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Why are America's public schools falling so short of the mark in educating the nation's children? Why are they organized in ineffective ways that fly in the face of common sense, to the point that it is virtually impossible to get even the worst teachers out of the classroom? And why, after more than a quarter century of costly education reform, have the schools proven so resistant to change and so difficult to improve?
In this path-breaking book, Terry M. Moe demonstrates that the answers to these questions have a great deal to do with teachers unions—which are by far the most powerful forces in American education and use their power to promote their own special interests at the expense of what is best for kids.
Despite their importance, the teachers unions have barely been studied. Special Interest fills that gap with an extraordinary analysis that is at once brilliant and kaleidoscopic—shedding new light on their historical rise to power, the organizational foundations of that power, the ways it is exercised in collective bargaining and politics, and its vast consequences for American education. The bottom line is simple but devastating: as long as the teachers unions remain powerful, the nation's schools will never be organized to provide kids with the most effective education possible.
Moe sees light at the end of the tunnel, however, due to two major transformations. One is political, the other technological, and the combination is destined to weaken the unions considerably in the coming years—loosening their special-interest grip and opening up a new era in which America's schools can finally be organized in the best interests of children.
- Sales Rank: #1127702 in Books
- Published on: 2011-12-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.17" h x 1.16" w x 6.10" l, 1.58 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 513 pages
Review
"An exquisitely researched, compellingly reasoned treatise on the role of teachers unions and their impact on America's schools. Terry Moe has read everything, collected mountains of data, and thought more deeply on this topic than anyone in America. Special Interest immediately becomes essential reading for policymakers, would-be reformers, and anyone concerned about the future of American education."―Frederick Hess, American Enterprise Institute
"America's public schools are broken, and Terry Moe sets out to explain why. In a bare-knuckled and brilliant account, he shows how the teachers unions use their unmatched political power to control virtually every aspect of educational policy and practice. The result, not surprisingly, is a system that protects the interests of employees at the expense of our kids."―Joel Klein, CEO, News Corp Education Division, and former chancellor of New York City Public Schools
"This is a superb and historic book. Terry Moe, the first scholar to brave unions' wrath by revealing how they operate, now also shows how their dominance of public education will wane, due to political change and productivity-enhancing technology. Reformers, foundation heads, elected officials who have up to now been afraid to cross the unions, and union leaders and their allies should read this book as soon as they can get their hands on it."―Paul Hill, University of Washington
"Anyone who wants to understand education reform and its challenges should read this extraordinary book. Over the past few decades, teachers unions have become some of the most powerful actors in American public education. Terry Moe fills a crucial gap by exploring how the unions work; how they veto important reforms in ways that are detrimental for children; and how their power might be waning. As with his prior work, this book will make a tremendous difference in how we run our schools."―Michelle Rhee, former Chancellor, District of Columbia Public Schools, reviewing a previous edition or volume
" Special Interest constitutes the most serious and sustained inquiry into teachers unions ever conducted. It has the signature markings of Moe's scholarship: impeccable writing, clear and persuasive argumentation, sound empirics, and an utter unwillingness to pull any punches. In the ongoing debate about teacher unions and school reform, this book is a game changer."―William Howell, University of Chicago
"Moe shines a bright light on perhaps the most under-researched topic in all of education policy. This is a theoretical and empirical tour de force, revealing what makes the teachers unions tick and why they are absolutely central to any discussions of education reform. Along the way, it makes a persuasive case that the unions are often misunderstood, even by seasoned observers―and that this is encouraged by a rational union strategy. Moe's perspective on union power is bleak, laying bare its iron grip on the schools, but he offers hope that we are entering a special time that allows for significant change."―Eric Hanushek, author of Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses
About the Author
Terry M. Moe is the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His previous books include the seminal Politics, Markets, and America's Schools (Brookings) and Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education (Jossey-Bass), both cowritten with John Chubb. He is also the author of Schools, Vouchers, and the American Public (Brookings).
Most helpful customer reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
A Nation Still at Risk
By Robin Friedman
In 1983, the President's Commission on Excellence in Education published a report titled "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform". The report warned of "a rising tide of mediocrity" in public schools in the United States, and it resulted in extensive efforts at reform. Despite these well-intentioned and expensive efforts, United States public schools are still putting children and the nation "at risk" in failing to teach basic skills in reading, mathematics, and science and in failing to prepare too many young people for lives in which they will be informed citizens, happy with themselves, and useful to others.
Terry Moe's book "Special Interest: Teacher Unions and America's Public Schools" (2011) is written against the backdrop of the continued difficulties in American public education. Moe argues that the teachers unions and the power they have amassed since the late 1960's bear substantial responsibility for the continued poor state of American education. Moe is the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has written extensively on the American political process and on American education.
In examining a problem as pervasive as educational failure, it is tempting to conclude that many and broad-based factors are involved. Thus, Moe observes, many people find to sources of students' failure to learn in social conditions which do not require restructuring schools as much as "ameliorat[ing] poverty, educat[ing] parents, and mak[ing] schools into community service centers that can meet an array of health, dental, nutritional, psycological, family, and other social needs." (p. 12) While Moe acknowledges the need to address social inequities, he insists that these considerations "cannot be allowed to distract from the pursuit of effective schools." (p. 12) He finds that schools themselves have a large impact separate from social conditions, and that effective learning can take place in properly structured and managed schools even when the students suffer from social and economic disadvantage. As Moe also points out, the claim that a problem results from "a number" of factors is ultimately no answer at all and works against trying to correct a situation. Moe's book thus argues that the teacher unions, the work rules they impose in the schools the power they exercise in the political process, and their ability to block reform, must shoulder a great deal of responsibility for the state of American education.
Moe is a careful student of American politics, and he is has thought well about its interaction with American education. He has a great knowledge of interest groups and the way in which such groups promote their own agendas beyond what their strength in numbers might indicate. His discussion of interest politics, separate from the way he applies it to the teachers unions, is instructive in its own right. Moe is at his best as an empirical scholar who has amassed a great deal of information about the membership in the teacher unions, their finances, their large contributions to the political process, and the state-by-state differences in their organization and function. This information is valuable and important. Moe contends that the teachers unions, for all their rhetoric about working for the child, are devoted to the pursuit of the economic well-being of their members, the teachers, and that the interests the unions promote frequently undermine effective education.
In the early chapters of the book, Moe discusses the history of the two primary teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the smaller American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Prior to the 1960s, these were largely administrative organizations rather than collective bargaining units for teachers. When public employees obtained collective bargaining rights, the unions amassed great power. Their power was assisted by the ability of the unions, to varying degrees, to control the make-up of the school boards with which they bargained and by the rather lax way in which school boards tended to bargain with the unions, granting them heavy concessions, particularly in matters not involving immediate out-of-pocket expense and in matters involving the running of the schools.
The heart of the book lies in Moe's treatment of collective bargaining in chapter 6, which makes many thoughtful points. The unions bargained successfully for salaries, overtime, restrictions on work, protections for all teachers, including the obviously incompetent, seniority rules, control of teachers over transfers, and many other matters. Moe opposes many of the concessions granted to the unions in collective bargaining. Moe still needs to show that these concessions, questionable as many of them undoubtedly are, were determinative factors in what children learn. I am not sure he fully does this. In the concluding sections of chapter 6, Moe acknowledges the difficulty of establishing a causual relationship between student performance and collective bargaining contracts. He points to two detailed academic studies, one by a scholar named Caroline Hoxby and one by Moe himself (pp. 211 --212) He admits that the question of causation is difficult and messy while insisting that the evidence is more than sufficient to fault collective bargaining contracts. As a layman reading the chapter, I thought that Moe made many strong points about collective bargaining contracts as well as some questionable points (Moe objects, for reasons unclear to me, to rewarding teachers for pursuing advanced degrees, such as an MA in their speciaties). I thought, in reading the study, the the collective bargaining contracts were probably detrimental to education in many ways, but the the depth and single-mindedness of Moe's critique outstripped his evidence.
In subsequent chapters of his book, Moe describes increasing public concern with teacher unions, including concerns in its natural political home, the liberal wing of the Democratic party. He discusses well-publicized and expensive efforts to break the power of the union contracts in New York City and in Washington, D.C. These efforts resulted in large financial rewards to the members of the teachers unions in exchange for concessions which may not survive the political process. The success of these efforts remains questionable. Moe also discusses effectively "reform unionism" which he finds unlikely to succeed given union structure and the strength in the American system of interest politics.
In the final chapters of his book, Moe returns to the political process which he knows well. Readers may be surprised about the large financial contributions the teacher unions make in both national and state politics. Moe explains the politics of "blocking" in which it is ordinarily easier for a minority group to thwart legislation than it is to enact new legislation. He uses the discussion of "blocking" to show how teacher unions have the power to stymie reform. Moe discusses efforts on the national level that have had some success, including the "No Child Left Behind" act and the innovative "Race to the Top" program of President Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Overall, Moe is not optimistic about the possibility of achieving reform of teacher unions and collective bargaining contracts in the short term. In the longer term, Moe predicts, for reasons that remain unclear, that the growth of Information Technology and computer-based systems of learning will render the teachers unions largely obsolete.
Moe has written a difficult, thoughtful book about the American political process, the teacher unions, and American education. The book should encourage readers to reflect on what they understand the purpose of education to be and why education is important. It should also encourage reflection on the nature of American public education and the diverse goals it attempts to achieve. Moe has identified a problem and pinpointed a likely source of some of the difficulty. In places, I thought that the book overreached in its conclusions.
Robin Friedman
22 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
Extraordinary book!
By Larry Sand
Collecting a colossal amount of data, Terry Moe has authored an extraordinary book about our nations' teachers unions. While much has been written about these unions in the last ten years or so, nothing has been written with the rigorous attention to detail that we find in Dr. Moe's Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools.
The unions are examined in a myriad of ways - their relationships to teachers, effect on school boards, insistence on collective bargaining, rise as a unified powerful political entity, etc. Researched over a period of years, there are ninety pages of end notes.
This work should be required reading for education reformers, policy experts, taxpayers, parents and anyone else who is interested in how American public education works... or doesn't. At points during the book, you might experience feelings of despair about the future of public education, but toward the end of the book, Dr. Moe offers us some real reasons for hope.
22 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
This is a crime, and the perps should be behind bars.
By Passenger on the Titanic
While this book is a bit of a slog, it's only because it's so well-researched and scholarly. But you still want to just curl up in the bathtub and open up a vein. As the other reviewer said, this should be required reading for every taxpayer in this country who's footing the bill for an education system that is abysmal, despite the fact that we spend approx. half of our tax dollars on it. There is nothing more important to our country than educating the next generations -- not even the economy -- and what the unions have done to it in our urban areas, where the most vulnerable children live, is a crime. If these actions had been imposed upon us by another country, it would be considered an act of war (what genius said that?) Terry Moe has done a magnificent job educating at least his readers.
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