That’s the headline above Paul Peterson’s better-than-nifty essay on the Ed Next blog.
Peterson, director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard and Executive Editor of Education Next (of which I am a contributing editor), uses the Mac the Knife reference to suggest that loyalties can be bought “for a pittance.” In this case, it’s the National Education Association (NEA), which can, Peterson argues,
…collect multi-millions of dollars through a check-off system that generates revenues directly from teacher paychecks (unless a teacher specifically objects),” and, a la the villain of Mac the Knife, “invest in the work of less-advantaged non-profits that ostensibly have entirely different agendas. Even a little bit of money can produce a valuable ally somewhere down the line.
It’s a short essay, but is packed with evidence (from the Education Intelligence Agency) of NEA’s multi-tentacled reach, from a $250,000 grant to the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice (“which has migrated to the University of Colorado at Boulder, which received another quarter million in direct funding,” says Peterson) to $100,000 for Media Matters, “a group that attacks conservative groups and commentators” and $35,000 for “the anti-accountability group,” FairTest.
“The list goes on and on,” says Peterson, who suggests keeping it handy “if one wants to understand the interstices of the debate over school reform.”
What is also problematic about all this is that the list doesn’t even include the millions given directly to legislators and other policymakers. And therein is an existential problem that, despite the lull in the fighting in Wisconsin and Ohio, lurks in the background of most of the debates about unions: they use public money to influence public officials to write laws that give them even more money. As Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute told the New York Times last year (see my “Unions on the Run” post),
Public unions have had no natural adversary; they give politicians political support and get good contracts back…It’s uniquely dysfunctional.
Thus, as a public union, the NEA (so too the American Federation of Teachers), is, essentially, spreading around tax dollars, money over which the taxpayer has no control, an income redistribution effort that could easily be mistaken for a kickback or, in states where union membership and dues are not voluntary, a not-so-hidden and not-so-representative tax.
And it’s not just lobbying for higher pay that is the problem. As Terry Moe writes in his new book, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools,
On the surface, it might seem that the teachers unions would play a limited role in public education: fighting for better pay and working conditions for their members, but otherwise having little impact on the structure and performance of the public schools more generally. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. The teachers unions have more influence of the public schools than any other group in American society.
Indeed, the battle about whether teacher quality is important to education outcomes is an important one. And teachers need a voice in the debate. But it should not be a voice amplified with funds from the public purse and used to silence other voices.
