Conventional wisdom holds that elected officials pay a political price when they champion bold education reforms. These efforts, after all, usually step on the toes of powerful interest groups—most notably, teachers’ unions, which can organize opposition and punish reformers at the ballot box. Here in Ohio, the supposed costs of seeing through tough-minded reforms has led lawmakers to backtrack as soon as they began to feel the political heat (think: academic distress commissions and reading retention).
But do bold reforms actually diminish electoral fortunes? A new study from Wisconsin sheds light, offering findings that should hearten policymakers seeking to shake up the status quo. Conducted by Yale professor Barbara Biasi and colleague Wayne Sandholtz, the analysis reveals that the school reforms led by Governor Scott Walker boosted his performance in subsequent statewide elections.
A quick primer on the Wisconsin context. Fresh off his first-term election in 2010, Governor Walker pushed through landmark legislation (“Act 10”) that weakened teachers’ unions and gave managerial authority back to district leaders. Among the provisions, the act dramatically narrowed the scope of collective bargaining to base wages only. This allows districts to determine teachers’ compensation above the base, whether tied to effectiveness, professional responsibilities, content area, seniority, or some mix of these and other factors. Act 10 also required annual union recertification by a majority of district teachers, a requirement that quickly reduced both the number of local unions as well as their membership. It also eliminated unions’ ability to strike and forbade them from automatically collecting agency fees (which the Supreme Court would later outlaw nationwide).
These sweeping changes set off an uproar that attracted media attention and thrust Governor Walker into the national spotlight. The controversial measure also provoked a statewide recall election that put the governor’s career on the line. Yet beyond the political fallout, previous research (also by Biasi) has found that the act—as intended—significantly altered the way Wisconsin schools are run. Many school districts did indeed use their newfound pay flexibilities to better attract and retain effective early-career teachers by ratcheting up their pay, while also clamping down on seniority-driven pay raises. Most importantly, students benefitted from Act 10. State math scores, for instance, rose by 0.17 standard deviations five years after districts began implementing reforms.
Turning back to electoral impacts, Biasi and Sandholtz leverage the different expiration dates of districts’ pre-Act 10 teachers’ contracts to study the political implications for Governor Walker. In the years immediately after passage, some districts were “early treated”—they implemented Act 10 earlier, as their old contracts expired sooner than “late treated” districts, which still operated under the previous contract at the time of the election. This allows the analysts to look at vote shares in the early- versus late-treated districts. What do they find? The implementation of Act 10 increased the share of votes won by Governor Walker in the 2012 recall and his second-term race two years later. Specifically, they estimate that the reforms increased his vote share by 1.4 percentage points—about 20 percent of his margin of victory.
Why the boost? The analysts point to diminished union influence, but also evidence suggesting that voter gains were larger in districts where junior teachers received bigger pay raises and where student learning gains were stronger. In other words, educators and parents may have begun to sense the positive changes happening inside schools, and rewarded the governor at the ballot box. As the authors conclude: “The reform won votes not only by weakening unions, but also by improving the experience of public education for a significant share of providers [i.e., educators] and users.”
These findings don’t suggest that going big on education reform is entirely risk-free. Governor Walker, after all, faced a recall that would not have occurred sans Act 10. And unions have certainly defeated reformers in other places. Nevertheless, as the Wisconsin case demonstrates, pushing the envelope on education reform—and sticking to it—can be a winner, not only at the ballot box but also for parents and students.
