their unions better represent their own interests than student interests (p. 195). This “convergent and mixed” orientation represents an important evolution in literature on teachers’ unions and provides the second main departure from Terry Moe’s work.
Empirically, Hartney’s main contribution is through his illustrative descriptive analyses that leverage an impressive array of data sources. He demonstrates, for example, that teachers are heavily involved in local elections (more so than in general politics or civic life), and union-endorsed candidates oftentimes win school board elections, even in the post-Janus (2018) era. In the context of these analyses, he often uses creative and intuitive placebo tests to demonstrate, for example, that teachers’ union’s power is associated with higher teacher salaries in Washington state, but not superintendent salaries. He also occasionally uses quasi-experimental methods to estimate policy effects more precisely. For example, he uses a differences-in-differences approach to estimate student achievement gains as a result of union retrenchment laws enacted in 2011 in five states (pp. 210-11). Though these quasi-experimental analyses are not the major contribution of the work, they leave open opportunities for future in-depth studies that allow for the space to conduct sensitivity checks and address embedded assumptions required for causal inference.
Theoretically, the book contributes a new perspective on the continued influence of teachers’ unions in contemporary education politics. According to Hartney, teachers’ union power has persisted because state governments subsidized it with collective bargaining rights, which allow for teachers’ unions to have official status and security provisions. While this explains how teachers’ unions have maintained their power, it does not shed light on why these subsidies were granted in the first place. Hartney provides some clues, ruling out union political mobilization at the state level (pp. 48, 63). Additionally, he suggests that district leaders may have granted association rights and security provisions as low-cost means of placating local teachers’ unions, but—in contrast to claims of union dominance—this implies that they are subordinate to district leaders. The lack of attention to the origins of subsidies is noteworthy given that many teacher job protections came about to protect female teachers against sexist treatment by administrators. It also leaves open the possibility that union subsidies might have come about in part because others—such as parents or elected leaders—recognized that unions could be useful partners in supporting efforts to benefit children.
Overall, Hartney’s subsidized interests hypothesis offers an insightful and nuanced explanation for the institutional factors that have maintained teachers’ unions as dominant players in contemporary education politics. The book’s impressive collection of data sources showcases the multi-faceted and enduring implications of state labor policies for American education politics. How Policies Make Interest Groups makes a valuable contribution to the research on education policy, organized interests, and institutional politics.
