Every few years comes some event that is supposed to herald a new era of bipartisan togetherness on education. Five years ago, it was the news that former labor secretary Robert Reich supported school vouchers (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/102900-02.htm). Before that, there was John Kerry's 1998 speech on ending teacher tenure (http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=110&subid=135&contentid=1533). And of course, Ted Kennedy's co-sponsorship of No Child Left Behind - and muzzling of National Education Association opposition during that law's negotiations - was supposed to be a seminal moment during which a new "accountability consensus" emerged.
Well, like Charlie Brown and the football, you can't blame people for trying, no matter how many times the ball gets pulled away at the last minute. And while there are estimable Democrats who've made valiant efforts on behalf of school choice, rigorous accountability, charter schools, and the like - think of Dianne Feinstein, Tony Williams, and Howard Fuller - the list also includes any number of Democrats who paid a high price for their journeys off the education policy reservation. (Recall Floyd Flake, drummed out of the Congressional Black Caucus for his support of vouchers, as just one example.)
The latest such episode is the rumblings of a "New Unionism," one that's allegedly open to various verboten education reforms, maybe even vouchers. Two Sundays ago, the New York Times Magazine had a long profile of Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, who has thrown down the gauntlet to the AFL-CIO: change or die. Specifically, he wants to merge scads of smaller unions into 20 or so big ones, end cross-industry poaching that has the machinists' union representing flight attendants, and open up the labor movement to new thinking on previously taboo issues. The economic policy of Democrats, Stern told the Times, "is basically being opposed to Republicans and protecting the New Deal. It makes me realize how vibrant the Republicans are in creating 21st century ideas, and how sad it is that we're defending 60-year-old ideas." Among those old ideas, he intimates, is opposition to school vouchers.
No one has been more vocal about the possibilities (and imperatives) of a New Union shift on education reform than the blogger Eduwonk, a.k.a. Andrew Rotherham of the Progressive Policy Institute. (I should mention that Eduwonk has always made clear his personal opposition to vouchers.) He noted an earlier Stern comment that suggested an openness to vouchers a few weeks ago (http://www.eduwonk.com/archives/2005_01_02_archive.html#110485379824854811) and followed up after the Times piece appeared (http://www.eduwonk.com/archives/2005_01_30_archive.html#110710613154470041). Eduwonk has scolded education reformers for viewing "the unions" as a monolith. "Instead of, rightly, criticizing teachers' unions that fight tooth and nail against charter schools, they paint the opposition with the broad brush of 'unions,'" he writes.
Yet outside of teachers' unions, there is no reason why union members should be any more naturally predisposed to support or oppose charter schools (or any other education reform) than the general public. So antagonizing them from the get-go isn't very politically smart. In fact, on the contrary, a lot of union members make likely allies in various educational improvement efforts because it's their kids bearing the brunt of some of these problems, too.
As we've often noted, Eduwonk is generally perspicacious, sometimes even wise, and Rotherham has made his own appearances in Gadfly. We like and respect him. All the more, we must warn him and his fans and readers that the New Unionism football is not going to be there when he finishes his approach.
To start, the hook Eduwonk hangs his argument on - that we should stop talking about "the unions" and qualify that with "teacher," lest we alienate potential allies - is pure straw man. Everybody knows that we're not talking about the musicians local. More substantively, we doubt that Andy Stern, no matter how much New Agey corporate jargon he channels, is quite the free-thinker that Eduwonk and others make him out to be. He is, after all, a former government employee himself - he started as a welfare caseworker - and there is nothing in his biography that inclines one to suppose that he thinks differently about vouchers (or other issues such as charter schools, tenure, performance pay, etc.) than your average public-sector unionist.
That said, conversion and redemption are possible. So let's give Stern the benefit of the doubt. Say he is truly open-minded on vouchers and willing to challenge liberal orthodoxy on that and other issues. What can he do about it? And why would he want to?
This is where think-tank chin-tugging runs into political reality. The labor movement is both in serious decline and being taken over by government employee unions such as the NEA and AFT (and allied unions such as the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees). Read the 1/31/05 Communiqu?? from the Education Intelligence Agency (http://www.eiaonline.com/) for details. Union membership is at its lowest level in a century, but public-school teaching is the single most unionized sector in the entire workforce. In fact, government workers as a whole are more than four times more likely than private sector employees to be unionized. Meanwhile, the institutions that have experienced the greatest decline in membership and influence are precisely the private-sector industrial unions - now comprising less than 10 percent of the total labor force - that Eduwonk identifies as potential allies in the education reform fight.
Simply put, it is inconceivable that even the savvy Andrew Stern could move the NEA, the AFT, and AFSCME to countenance "new union" thinking on vouchers. To do so would imperil the very existence of the first two institutions, while the third would doubtless stand with fellow government unionists for fear of a slippery slope toward full-scale privatization. It is equally inconceivable that Stern would allow vouchers (or a similar education issue) to become a stumbling block to his plans to remake the AFL-CIO. Support for vouchers could literally sunder the labor movement, shearing off industrial era unions from their government-employee counterparts. Unionism can ill-afford a breach of that magnitude - which Stern knows well. And while vouchers are an issue to die over, charters, tenure, and performance pay are only slightly less central to the teacher union agenda.
I suggest that industrial-era unionism is a spent force in a service-industry economy. For better or worse (in my view, mostly worse), government-sector unionism is the future of the labor movement - which means that its interests will shape the labor agenda. (And even that future is tenuous; the recent Bush administration proposal to reform the civil-service system, http://federaltimes.com/index.php?S=624410, is self-consciously the opening gambit in an effort to break the back of government unionism.)
As Terry Moe (http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006192) has recently reminded us, unions are not policy shops given to noodling about innovative reforms in any sector. They exist to advocate for the pocketbook interests of their members. And a labor movement whose money, power, and organizing muscle increasingly depend on its public-sector members is not going to move forward with "new thinking" that could endanger the sinecures in which millions of union members perch.
Simply put, government-sector unions like the NEA and AFSCME will bend the industrial unions to their will on the education issues that are their bread and butter, not the other way around. As a result, it seems more likely that the labor movement's opposition to vouchers is going to harden, not soften. And once more, the political football will be snatched from education reformers at the very moment we get ready to make contact.
"The new boss," by Matt Bai, New York Times Magazine, January 30, 2005 (subscription required, plus small fee for archive retrieval)
"Future of civil service," by Tim Kauffman and Eileen Sullivan, Federal Times, January 31, 2005
"No teacher left behind," by Terry Moe, Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2005