Teacher's pets.

• Author: Chinni, Dante
• Position: State legislatures and teachers' unions

HALF-TRUTHS CAN BE DANGEROUS things, especially in the hands of a politician. Witness this little harangue on education reform near the end of Bob Dole's nomination acceptance speech in San Diego:

The teachers' unions nominated Bill Clinton in 1992; they are funding his reelection now; and they, his most reliable supporters, know he will maintain the status quo," Dole told conventioneers. [W]hen I am president, I will disregard [their] political power, for the sake of the parents, the children, the schools, and the nation." The unions are killing the education patient and bankrupting the education business, he said.

It was a perfect political half-truth, a simple diagnosis of a real problem with a magic bullet answer: a president willing to stare down the unions. Even those who didn't agree with Dole's final solution - a school voucher system - heard something sensible in his words. Many agreed that teacher unions get in the way of reform and that Washington needs to do something to limit their power.

The problem is, Dole had it wrong and his half-truth draws attention away from the real issue.

It is true that teacher unions and their unwavering support of archaic tenure and certification systems all too often are roadblocks to reform. But any effort to ease the influence of the unions cannot begin in Washington. Despite their well-known national organizations, teacher unions are creatures of the states, governed by state laws that establish licensing procedures and guarantee tenure. Those laws, established long before our lawsuit-crazed era, were designed to protect teachers from political pressures and capricious firings. Today, however, they often serve as a shield for inferior teachers, and they stay on the books because of union money that goes not to the White House, but to the state houses. "Where the teacher unions are most powerful is the state level," says Jay Butler, spokesman for the National School Boards Association. "They want to be where the power is - where the real bread-and-butter issues are decided."

The numbers bear Butler out. According to the latest FEC figures, the American Federation of Teachers' PAC gave $1.29 million to federal campaigns between January 1995 and September 1996. That's not chump change. But the AFT's New York affiliate, the New York State United Teachers, spent nearly as much on its state races in just 10 months, $1.2 million from January to October 1996. And while the nationally focused AFT gave almost exclusively to Democrats, the NYSUT took a more bipartisan approach, giving 52 percent to Democrats and 34 percent to Republicans, with the remainder going to non-partisan groups.

Teacher union spending is not always so evenly split at the state level, but there are usually a number of key Republicans with their hands in the pot. In the states, the "laboratories...