Teachers’ Unions and Your Family’s Education

Teachers' unions do not own your child's education, and the fact that an organization speaks in the name of education does not settle whose interests it serves. A union has members, political commitments and an institutional position to defend. Your child has a mind to develop and a future that can be damaged by a poor education. We should not make the child's dependence on that organization permanent simply because its public arguments describe the organization's needs as the child's needs.

The distinction is not complicated. A union represents people employed in an institution, while the institution is supposed to provide something to learners. Those interests can overlap, but they are not identical. Better conditions for teachers may improve education; preserving a particular arrangement may also protect the adults when the arrangement is failing a student. Parents need to be able to ask which relationship actually holds, instead of being told that questioning it is hostility to education itself.

The NEA’s July 23, 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris is an explicit political commitment, presented in terms of students’ futures and public education. Whatever you think of the candidate, the organization has taken a side. That endorsement does not tell us how every teacher behaves in class or establish a percentage of dues spent on politics. It does give us a concrete reason to reject the fiction that an organization speaking about education is therefore speaking for every child. Parents can dispute its political judgment without being opposed to education.

Money should face the same examination. An increase in expenditure may purchase useful attention, but its size does not tell us how much understanding the learner gained. We should ask what the resources changed and whether the result justifies the claim made for them. An educational institution can become extraordinarily skilled at explaining why it needs more while remaining much less responsive about what the child actually receives.

The problem of responsiveness becomes sharper when a family cannot make dissatisfaction consequential. It can complain, attend a meeting and wait, while the child continues with the same education. An organization whose claim on the learner survives a bad fit has less reason to adapt than one which must earn the family's continued choice. Our resistance to institutional control begins with refusing to make that claim automatic.

Homeschooling creates one route by which a family can act. It can choose the work, change the explanation and organize around the child's goals, with responsibility for examining whether those choices succeed. There is no need to pretend that every individual teacher is badly motivated before using that freedom. A valuable teacher can work inside an arrangement worth criticizing, and criticism of the arrangement does not invalidate the teacher's work.

Educators can choose to act together, and parents should be able to choose an education without joining their political project. Those freedoms can coexist. What I reject is the move from representing the adults who work in a system to claiming authority over the families who depend on it. Winning an agreement about the adults' employment does not settle what one child ought to learn or where that child ought to learn it. The family is not a party whose consent can be supplied on its behalf by the organization.

Parents should not have to spend their child's years waiting for an organization to concede that its priorities may differ from theirs. They need the freedom to seek a better arrangement and the ability to judge it directly. That is a serious challenge to institutional power, because it denies that invoking the public good grants an indefinite claim on an individual child. Every part of the system should have to explain how it serves the learner, including the parts most practiced at speaking for them.