The Union that Dominates American Education: A Brief History of the American Federation of Teachers

We look at the history of the powerful AFT and its role in American education.  

Transcript

The Union that Dominates American Education: A Brief History of the American Federation of Teachers

July 2023

At the end of June of 2023, the US Supreme Court issued three significant and controversial opinions, with Students for Fair Admissions among them. The court held, by a margin of 6-3, that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions processes violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. With its companion case, Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court effectively overruled previous decisions which validated some affirmative action in college admissions provided that race had a limited role in decisions.  

Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson, whose 29-page dissent sounded more like a New York Times opinion piece rather than a legal dissection of why the majority was incorrect, provided a history lesson of black disparities that included everything from land to housing to healthcare. Brown Jackson said, “The point is this: Given our history, the origin of persistent race-linked gaps should be no mystery. In Frederick Douglass’s words, it has never been a deficiency of Black Americans’ desire or ability to “stand on [their] own legs.” Rather, it was always simply what Justice Harlan recognized 140 years ago—the persistent and pernicious denial of “what had already been done in every State of the Union for the white race.” And Brown Jackson does not even mention policing, long an example cited by thousands as a clear example of a rigged system.  

The term systemic racism has entered our lexicon, and Brown Jackson provides an exhaustive list except for one system in particular. And in this case, American education lies the answer to all of those other disparities, especially college inequities. Assuming that the educational system produced college-bound students, in which work ethic, determination, and raw intelligence were the determinants, a blind admissions process looking at grades, test scores, individual accomplishments, and service time would yield equal outcomes making affirmative action unnecessary. 

So why does Brown Jackson, with her exhaustive list, make a wide detour around K-12 education, the one system directly related to admissions, in a dissent directly addressing a system she wishes to maintain, to correct inequities? And for this, I give you the American Federation of Teachers or the AFT. This union is an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, was founded in 1916, and now represents 1.7 million members in more than 3,000 local affiliates nationwide.

Five divisions within the AFT represent the broad spectrum of the AFT’s membership: pre-K through 12th-grade teachers, paraprofessionals, and other school-related personnel. In addition, the AFT represents approximately 80,000 early childhood educators and nearly 250,000 retiree members. Along with its sister union, the National Education Association, the unions, and their state and local affiliates take in $1.3 billion each year from dues and employ 6,000 full-time staff members.

Though the AFT is over a century old, the historiography is problematic. Being a teacher’s union, there is a plethora of works that are either celebratory or downright propagandist, starting with its own website, “While the AFT grew quickly in the beginning, chartering 174 locals in its first four years, the years following World War I saw school boards pressuring and intimidating teachers to resign from the union.” Those darn school boards, the ones elected from the local population. How dare they try to limit union power. The AFT website says, “By the end of the 1920s, AFT membership had dropped to less than 5,000—about half the number in 1920. Throughout that time, the union fought for tenure laws and the academic freedom of those teachers whose beliefs were being investigated by political committees during the “Red scare” anti-communist hysteria following WWI.” 

And It is in this statement that a critical word crops up, note “the AFT went on to fight for tenure for teachers. By the end of the Depression, tenure of some kind had been gained in 17 states, largely because of the AFT’s efforts. While strong leadership in the AFT boosted membership from 7,000 in 1930 to 32,000 in 1939.”  

We will explore what tenure means on the ground later in the podcast. However, even here, within these statements, it is rarely about the craft or skill of teaching and even less about the kids, but squarely focused on the power of the union and the membership numbers. 

But this is the AFT website, so the union is trying to prove its value. Works purportedly independent of the union are not much better. William Edward Eaton, author of The American Federation of Teachers, 1916-1961: A History of the Movement, writes, “From its turbulent beginnings in 1916 in Chicago, where the seeds of the movement took root, to the 1961teacher strike in New York City, which proved the union’s effec­tiveness, the American Federation of Teach­ers union had provided a simulacrum of industrial-organizational patterns common to the labor movement in this country. De­riving its principal strength from such modes, the AFT was crisis oriented from the start and is thus distinguished from its rival union, the NEA, a more conservative, pro­fession-oriented group.”  

A lot to unpack here. First off, Eaton calls this a movement that implies change or direction. One can see from these statements that the movement was only for the good, “the union’s effectiveness.” And calling the NEA conservative? Perhaps in the time that Eaton covers, but that is decidedly not the case today. 

Robert Braun’s 1972 work about the AFT and the American Federation of Teachers Bibliography: Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs from Wayne State University, published in 1980. “Since its foundation in 1916, the American Federation of Teachers has been vital in the development of American education. Its contribution to better salaries, teacher professional recognition, and improved schools has been immeasurable. AFT members have spoken out on various educational issues, and the union has taken strong social, political, and economic policy positions.” Again, propaganda. So we must rely on more conventional methods and piece together the history ourselves.  

On May 9, 1916, the American Federation of Labor chartered the AFT. The American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886 by Samuel Gompers, emerged from what was originally a cigar-making union. By 1919, AFT had 100 local affiliates and a membership of approximately 11,000 teachers, which amounted to 1.5% of the nation’s teaching force. In its early days, AFT distinguished itself from the National Education Association (NEA) by excluding school administrators from membership. AFT membership declined to 7,000 by 1930 due to opposition from politicians and education boards. 

Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s benign attitude to most unions, AFT membership climbed during the Great Depression, reaching 33,000 by 1939. During the 1930s, AFT, whose members had historically been primary school teachers, saw influential college professors join the union. Also during the 1930s, the Communist Party gained influence within the AFT; under pressure from the AFL, the union ejected three local unions in New York City and Philadelphia (including its prominent early member, the New York City Teachers Union, AFT Local 5) for being communist-dominated. The charter revocations represented nearly a third of the union’s national membership.

Today we hear much of the red scare, McCarthyism, and black listing in understandably questionable terms. I am against the limitations of freedom. Liberty means toleration. But just because we can tolerate alternative views does not mean those views should not be rigorously challenged. According to Benedetto Croce, all history is contemporary history, which he and all serious studies of the past are informed by the problems and needs of the writer’s time. But a corollary to this is presentism, in which we impose contemporary beliefs and cultural mores on past cultures. Though communism should be seen in a similar vein as fascism, and I would argue where it has been implemented, it had as much of a deleterious effect on society as the extremist right-wing beliefs. But because those denigrations were mostly perpetrated internally to the state upon which it was ruled, they receive less hard ignominy. Therefore Marxism and communism are not seen in the way of fascism. Not only did Barack Obama try to normalize relations with Cuba, we do hundreds of billions of dollars of business in the most significant communist nation on Earth.  

So when we see the historical aversion to communism as in the 1930s, today’s beliefs see that as oppressive as rather a wary look at an ideology that could be deleterious to our Republic.  

In the case of the AFT, as the 1930s progressed, they managed to distance themselves from much of the communism that was a part of their membership. 

The 1940s were marked by a series of teacher strikes, including 57 strikes that occurred from 1946 through 1949. By 1947, AFT had a membership of 42,000. 

Going into 1960, AFT membership was 59,000, a new high but different from the hundreds of thousands of members in industrial unions such as the UAW or the United Mine Workers, which at its peak in the 1930s boasted 300,000 members. Yet by 1970, just ten years later, the AFT had 200,000 members and 550,000 in 1980. 

We can sum up this change in two words: collective bargaining. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), first passed in 1935, guaranteed the right of private sector employees to organize and collectively bargain, but the NLRA did not cover public workers. One of the things that progressives like to avoid are these words of union champion FDR, who drove the passage of the NLRA, “ln Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The government’s very nature and purposes make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws that establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters. Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees.”  

FDR knew that public employees engaged in collective bargaining were sitting on both sides of the table, unlike a corporation like GM, where management and labor are delineated. In most companies, labor does not choose management, and even employee-owned organizations have strict policies of how management is governed, nor do these private sector companies perform a designated public good. But in the public sector, as we shall see, the public teacher’s unions are deeply engaged in elections and therefore pick and dictate to their bosses.  

The nation’s first collectively bargained agreement with public school teachers was signed in 1962 in New York City, whose local union was led by a charismatic high school math teacher named Albert Shanker, who later became AFT president. In the decades following the NLRA’s enactment, many states passed similar laws to regulate organizing, bargaining, and settling disputes for working people in the public sector, including public education employees. 

Currently, teachers in 34 states and the District of Columbia have the legal right to bargain; education support professionals in 31 states plus D.C. have that right, as do some higher education faculty in 28 states plus DC Note how DC, home of the political class is inevitably intertwined with a union that gives them money to be elected.

In many other states that do not have collective bargaining statutes, limited bargaining takes place in some or all categories of education employees.  

Though Shanker insisted that the struggle was about more than mere bread-and-butter issues—that it was also about improving the quality of public education and strengthening democracy—the contract the UFT signed with the New York City Board of Education nevertheless reflected the traditional industrial model. 

And in many regards, this is the set-in-amber structure we struggle with today. It set up uniform pay scales and seniority rights for teachers, limited their classroom hours, and required new teachers to be automatically enrolled in the union and have their dues deducted from their paychecks. Though some states, such as Wisconsin in 2012 and Arkansas this year, have removed the automatic deduction, most states still feature it, and the AFT, playing the long game, often gets it reinstated.

Writing for the City Journal, Sol Stern notes, “So why did the bottom drop out of American public education just as per-pupil spending soared in the 1970s? Basic economics provides a compelling answer, though countless blue-ribbon commissions, and indeed much of the present national dialogue about school reform, have failed to acknowledge it: the $250 billion public education industry behaves precisely like any other publicly protected monopoly. Union negotiators in the private sector know that if they insist on protecting incompetent workers and cling to outdated work rules, especially in the global economy, the company will begin losing market share, and union members will lose their jobs. In public education, by contrast, collective bargaining takes place without the constraining discipline of the market. When school board representatives sit down with union officials to negotiate a labor contract, neither party is under pressure to pay attention to worker productivity or the system’s overall competitiveness. If the contract allows some teachers to be paid for hardly working at all and others to perform incompetently without penalty, there is no real economic danger for either side. After all, most of the monopoly’s customers, the schoolchildren, have nowhere else to go. Historically, tax revenues have continued to flow into the schools no matter how poorly they perform. One of the best examples of this is the District of Columbia which spends an astounding $22,000 per pupil but is in the lowest quartile of student performance. 

And I noted the concept of tenure. It was in the 1960s that the inability to fire poor-performing teachers began. According to a Fordham study conducted in 2016, In 17 of the 25 districts surveyed, including New York, Miami, and San Francisco, state law allows teachers to gain tenure and keep it, despite poor performance reviews. And in terms of the length of the dismissal process: In 12 of the districts, it takes at least two years to dismiss a teacher for poor performance. In San Francisco and Los Angeles, it takes at least five.  

And that addresses the few, very few, who actually get fired. Newsweek provides more stats, “In most states, after two or three years, teachers are given lifetime tenure. It is almost impossible to fire them. In New York City, three out of 30,000 tenured teachers were dismissed for cause in one year. The statistics are just as eye-popping in other cities. The percentage of teachers dismissed for poor performance in Chicago during a recent three-year period was one-tenth of one percent. In Akron, Ohio, zero percent. In Toledo, 0.01 percent. In Denver, zero percent. 

And in the 1960s, with this newfound power, the AFT ended a no-strike rule and conducted 300 strikes from 1961 through 1970. Taking a cue from the aggressiveness perpetuated by the civil rights movements, the AFT strongly increased their agitation. In a piece by Marjorie Murphy, the author notes, “Public school teacher militancy appeared suddenly in the late 1960s, though the movement for teacher unionism was quite mature, dating to the early twentieth century. Like the rank-and-file militancy in other sectors, teacher activism drew some of its strength from a new, younger workforce, very much dedicated to the social issues of the day, including desegregation and ending the Vietnam War. The examples of civil rights activists, student antiwar demonstrators, feminists, and other social movement protesters inspired teachers to confront school boards, mayors, and state legislatures in a wave of strikes and protests demanding better wages, improved working conditions, and more school funding.”

Not stated in both the AFT website or this piece is that when the UAW goes on strike, we are limited by the number of cars we may purchase. When the AFT goes on strike, our children’s education is limited. This is lost in the celebratory atmosphere of the union regarding strikes.  

Interestingly, Shanker, who began many of the issues we see today, turned back toward a more fluid system during his later years as president of the AFT. For 27 years, Shanker wrote a weekly column entitled “Where We Stand” that ran as an advertisement in The New York Times. Shanker was an early advocate of charter schools. He also called for a national competency test for teachers, merit pay for teachers, and more rigorous requirements for high school graduation. Of course, being a good union guy, Shanker was jailed twice for leading illegal strikes.

But the election of Randi Weingarten as AFT president in 2008 saw a reversal of much of Shanker’s proposed reforms. Just as the Obama administration enacted an ever-growing movement leftward on issues such as healthcare, so did Weingarten follow suit on educational policy, which the unions in a democratic administration largely dictate. In a 2013 debate in New Haven, Weingarten argued that charter schools, public schools that operate as schools of choice and are exempt from significant state or local regulations, pull money from regular school districts. She claims charter schools should be “complementary” but not “competitive.” And if she is not supportive of the main public schools, she then opposes funding for them. In a 2015 report co-authored with In the Public Interest, the AFT decried the Walton Foundation’s pursuit of what the report termed a “market-based model [that] will lead to ... the eventual elimination of public education altogether, in favor of an across-the-board system of privately operated schools.”

Weingarten has suggested that parental-choice legislation spearheaded by Republican-controlled Florida and Virginia could sow the seeds of violent conflict. “This notion — we’ve been very lucky in America, and we in some ways live in a bubble for a long time,” she said during an April 13 radio interview on The Rick Smith Show. “This is propaganda. This is misinformation. This is the way in which wars start. This is the way in which hatred starts.” Well.

The AFT president condemns a “fixation on testing and data over everything else” as “a fundamental flaw in how our nation approaches public education. Weingarten has resisted attempts to curtail or eliminate tenure protections for public school teachers, arguing that the outright removal of tenure protection would hurt the quality of classroom instruction.

And all of this was before COVID. The AFT was chief among the unions lobbying for extending school closures, classroom mask mandates, and other Covid-19 restrictions that interrupted or hampered learning during the pandemic. And we are still living with the after effects, according to a study published in the New York Times, “Test scores declined more in districts where schools were closed longer,” the authors wrote. “In districts closed for 90 percent or more of the 2020-21 school year, math scores declined by two-thirds of a year, nearly double the decline in districts that were closed for less than 10 percent of the school year.” Weingarten, knowing of these effects, now claims that in testimony before Congress last month, “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open.” This is a complete lie. 

Not only was the AFT complicit, but in some cases, they actually dictated the policy, having worked with the CDC on closures. This from the National Review editorial board, “To put it mildly, this is not true. In the fall of 2020, Weingarten called attempts to reopen schools “reckless, callous, cruel.” Every few days during the spring and summer of 2020, Weingarten would explain why schools must remain closed. Affiliated unions said even more bizarre things. The Chicago Teachers Union, in December 2020, said that the push to reopen schools “is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.” The AFT aggressively lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and even suggested language for the agency’s influential school-reopening guidance, language that would make it easier to delay or halt reopenings.”

Most recently, Weingarten is now working with the Department of Homeland Security on student safety, “Weingarten was appointed Monday to a new Department of Homeland Security school safety advisory council tasked with making recommendations on “emergency management,” “preparedness measures,” and “safety and security” in schools. Remember that before being union head and a teacher, Weingarten was a lawyer focusing primarily on collective bargaining for the AFT. What this has to do with school safety is a hard stretch. Still, as Ned Beatty’s Dean Martin, of the epic movie Back to School, when asked why he was letting Rodney Dangerfield into the college despite never having graduated high school, he stated, “It was a really big check.”  

And what sort of checks are we talking about? Big ones, indeed! In a 2012 article in the Wall Street Journal By Alicia Mundy, the writer asks, “What do the American Ireland Fund, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network have in common? All have received some of the more than $330 million that America’s two most prominent teacher’s unions spent in the past five years on outside causes, political campaigns, lobbying, and issue education.

The contributions—totaling more than $200 million from the National Education Association and more than $130 million from the American Federation of Teachers—were disclosed in annual reports that unions file with the Labor Department detailing their spending on political activities and advocacy work, as well as separate political-action-committee filings.”

In 2020 The American Federation of Teachers raised almost $10.7 million for this election cycle. It similarly directed most of that money to super PACs and outside groups while it is traditional PAC virtually disappeared. Simply put, the union wanted more transparency. The AFT is the 17th most generous funder of outside groups. Both teacher’s unions rank ahead of one of their top bogeymen, the Koch Brothers. AFT designated 98.6 percent of its money to benefit Democrats. Republican Donald Trump received $121 from AFT sources. Very bi-partisan. 

In the 2022 midterms, the AFT spent even more at $23 million, ranking it 24th out of 30,000 contributors in the cycle. And this is the documented items. With over 1.6 million members, the AFT can command these brigades to spend on personal, small-scale donations that are now the bread and butter of political campaigns. It does not take a math genius to guess the number if each of these members spent $50.00 apiece. 

Today the Schools in the United States spend an average of $16,993 per pupil, which is the 3rd-highest amount per pupil (after adjusting to local currency values, and note I do not include Luxembourg or any nation under 1 million people, so Iceland is out as well, sorry Luxembourgers-your not really a nation) among the 37 other developed countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In 2018, the United States spent $14,400 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 34 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries of $10,800. 

And that leaves ahead of us oil-rich Norway and Austria ahead of our spending. So what does that spending get us? In the same group of 37 nations, the US ranked 30th in math and 19th in science. There is a worm in the apple, as author Peter Brimelow noted in his book using the exact phrase. 

Over the past 40-50 years, we have tried all manner of school reforms regarding curriculum, newer schools, and more money. We have yet to try to reform the hiring, management, and possible termination of teachers. The school boards, the principals, and even the parent’s hands are tied. We have done everything but take away collective bargaining from the unions.  

Almost all of the works covering the history of the AFT treat the organization more like a traditional union. The issue is that the public treats neither the AFT nor the NEA as such because these are different from the teamsters, United Auto Workers, or the United Mine Workers. Yet participation in these traditional unions has declined for decades despite liberals in office, including Johnson, Carter, and Obama. This is due to both a movement away from traditional blue-collar jobs and many questions about the efficacy of the union system. Where unions are strong, we struggle; where weak, such as Tech, we are strong.  

So why does the AFT get a pass? Because teachers interact with our children. We all know that teacher. The one who had an impact on our kid. The one who went the extra mile. It would be hard to say, “You know that guy who put my Ford F150 together? Well, that guy was really inspirational! 

But I ask this question of all folks. Name three teachers with that impact. If one assumes that we encounter about four teachers in K-5 each year, the general teacher plus music, gym, and a sport. Then during three middle school years, about six, and high school, about seven. From k-12, we would encounter about 66 educators during that span. But at best, five, or at worst, two or three are impactful? Yet we remember the great ones and are dismissive of the mediocrities. 

And this gives teachers a pass that other professions do not get. We would raise cane if we encountered five cool government bureaucrats at the DMV but had poor interactions with another ten of them. But education, which is far more important, gets the benefit of the doubt.  

By controlling the K12 system in the United States, the AFT limits the ability for parents to choose their own schools, for principals to hire and fire the teachers they desire. For schools to compete for student dollars. For the school boards to manage their districts, and most importantly, for parents to influence what is taught.  

As a piece in the Brookings Institute noted, educational outcomes for minority children are much more a function of their unequal access to critical educational resources, including skilled teachers and quality curriculum, than race. In fact, the US educational system is one of the most unequal in the industrialized world, and students routinely receive dramatically different learning opportunities based on their social status.” So the answer is clear: spend more money on schools attended by black and brown students. But that is already happening. Chicago spends $20,000 per student, more than the national average. DC, which has a majority African American student body, is at the aforementioned $22,000. New York City, taking advantage of COVID and other spending, came in at a whopping $29,931 per pupil and was second highest among the nation’s 100 largest school systems. But they ranked 13th in student performance. 

And remember all of those strikes? The ones proudly noted on the AFT’s websites and the ones for which Weingarten had been arrested? Well, now we know from COVID what happens when a student misses chunks of classroom time. A study by Amplify, a curriculum and assessment provider, examined test data for some 400,000 elementary school students across 37 states. It found that the shutdowns led to a spike in students unable to read at grade level, with literacy losses “disproportionately concentrated in the early elementary grades. The study revealed that during the 2021-2022 school year, 47% of black and 39% of Hispanic second graders fell behind on literacy and needed “intensive intervention,” compared to 26% of their white peers.

In a piece called The Systemic Racism of the Teachers’ Unions by Larry Sand in 2022, he notes, “The irony of the teachers unions’ deploring racism in education is glaring because it is the very same unions that essentially imprison children – notably poor children of color – in substandard public schools. Specifically, the union-mandated collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in place throughout most of the country highlight why government-run schools fail so many kids. In reality, CBAs dictate that teacher’s unions don’t treat teachers as professionals but rather as interchangeable widgets, all of whom are of equal value and competence. Differentiating between effective and ineffective educators as a result of what their students actually learn would necessitate doing away with their industrial-style work rules. Those include one-size-fits-all salary scales, tenure (contractually known as “permanence”), and seniority or “last in, first out (LIFO), whereby if a teacher must be laid off due to budgetary belt-tightening, it is not the least talented teacher who is on the chopping block, but rather the newest hire.

Regarding salaries, teacher quality doesn’t matter a whit to teacher union honchos, only the number of years they have on the job. The other way teachers can increase their salary is by taking “professional development classes,” which typically have no impact on student learning.

At the beginning of this podcast, I featured the dissent of Justice Brown Jackson, and let’s conclude with this one. 

“The only way out of this morass—for all of us—is to stare at racial disparity unblinkingly and then do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together, collectively striving to achieve true equality for all Americans.” Instead of putting the band-aid of affirmative action on the gaping wound of our educational system, perhaps Brown Jackson should stop castigating her fellow justices and look a little closer to home. In a press release issued on April 4, 2022, preceding Brown Jackson’s nomination hearing, the AFT had this to say, “This historic nomination demonstrates our nation’s continued path towards becoming a more just society where all children have the opportunity to succeed regardless of what they look like, where they’re from or what their parents do for a living.” Brown Jackson’s nomination or her rhetorical dissents will not change the fate of too many in this country ill-served by public education. 

Curbing the power of the unions will.