Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Since their early beginnings in the 1850’s, teachers’ unions have emerged as significant, albeit controversial policy actors by actively voicing and defending significant teacher issues at the local, state, and national levels of government. One of the primary policy-setting roles of teachers’ unions is to negotiate collective bargaining agreements (CBAs or teacher contracts) with local school districts in the 43 states that permit or require public-sector negotiations with unions. While bargaining negotiations clearly function as an important policy-setting mechanism for teachers’ unions, the practical implications resulting from the enactment of new state policies recommends that teachers’ unions may have an even greater interest in what happens in state legislatures (Moe, 2011). This is because alterations in state-level policies usurp any local-level policy decisions that arise from bargaining negotiations. In short, if teachers’ unions want to secure a favorable local bargaining climate, or if opponents wish to impose constraints on union bargaining power, shaping the policies under consideration in state legislatures is of primary concern. However, even as we understand more about the impact of collective bargaining agreements as local policy documents, the policy-setting role of state-level teachers’ union organizations remains largely ignored in the extant literature. In particular, the degree to which teachers’ unions’ political activity actually yields influence in policy-setting is still an open empirical question.

In this paper, I utilize archives available from the National Conference on State Legislatures and Lexis Nexis State Capital to generate a database of all proposed legislation from 2011 to 2015 related to 19 high-profile teacher-related policy areas (e.g. teacher collective bargaining rights, performance pay, retirement, tenure). I code each piece of legislation based on whether it aligns with or runs contrary to traditional teachers’ union positions (favorable vs. unfavorable). Using this dataset of over 4000 state laws, coupled with measures of state teachers’ union strength (as measured by the proportion of teachers’ unions’ contributions to parties and candidates, teachers’ union dues per teacher, teachers’ union expenditures per student, and union size), I answer three related research questions: 1) what is the relationship between union strength and the proposal of favorable/unfavorable teacher-related legislation? 2) what is the relationship between union strength and the outcome (pass/fail) of favorable/unfavorable teacher-related legislation? and 3) what is the relationship between union strength and the proposal and outcome of certain types of teacher related laws (e.g. tenure, evaluation etc.)?

I find that the proportion of teachers’ unions’ contributions to candidates is positively associated with the proportion of unfavorable laws proposed and failed by state legislatures. Surprisingly, union donations appear to buy little influence in terms of the proposal and outcome of favorable legislation. Instead, it appears that teachers’ unions lobbying influence is most effective when protecting the status quo within a state (blocking unfavorable legislation) than in supporting the proposal and implementation of new reforms favorable for teachers. Such a finding has implications for the ability of state lawmakers to reform public-schooling, particularly in ways that run contrary to the traditional interests of teachers’ unions.