Teacher Membership in Unions Drops Below 50 Percent

At Education Intelligence Agency, a site devoted to tracking
behavior by teachers’ unions, Mike Antonucci looks at how union
membership has paced with the growth in the number of educators. It
turns out, particularly over the past 15 years, it hasn’t been
going so well for the unions. Even though the number of educators
has increased, membership in unions did not at the same pace. As a
result, the percentage of teachers who belong to unions has
dropped. Antonucci
notes:

BLS began tracking union data in 1983. That year there were more
than 2.6 million people employed as primary, secondary and special
education teachers in both public and private schools. More than
1.5 million of them were union members, for a unionization rate of
57.5 percent.

By 1995 there were 600,000 more teachers, but the unionization
rate was virtually identical. In the 18 years since, the rate has
never approached that height again.

In fact, while America’s schools added almost a million and a
quarter new teachers, teachers’ unions added fewer than 345,000 new
members, for a rate of 27.8 percent.

In 2013, the percentage of educators who belong to teachers
unions dipped below 50 percent for the first time since BLS has
been monitoring the data:

To be fair about the chart and to the unions, it’s not quite as
big a drop as it looks at first glance. The distance between the
top and the bottom of the chart is only 10 percentage points, not
100 to 0.

Nevertheless, it could be an indicator of decreasing influence
by the unions. Over at the Sacramento Bee, columnist Dan
Walters notes the decrease in union power over the control of the

future of the California school system:

The most public example is the complex, multifront battle that
pits the state’s union-dominated education establishment against
civil rights and reform groups over the direction of public
schools. It’s essentially a Democrat vs. Democrat battle, waged
within big-city school boards, in the Legislature, in the state
Board of Education and in the courts.

The establishment contends that the schools’ shortcomings can be
solved with more money – a lot more money. The California Teachers
Association-led Education Coalition reiterated this month that it
wants spending to rise to the average of the nation’s 10
highest-spending states, which would cost $30-plus billion more a
year.

Reformers don’t oppose spending more, but contend that union
rules and the education bureaucracy are thwarting efforts to do
more for students, particularly poor and English-learner children.
A lawsuit now being tried in Los Angeles is the current venue for
the years-long battle.

Brian Doherty delved into that lawsuit in February. Read a lot
more
here.