I assumed teachers unions were going to become more responsive to members after the Janus v. AFSCME decision by the Supreme Court. Janus meant government school teachers in all 50 states could fully quit their unions without having to pay most of the dues anyway through so-called “agency fees.” Teachers unions would suddenly have to worry a lot more about representing all the rank and file, I thought, including conservative teachers, lest they leave and take their dues money with them.
But data from the Center for Responsive Politics prove otherwise. The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association teachers unions have already donated more than $2.8 million and $2 million respectively to candidates and party groups, according to these 2020 data, and the support has overwhelmingly gone to Democrats.
One could easily imagine a still very lopsided but closer to 70%/30% or 80%/20% imbalance that nevertheless preserves at least the plausible fiction of nonpartisanship. But with the AFT giving more than 99% of its donations to Democrats and the NEA nearly there at 94%, both groups’ interest in projecting even a semblance of ideological diversity has clearly flatlined.
The teachers unions’ national picks aren’t a secret, of course. The NEA endorsed Joe Biden back on March 14, with the AFT following suit about a week later. The NEA even held a video livestream with the former vice president on July 3, setting the stage for his fresh, new, unforced error of “I’m Joe Biden’s husband.” Stranger still was the livestream of the AFT’s Randi Weingarten praising Biden to his face for nearly six minutes at the end of July, as Biden sat.
But since unions are supposed to be about the little guy, you’d nevertheless expect some sort of defendable process for arriving at these endorsements, even as a pro forma matter or “respect the rank and file” theater. You decide whether that happened.
Let’s start with the AFT. Last year, Jonah Furman wrote for Labor Notes that the union would be changing its presidential endorsement process:
In other words, why actually hold a vote when you can throw up a website to message engagement as a concept? Then, in February of this year, still without bothering to ask actual teachers, the AFT executive council picked three Democrats, Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, from among the rest of the primary fray, thus giving the union more time to hold out and see how the horse race unfolded. (Was AFT really still unclear as to the candidates’ platforms after primaries had begun?)
But the next part was the real jaw-dropper. In March 2020, the AFT hired pollster Hart Research to survey 1,207 teachers about their presidential primary candidate preferences. Here’s the amazing part: The union directed that only “members who identify as Democrats OR who identify as independents and say they vote in Democratic primaries” were eligible for the survey.
Why even bother tallying presidential preferences of Republican dues-paying union members when it’s easier to inform the pollster in advance to ignore them and quickly move on to the teachers who matter?
That cherry-picked survey purported to show Biden as the winner over Sanders, 60% to 30%. Wait, what happened to Warren? More clarity on the AFT’s level of transparency when it didn’t even include Warren’s name in its reported response data despite her belonging to the AFT’s cool club just three weeks before.
As for the NEA, the Associated Press reported that the union chose Biden this way:
“Months of surveying,” eh? Did the NEA provide the results of those surveys to members? When were they conducted? Maybe even just tell members how many teachers were surveyed? Anything? No? All they were told is that these secret surveys were given to a political action committee board to do some secret thing with. Then, that board gave the results of its extensive strategy to another board, i.e., the big NEA board, to apply its own crafty, clandestine deliberations over and above the last board’s deliberations. Great transparency.
For the record, some members have been pushing back against this top-down endorsement process for presidential candidates. A petition was circulated for the NEA to switch to a “Fair Endorsement Process” for the 2020 presidential election, but it went nowhere.
Through most of our lifetimes, millions of public school teachers were forced to hand over a lot of their money to private groups called unions every year, which then consistently funded one political party over another. (It would be like if people in the military had to pay some different private group that nearly always funded Republicans.) But in the wake of Janus, once teachers could fully quit their unions, it started to feel different. It’s a little like you’re still at the party when the host begins to clean up. She stops talking to guests. She turns off the music. All the lights go on. She’s loading the dishwasher. How much of a hint do you need that it’s time to leave? Are the unions telling Republican teachers through these actions, “Please leave. We reject your values. We’ll formally tell our pollster to ignore your opinions”?
Actually, it’s a rhetorical question — it’s now a hint delivered through a bullhorn. The real question is whether conservative teachers will be the guests who can’t take the hint.
Bob Bowdon (@BobBowdon) is the executive director of Choice Media, an education policy news service.
