The Woke and the Greedy

How to think about the motivations of teachers unions.

A central message of Corey Angelis’ The Parent Revolution is that teachers unions are run by and for greedy jerks.

Teachers unions never stop demanding bigger budgets.

They infamously stand by teachers accused of incompetence or misconduct.

They try to prevent parents from seeing what their kids are learning.

They get angry when parents ask hard questions.

And they struggle to crush any form of school choice!

During Covid, these unions stubbornly resisted any return to in-person education. “Safety” was the rationale, but unions didn’t care if teachers took exotic vacations during a pandemic. Unless… their members embarrassed the union by posting their vacation pics on social media. Learning loss? No big deal. Bad optics? Horrors!

If you read The Parent Revolution carefully, however, you’ll discover a long list of union activities that aren’t plausibly motivated by greed. If your overriding goal is to get piles of money for your members, why would you enthusiastically defend the right of biological males to use girls’ bathrooms? To compete in girls’ sports? Especially in the public sector, standing up for unpopular causes seems like a demented way to make money. You need voters to like you!

The same holds when unions support unpopular curricula. If the typical parent is politically moderate, greedy unions should push a politically moderate agenda in history and civics. If the typical parent is white, greedy unions shouldn’t make hyperbolic claims about the ubiquity of “white supremacy.” Sure, unions might want to tailor their lessons to their school. In a heavily black district, blaming all social ills on structural racism might be prudent. But turning the nation’s schools into left-wing indoctrination centers is, selfishly speaking, rather stupid.

To be clear, DeAngelis never explicitly states that teachers unions care solely about the bottom line. The subtitle of The Parent Revolution warns against “radicals,” not “bloodsuckers.” But throughout the body of the book, he strongly insinuates that greed is the unions’ core motivation — while decrying numerous union policies and positions in severe tension with this motivation.

Do teachers unions care about money? Naturally, but it’s on a spectrum. Call it the Woke-Greedy Spectrum. And once you concede that there’s a spectrum and sift through the evidence, the further from the greedy pole and the closer to the woke pole the unions seem to stand.

Most glaringly, greedy people are happy to negotiate. You want a swift return to in-person education? Fine, but you’ll have to double teachers’ salaries to get it. Want to fire bad teachers? Great, you can fire the bottom 1% in exchange for a 3% raise for the rest. You want school choice? Sure, as long as schools can keep half the state funding for every student they lose. Homeschooling? Just pay a $1000 a year surtax and we’re good to go. Want to keep biological males out of girls’ sports and bathrooms? Yeah, we’ll throw that in for an extra day of early release.

Unrealistic? That’s my whole point. The fact that actually-existing teachers unions would hysterically oppose these money-making compromises shows that they aren’t all about money. Not even close. Most of their leadership and much of their membership is sincerely woke. Maybe not sincere enough to send their own kids to crummy public schools, but still pretty sincere in the broad scheme of things.

Not convinced? Few things matter more for teachers’ well-being than student discipline. Forget all the evidence that tolerating a few disruptive students seriously harms the rest. What’s undeniable is that teachers suffer if discipline is lax: One monstrous child who feels free to act with impunity is enough to turn your classroom a living hell.

Yet over the last thirty years, strict discipline has almost vanished from America’s public schools. In the 1980s, kids who acted up in suburban schools were punished with failing grades, the remedial track, detention, suspension, expulsion, and worse. I saw it with my own eyes. Pleading ADHD, bipolarity, or “I identify as a cat” would have just made school authorities angrier.

Today, in contrast, virtually every teacher I talk to feels powerless against their worst students. If teachers’ unions cared only about the well-being of their dues-paying members, they would be ferocious advocates of mercilessly crushing disruptive students — and ferociously fighting psychiatric excuses. Yet they’ve done virtually the opposite for decades. Often for explicitly woke reasons, like “Discipline is an expression of white supremacy.”

Once you realize how sincerely woke teachers unions really are, even seemingly clear-cut evidence of their “greed” grows fuzzy. If teachers fought reopening purely out of greed, would they have fought so long and so hard? All things considered, sincere fanaticism is a more credible basis for their recalcitrance. Pro-Palestinian protestors and the annual Socialism convention still have masking requirements in 2024, after all. And while it’s tempting to blame unions’ support for ever-higher education spending on their greed, the harsh reality is that almost all adults around the world favor even more education spending.

Rhetorically speaking, calling teachers “greedy jerks” probably discredits them more effectively than calling them “leftist fanatics.” No one likes greedy jerks, but a third of the population feels for leftist fanatics.

Practically speaking, however, the “greedy jerks” story is optimistic. If the sole goal of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers were to get, in Samuel Gompers’ immortal word, “more,” dissatisfied taxpayers could amicably negotiate with them. Once you accept that teachers unions prioritize being woke over making money, however, negotiation looks pretty hopeless. Which makes the case for universal school choice — as well as educational austerity — look better than ever. The best way to deal with true believers… is not to deal with them at all.