Michael T. Hartney

From the Schoolhouse to the Statehouse Teacher Union Political Activism and U.S. State Education Reform Policy

Elementary and secondary education policy making in the U.S. states is heavily influenced by the political bargaining of various actors, with teacher unions one of the most important actors. Yet previous studies that assess the impact of teacher unions on education reform use problematic measures of their direct political influence, instead opting for broader measures of membership or collective bargaining power. By contrast, the authors measure teacher union political activity by calculating the percentage of campaign contributions to candidates for state office that come from teacher unions. Using this measure, the authors find that increased teacher union political activity greatly reduces the chances that states enact reform-oriented education policies such as school choice and performance pay for teachers, while previous measures of teacher union strength bear little relationship to a state’s adoption of these reform policies. These findings highlight the importance of paying careful attention to how political influence is operationalized in studies that assess the role organized interests play in shaping U.S. state policies.

The Political Foundations of the Black–White Education Achievement Gap

More than 50 years after Brown v. Board, African American students continue to trail their White peers on a variety of important educational indicators. In this article, we investigate the political foundations of the racial “achievement gap” in American education. Using variation in high school graduation rates across the states, we first assess whether state policymakers are attentive to the educational needs of struggling African American students. We find evidence that state policymaking attention to teacher quality—an issue education research shows is essential to improving schooling outcomes for racial minority students—is highly responsive to low graduation rates among White students, but bears no relationship to low graduation rates among African American students. We then probe a possible mechanism behind this unequal responsiveness by examining the factors that motivate White public opinion about education reform and find racial influences there as well. Taken together, we uncover evidence that the persisting achievement gap between White and African American students has distinctively political foundations.