Photo courtesy of the Journal-Sentinel

It is tempting to look at this week’s recall elections in Wisconsin — and the fact that Republicans retain control of the Badger State’s upper house — through the gaze of all-politics-are-local. But when more money is spent on the recall elections than on the entire state legislative campaign last year, most of it coming from public-sector unions opposed to Gov. Scott Walker’s successful effort to abolish collective bargaining, the politics are clearly national. And when the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers weigh in — including spending $400,000 on radio ads supporting Democratic opponents alone — the elections are also a referendum on the influence of teachers unions in education policy.

The results of the referendum are clear: The NEA and AFT are not nearly as influential in education policy as they once were a decade ago. And thanks to the twin forces of the school reform movement and the current economic malaise, that influence will continue to weaken.

The nation’s two largest teachers unions are certainly doing their best to triangulate and beat back Parent Power movements and other school reform efforts. It hasn’t always been successful — especially among the AFT, whose president, Randi Weingarten, issued another public nonapology apology  in the Huffington Post after Dropout Nation revealed its anti-Parent Trigger presentation. (Of course, Weingarten couldn’t mention your editor by name.) Even as the two unions are beset by a generational divide between Baby Boomers who want to preserve their privileges and reform-minded less-senior teachers, the reality is that the former are still in clear control of union activity. Their interest in keeping traditional districts under their respective thumbs, along with preserving the array of quality-blind compensation and near-lifetime privileges that has made teaching the most-comfortable public-sector profession, is why the NEA is devoting $40 million in member donations (whether or not younger members support it) on efforts to beat back reform. It is also why legislators such as New Jersey Assembly Speaker Steve Sweeney have lost NEA and AFT endorsements.

The NEA and AFT thought that they could whip up outrage against moves by governors and legislatures in Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey and Florida to abolish collective bargaining and begin overhauling costly teacher pay systems. For good reason. Most Americans respect individual teachers, who the two unions can rally for electioneering. The fact that governments (including school districts) are major employers, especially in rural areas, along with the struggle reformers often have in explaining the nuances of teacher pay (and moving away from over-simplification that lead to Matt Damon moments) should also help the NEA’s and AFT’s cause.

What the two unions continually fail to realize is that those arguments no longer work in the face of these stubborn facts.

For one, with states facing $137 billion in budget shortfalls this and the coming fiscal years, governors and legislators can no longer afford to protect school spending from the axe. Given that the cost of the nearly-free healthcare benefits and other perks of teaching have increased by 21 percent within a six-year period — and the $1.4 trillion in pension deficits and unfunded retiree healthcare costs — governors realize they must restrain future increases.

Second: While reformers haven’t done a good job of fully explaining teacher compensation, they have done a fantastic job of showing that the traditional system is ineffective in rewarding good-to-great teachers or in improving student achievement. A decade of revelations about the laggard quality of teaching and curricula in traditional schools and the results in the form of 150 teens dropping out every hour, has shown taxpayers that the nation spends $600 billion on education abysmally.

Then there is the reality that the average American, working in a private sector in which layoffs and wage cutbacks are common, are none too sympathetic to teachers unions who insist that their rank-and-file should not be subjected to economic reality. Opposition from the unions to performance pay plans, ending tenure and using student test score data in teacher evaluations, also fall on deaf ears. That there are other fiscal matters that they consider to be equally important, including police and fire service and Medicaid, that have been subjected to cutbacks, makes taxpayers less willing to listen to cries against revamping teacher compensation.

Combine these realities with moves such as the AFT’s failed lawsuit against New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s school reform efforts and revelations such as those last week by Dropout Nation, and suddenly, the pitch from teachers’ unions is as failed as their vision for American public education.

All this said, the NEA and AFT remain formidable forces who have long ago mastered the less-electoral aspects of the political game. School reformers need to step up their game in this area as well as build ties to grassroots activists and community leaders in order to sustain momentum.

At the same time, some reform camps, namely centrist and left-leaning Democrats, need to come to terms with the reality that the teacher quality reforms they espouse involve the same weakening of teachers’ union influence as the efforts by conservative counterparts to abolish collective bargaining. Trying to publicly oppose the weakening of teachers’ union influence even your own agenda calls for exactly that is trying to have it both ways. And that’s just not possible.

This week marked another slow decline in teachers’ union influence. And more clout may be lost — to the benefit of our children — by the time the year is over.

Perhaps It’s Time to Abandon the Union: Last week’s Three Thoughts noted George W. Bush Center scholar Jay P. Greene’s conclusion that school reformers would be better off starting their own institutions in order to successfully spur school reform, and force traditional districts and other players to abandoned failed practices. This question comes up as one reads Andy Rotherham’s latest column in Time on the younger players who are trying to force the NEA and AFT to end their opposition to systemic reform.

As I did last year for Labor Watch and The American Spectator over the last year, Rotherham details how groups such as Educators4Excellence have agitated with some success for the two unions to modify their positions. NewTLA, for example, now significant influence in the AFT’s Los Angeles local, while the efforts of Teach Plus in Indianapolis and elsewhere to rally younger teachers to push for reform is also wonderful to watch.

But are their efforts enough? As Adam Emerson of Redefine Ed points out, the insurgents haven’t really forced the NEA and AFT to do more than slightly alter their positions and help shape a local election or two. More importantly, the activists haven’t challenge the penchant for treating families as nuisances and afterthoughts that is rampant among NEA and AFT leaders (and in the agendas of the two unions). The fact that the younger teachers pushing for internal reform have not yet themselves begun dismissing the anti-Parent Power strategies of their union (or have even argued publicly for the union to support Parent Trigger laws and vouchers, even though they do embrace charter schools) means that they don’t have the missing link they need to force the two unions to embrace systemic reform.

Virginia teacher and occasional Dropout Nation contributor Chad Sansing has noted that there needs to be a way for families and teachers to get together and work towards improving education. He is right. Currently, given that NEA and AFT affiliates are more-concerned with serving members and perpetuating its existence, and the concerns among poor and minority families that they are shunted aside in education decision-making, better working relationships between parents and teachers will remain a struggle. Certainly we need the insurgents to push for reform within the NEA and AFT. But reform-minded teachers may ultimately have to abandon the union model, form their own professional associations, and team up with Parent Power groups to do so.

Dropout Nation’s revelations that the American Federation of Teachers aren’t all that fond of the Parent Power movement and other elements of the nation’s overall school reform movement has shattered Randi Weingarten’s three-year-long effort at triangulating reform. For the union and its charming, cunning president, it will be more-difficult to convince the public that they welcome parents to the table of education decision-making. And the rank-and-file won’t be too pleased either.

But the “Diffused Parent Trigger” affair (their misspelling, not ours) also proves lie to one of the biggest myths perpetuated by education traditionalists: That their efforts to defend even the most-atrocious of traditional public education practices is simply a homegrown grassroots affair fighting against supposedly “corporate” school reformers interested in filthy lucre. The very anti-intellectualism of this mythology — based on the failure to realize that the entrepreneurs and corporate institutions are the very reasons why America has a high standard of living, are the ones who provide the tax revenues that sustain American public education, and finance the very institutions that give education traditionalists their jobs — makes such statements rather ridiculous. More importantly, this myth fails to consider the reality that education traditionalists are themselves defenders of an institutional, or, I’ll dare say, corporate, culture.

Consider this: At the national level, the AFT, along with the NEA, generate $622 million a year in dues — and this is the tip of the iceberg. When one drills down into the finances of all of their affiliates, the two unions are billion-dollar organizations with the sizeable staffs that one would find in the average corporation. Weingarten and her counterpart, Dennis Van Roekel, are just as well-paid as their counterparts in the corporate world (and not just the S&P 500 companies unions tend to focus on, but the average CEO, who makes in the $350,000 range):  Weingarten earned $428,284 in 2010,while Van Roekel was paid $397,721. Their respective executive team members also make six-figures sums, with Weingarten’s second-in-command, Loretta Johnson commanding $198,065 a year, while her NEA counterpart, Lilly Eskelson, gets $326,563.

Like their peers in the corporate world, the two unions devote countless hours developing strategies aimed at maximizing their core mission — serving their shareholders and customers, who, given that they are teachers, are one and the same. As with any business, they pay special attention to their controlling shareholders and most-loyal (and highest-spending) customers, Baby Boomers in the teaching corps, even though they make up a declining share of the shareholder and customer base. (Whether or not they are actually serving their customers and shareholders well is an open question; but then, most of them have no choice but to pay their dues). This includes developing marketing strategies such as touting that AFT and NEA affiliates are the only ones who can ensure that teachers are well-paid (and that school reform efforts are inferior, and in fact, dangerous to their incomes and careers), public relations activities such as endorsing (and financing half of the $100,000 budget for) last week’s Save Our Schools rally, and even corporate social responsibility activities such as donating millions to organizations whose views ostensibly dovetail with their own such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

And as with any business entity or institution, teachers unions always make sure that they continue to perpetuate their existence. Which means embracing branding and marketing strategies that advance their image. In their case, they promote the public image that they welcome family engagement and that they want to partner with them in order to improve education for all kids. And, as with Corporate America, they understand the importance of lobbying, public policy and campaigning in sustaining their business. It is why the two unions have become the biggest players in American campaign politics, handing off $292 million in donations between 2000 and 2011, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. And why the AFT and the NEA strongly opposes any effort to allow parents to be the lead decision-makers in education; it is a threat to their interests and, in their view, the very survival of their institutions.

In short, the NEA and the AFT are corporate traditional education institutions. They are not the only one. From traditional school districts (whose superintendents are often paid as well as Weingarten and Van Roekel) to university colleges of education (a $7 billion sector whose members train nearly all of the nation’s teachers), traditional public education’s defenders are about as corporately-driven as peers in the private and non-profit sectors. the more-independent of traditional educationalists are still just as tied up in the corporate/institutional landscape as those who work directly for institutions. From Diane Ravitch (who collects tidy sums from her gig at New York University, book royalties and  speeches before traditional educationalists) to conspiracy theorist Mike Klonsky (who runs the small schools effort out of the University of Illinois, Chicago), and Kevin Welner (whose National Education Policy Center has counted on NEA support, and who also serves on the board of the union’s foundation arm), the idea that these folks are just mom-and-pop advocates is just plain hilarious.

What isn’t so funny is their opposition to reforming American public education so that all children can write their own stories. Their sclerotic unwillingness to abandon practices and mythologies that are failures is a detriment to our kids. And the tactics they engage in to sustain it (even as they talk a good game) pretty much casts them as cynical ciphers supporting a failed amoral vision that condemns 1.2 million children a year to poverty, prison and despair. While I believe that they care for the lives of children, their beliefs and dogmas do not match with their tactics and actions. And this is especially infuriating when it comes to how they treat poor and minority parents and their children, who deserve better than condescension, dismissal and disdain.

Anything wrong with being corporate or institutional? Certainly not. Unless one is independently wealthy, everyone — including entrepreneurs, middle-managers, and advocates– depends on customers, clients and employers for their sustenance. But it is funny that education traditionalists don’t realize the hypocrisy inherent in their anti-corporate rhetoric — and, even after this week’s revelations, that they continue to be dismissive of Parent Power activists. Especially when they call themselves parent advocates. School reformers should consistently call out education traditionalists for the blatant mismatch between their message and what they actually support.