But according to research from political scientists at Ohio State University and Boston College, one of the most valuable assets of all is the endorsement of the local teachers’ union.

, circulated by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, finds that a union endorsement increases support for candidates by as much as 20 percentage points among various voting blocs, with the effects particularly concentrated among Democrats and those who favor organized labor. Almost no group, including Republicans, responds negatively to the endorsements, the authors found.

The study offers an intriguing explanation of exactly how teachers’ unions help their preferred politicians win office. Beyond storming the polls with energized members, or using to get out the vote, local teachers’ associations appear to triumph in large measure through their popularity with the electorate. Parents and community members from different walks of life believe that leaders who win the approval of teachers will do what is right for schools, including by improving student performance.

Ohio State political scientist Vladimir Kogan said that he and his co-author, Michael Hartney of Boston College, were struck by the “huge positive effect” of such endorsements on the public perception of candidates. Among Democrats, he noted, the boost was of approximately the same size as learning that a given candidate was a Democrat himself. 

“In American politics, it’s very hard to find a piece of information that moves votes as much as partisanship, so that’s a pretty shocking impact,” Kogan said. “Even for Republicans, it’s positive.”

The researchers investigated the scale of the political benefits by running multiple studies over the last 12 years. 

The first, in 2012, consisted of a survey administered to about 1,700 registered voters in San Diego about their voting intentions in two upcoming school board races. The elections were nonpartisan, as are contested throughout the country each year, but participants were randomly presented with biographies that either included or excluded information about one candidate’s endorsement by the San Diego Education Association. 

Among Democrats who learned of the endorsement, support shot up by 12 percentage points. Independent voters became about six points more likely to support the union-favored candidate, while for Republicans, the boost was positive but statistically negligible. Across a range of nonpartisan demographics, the effects were even larger: Respondents who rated teachers favorably were 10 points more likely to favor a union-endorsed candidate, and those who rated labor unions favorably were 20 points more likely. 

A follow-up experiment, conducted at the beginning of 2023, replicated those findings almost exactly. This poll was sent to a national sample of roughly 1,400 respondents, with some exposed at random to candidate descriptions highlighting the support of “a local teachers’ union” (or, more generically, “a local teacher association”). 

The average survey participant was eight percentage points more likely to opt for a candidate who received an endorsement — more than enough to swing a close election. And while that added support was again driven by those who felt warmly toward unions and teachers, reactions to the endorsement information from almost all respondent groups were either positive or effectively neutral; just one small group, those who voiced negative views of teachers, were more likely to reject a candidate after learning they had the backing of a teachers’ union. 

It is notable that unions’ blessing kept its potency between 2012 and 2023, a period when politics became and unions themselves for prolonging school closures in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Kogan said that the lasting strength of the union movement — often cast as the villain in some of the fiercest disputes of the education reform era, including battles over school choice and teacher tenure — wasn’t widely understood by those who have opposed it. 

“This is inconsistent with the stories reformers tell,” Kogan said. “I think they underestimate how influential teachers — and teachers’ unions — are, in terms of how much voters are willing to defer to them.”

‘Incredible’ branding

Critically, Kogan and Hartney’s survey work only shows how potential voters tend to react when they discover that a particular candidate has been endorsed. It is unknown how often that information actually reaches them.

Though a fixture of local civic life, school board races are among the most opaque of any in American democracy. the National School Boards Association, participation in the elections — often conducted during off-cycle years, with no national or statewide figures to draw marginal voters — ranges from 5 to 10 percent. Since party affiliation is seldom listed on the ballot, even those who turn out don’t receive a clear signal about candidates’ policy preferences.

John Singleton, an economist at the University of Rochester, said that messages from trusted local groups likely played a crucial role in guiding voters’ decisions. Unlike statewide or congressional campaigns, he said, most school board elections generate little in the way of media coverage. 

“You could go on your school board candidate’s Facebook page and read about their policy positions, but that’s going to require you knowing who they are and seeking them out,” Singleton observed. “On the other hand, it’s possible to passively absorb that information” through media and endorsements, he added.

The second survey allowed the research team to directly test the importance of union support against various other attributes that might plausibly help voters make up their minds, including candidates’ occupations, whether they had children, and whether they had received endorsements from other groups. In thousands of head-to-head comparisons, respondents rated imaginary candidates with randomly assigned traits.

This added wrinkle made it even clearer how influential teachers unions can be. The effect of their endorsement was larger than that of a local newspaper or chamber of commerce. Revealingly, the advantages it conferred were also greater than those of an endorsement from a cafeteria workers’ union — showing that teachers themselves, more so than school employees generally, command particular loyalty from their communities.

Singleton said that the successful branding exemplified by groups like the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, extending from tiny local school districts to national politics, was “kind of incredible.”

“In terms of the coordination between the grassroots and the national organizations, and the influence they have, it’s a model for other activist efforts,” he said.

Notably, the 2023 study prodded participants to not only name which candidate they might support, but also which would be more likely to improve conditions in local schools. Union-endorsed candidates were, on average, thought more likely to raise teacher salaries, improve academic outcomes for students, and to be more responsive to parents. 

Kogan said the reputational improvement of being affiliated with a teachers’ union was highly unusual. The only comparably positive perception he could think of was the of the American Medical Association, which has exerted heavy influence in public health policy over the last century.

Until recently, Kogan argued, police unions enjoyed a similar “halo,” frequently winning voters for their chosen candidates in elections that hinged on questions of criminal justice and public safety. But has shown that, with the increasing polarization around policing and officer-involved shootings, views of those unions have taken on a more partisan skew.

“Many voters, particularly Democratic ones, have realized that a candidate isn’t necessarily good just because the police union says so,” he said. “The halo effect has eroded over time for police unions, but not for teachers.”

“By every metric,” she said — skipping past the word “nearly” in — “Massachusetts has the best schools in the country.” 

If the lawmakers and civil servants packing the State House didn’t burst into applause, it was partly because they were hearing old news. For years, Healey and her predecessors have touted the excellence of the Massachusetts school system before local and national audiences, citing math and English scores since the early 1990s. By the late Obama era, its path of ascent was held up as a template for . 

The audience also understood, however, that Healey wasn’t calling for a victory lap. Rather, she warned of a serious threat: thousands of children deficient in literacy skills thanks to schools using what she called “disproven, out-of-date” methods. While disadvantaged students face the greatest risk of falling behind, revealed last year that questionable curricula are in use in some of the wealthiest and best-regarded school districts in Massachusetts.

The governor quickly moved into a pitch for her , which will offer resources and incentives to local educators to revamp their early literacy programs in accordance with scientific evidence. But the proposal, and the academic drift underlying it, reveal worries about where Massachusetts finds itself after three decades of energetic policymaking and school improvement.

As even the state’s biggest boosters concede, however, those reforms stopped yielding the same results in the years leading up to the pandemic. Since COVID, already-significant achievement gaps between rich and poor students have , with test scores levels seen in 2019. Ed Lambert, a former state representative who now leads the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, said that local leaders had been too slow in recent years to embrace the kind of experimentation that fueled the state’s remarkable rise.

 “Often, holding that mantle of ‘first in the nation’ has led to a level of complacency that isn’t serving us well,” Lambert said.

Even more alarming, in the eyes of education officials, is the possible reversal of some of the hallmarks of Massachusetts’s brand of K–12 reform. Activists have begun a spirited push to eliminate the use of the MCAS, the state’s standardized test, as a high school graduation assessment; in late May, leaders of the effort announced that twice the number of signatures necessary to place their initiative on the November ballot. The campaign is being led by New England’s largest union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which has transformed itself over the last 10 years into a progressive heavyweight.

Harvard professor Paul Reville, who previously served as a top policy advisor to former Gov. Deval Patrick, observed that Massachusetts was caught between its celebrated past and a murky future. If the state is to remain a national exemplar, he said, it will have to change the way it pursues change. 

“Massachusetts reflects a national uncertainty about where we go next, post-reform and post-COVID,” Reville said. “It’s an era of chronic absenteeism and declining confidence in public education generally, and Massachusetts demonstrates the symptoms of that as vividly as any other state.”

MCAS viewed as ‘roadblock’

No single development will influence the path ahead more than the clash over MCAS.

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System was developed as the result of the landmark Education Reform Act of 1993, considered the Big Bang of recent K–12 history in the state. The legislation , but its central achievement was to vastly increase the role of the state government in overseeing schools.  

Nearly a decade before Congress took up the No Child Left Behind Act, that meant students in elementary, middle, and high school would sit for the MCAS each year; that their performance would be monitored and reported to families; and that schools would be held accountable for the results. In addition, tenth graders would need to pass the test in order to graduate high school. 

Federal law caught up with Massachusetts with the passage of NCLB. But according to , it remains one of only nine states to administer a graduation exam, down from a high of 27 in the 1990s. Education authorities in New York recently recommended going forward, while legislators in Florida considered abandoning the existing requirement that students pass tests in Algebra I and tenth-grade English before graduating. 

The same process may well play out in Massachusetts. Defenders of the exam insist that discarding it will allow the state’s 316 school districts to adopt a patchwork of separate, weaker standards — concerns that were loudly amplified by members that reviewed the ballot question this spring. 

In one of the panel’s meetings, Reville and Lambert both testified in favor of retaining the tenth-grade MCAS requirement. Among those speaking in opposition was Kirsten Frazier, a high school teacher who works with English learners in the central Massachusetts city of Worcester. 

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Frazier said that her students — many of them recent arrivals to the United States — often fail the MCAS on their first attempt. Though they are given several opportunities to retake it, each comes at the cost of desperately needed instructional time, she added.

“This test, especially when you have the pressure of not graduating if you don’t pass, creates a massive roadblock,” Frazier said. 

Members of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education have responded that each year fail to graduate due solely to their test scores. Ninety-five percent of upperclassmen pass by their second try, state data show.

What’s more, an analysis by Brown University economist John Papay is correlated with real-world outcomes like college enrollment and career earnings. Paul Toner, a former president of the MTA who now serves on the city council of Cambridge, Massachusetts, argued both that the MCAS should be more regularly updated and that it stood head and shoulders above other state tests.

“If you talk to anyone in the assessment game around the country, they will tell you that MCAS is the best of the state assessment systems,” Toner said. “Is it perfect? No. But it’s the best.”

Yet the exam’s longtime detractors believe that high schoolers should be assessed through other means. Glenn Koocher, head of the , said that while passing MCAS was ultimately “not that hard,” its use as a graduation requirement made it more of a cudgel than a meaningful standard of achievement.

“Very few kids ultimately don’t graduate,” Koocher said. “But the MCAS is just there as a symbol of, ‘Here’s what happens if you don’t do what we tell you.’ And I find little value in it.” 

A ‘more progressive’ union

Much of the Massachusetts political establishment has already come forward in opposition to the November ballot initiative, including . On the other side stands the 117,000 members of the MTA. 

The union — known under Toner’s leadership for being willing to cooperate with reform-friendly policies around teacher evaluation and charter school expansion — swerved toward with the election of new leadership in 2014. 

the most notable advances of the education reform era, MTA organizers earned national attention in 2016 by helping defeat a ballot measure that would have lifted the state’s cap on charter schools. In a campaign , the organization proved it could summon enormous resources and substantially swing public opinion to its cause. 

That reputation has been solidified with more policy victories in the years since, including a push for a . Along with its parent union, the National Education Association, to a campaign that raised taxes locally on incomes over $1 million, a change that is projected to raise billions in future state revenues.

But the organization’s growing profile has been accompanied by political missteps. Current MTA President Max Page, who was elected in 2022 to “raise more hell to win greater justice,” was soon derided after opining before the state board of education was “tied to the capitalist class and its need for profit.” 

A spokesman for the Massachusetts Teachers Association declined to provide a comment for this story.

Frazier, a member of her local MTA affiliate, said she appreciated the statewide union becoming “more progressive” over the last decade.

“We basically ended up with activist leadership,” said Frazier. “Those of us who have always wanted to be activists now actually feel like we can be.”

Committed education reformers are less enthused. James Peyser, who served as secretary of education under former Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, said that if the MTA succeeds in jettisoning the MCAS, it could be the first step in an “unwinding” of accountability and school improvement.

“If you have no real assessment system to determine how students are doing, and you have no accountability for meeting standards, and you have no authority for the state to take action when schools aren’t adequately serving their students, then the Education Reform Act is a dead letter,” he said.

Promising strides on literacy

As much as the battles over reform implicate the recent past, many believe Gov. Healey’s overhaul of literacy instruction could deliver a promising way forward.

The proposal was triggered in part by the revelation last fall that use curricular materials that have fallen out of favor with reading experts for . Some still rely, or have only recently transitioned away from, the Units of Study curriculum, which was in an expert report four years ago. 

Statewide achievement in early literacy also points to major shortcomings since the pandemic. from the 2022 MCAS, less than half of all third graders scored proficient in reading, including just 26 percent of students from low-income families, 15 percent of students with disabilities and 11 percent of English learners.

Literacy Launch, Healey’s , would include $30 million over the next five years to help districts transition to curricula more aligned with the science of reading, along with providing technical assistance from the state’s education department and tightening certification rules to require that teacher training programs provide more instruction about how children learn to read.

The program, included in the governor’s 2025 budget proposal, is virtually assured of passage. But a parallel effort in the legislature, that schools use only reading curricula that have been approved by state authorities, has been met with stout opposition from district leaders and teachers’ unions alike. 

have passed such laws over the last decade, some explicitly prohibiting the use of low-quality instructional materials, but Massachusetts lawmakers have thus far demurred. A February letter signed by almost 50 local superintendents protested that the bill under consideration would abrogate local control over schools.

Lambert, of the Business Alliance, said he found the legislature’s failure to act “just confounding,” particularly in light of public support for such a measure. A found that over 80 percent of parents believed that schools should “probably” or “definitely” be required to use evidence-based teaching materials. 

“A lot of the same people who will tell you that society needs to believe in science don’t necessarily believe that when it comes to literacy and choosing a curriculum that works,” Lambert said.

The absence of a strong literacy law pointed to a more general failure to keep up with policy developments that have been road-tested in other places, he argued. While states like Tennessee have invested heavily in programs to target struggling students with tutoring, Massachusetts — the home of the Match Charter Public High School, and spawned imitators around the country — hasn’t launched a similar effort. that local resources devoted to gifted and talented education, including a statewide office that was shuttered in the early 1990s, also lag those elsewhere.

While arguing that state authorities should, as a rule, avoid meddling in local decisions about curriculum, Peyser said the importance of early reading made it an exception.

“The reality is that we’re 30 years into education reform, and at the third- or fourth-grade level, the reading proficiency levels are not a whole lot better than they used to be,” Peyser said. “It’s such a foundational skill that, unless you solve that problem, it’s an uphill struggle to do anything you want to do.”

listed the conditions necessary for a bilateral ceasefire, including the release of Israeli hostages and the provision of more humanitarian aid. It excoriated Hamas, both for its Oct. 7 terrorist assault and the brutal repression suffered by Gazans under its control, as well as the Netanyahu government for obstructing the possibility of a two-state solution. Further criticism was reserved for antisemitism, Islamophobia and the attempted censorship of dissenting views.

The document was notable for its timing as well as its substance. By the end of January, a growing number of union affiliates and leaders had already made similar pronouncements, though often voiced in much harsher terms. 

Becky Pringle, speaking for the National Education Association’s three million members, demanded a permanent truce on December 8 — a position by the organization’s board of directors. In mid-November, Israel’s military campaign violated the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, but made no mention of the Oct. 7 attacks or the captivity of over 200 hostages. And in early December, a pro-Palestinian by Oakland Education Association members who developed special lesson plans the local school board.

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, AFT president Randi Weingarten said her union’s process moved more slowly in order to build support. Study groups were held to gather the views of internal constituencies, including the organization’s . Partly in order to gain the unanimous backing of its 43-member executive council, she acknowledged, drafting the resolution “took some time.”

“Early on, it was hard to have a real conversation…because it was so fractured,” Weingarten said. 

Four months after the events of Oct. 7, significant political fractures still cleave the labor movement, both within organizations and between unions and their allies in the Democratic Party. Several of the resolutions have been rejected by members as , or even , and while President Biden is now toward a six-week ceasefire, he with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or significantly altered his administration’s stance on the effort to capture or kill Hamas’s leaders. The division threatens to influence the outcome of the 2024 elections, with a faction of NEA members the union’s endorsement of Biden against Donald Trump. 

Those dissenters will almost certainly fail, and Israel’s armed incursion may culminate long before November. But while the war is unlikely to directly unseat Biden, it is a reflection of fissures on the left that very well might. suggests that many Americans favor a ceasefire, but also that Democrats are much more divided than Republicans on whether the U.S. should continue to support its closest ally in the Middle East. That divide is both a product of long-term political trends and a potent short-term threat.

Michael Hartney, a political science professor at Boston College and fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution, said that the decision to take a stance on something as controversial as the Gaza war illustrated how the currents of polarization could determine the course of even formidable political actors: Though distant from the day-to-day priorities of nonprofit and activist groups, hot-button issues like Israel have become central to the political identity of many members and have gradually become boxes that such organizations must check.

“I think it’s due to the changing landscapes of the incentives facing these interest groups,” Hartney said. “For them to fundraise and be influential, they basically have to pick a team.”

Rise in pro-Palestinian sentiment

Teachers unions, and particularly the AFT, have previously been involved in organizing and advocacy in the Middle East. Just two days before Hamas attacked Israel in October, Weingarten — a Jew who has made multiple trips to Israel during her nearly 16-year tenure as the Federation’s president — , a liberal nonprofit that lobbies politicians on American-Israeli relations and security priorities. Her counterpart, the NEA’s Pringle, of schools in Israel and the Palestinian territories last year.

But the posture of some groups within the labor movement as criticisms of Netanyahu’s leadership and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank have grown louder on the left. In 2021, following an outburst of violence in East Jerusalem that left hundreds dead, the United Educators of San Francisco became America’s first teachers’ union supporting the “boycott, divest, and sanction” [BDS] movement, a contentious project Israel. United Teachers Los Angeles, representing 30,000 school employees in America’s second-largest district, debated a similar measure before .

At the same time, perceptions of Israel have become more divided in U.S. politics overall. In public opinion surveys long predating the violence of the last few months, younger Americans have been to directly blame Israel for its periodic clashes with Hamas, and people between the ages of 18 and 29 to Palestinians than Israelis in the wake of Oct. 7. 

Jack Jennings, a former longtime Democratic staffer in the U.S. House, said the emerging generation gap was largely explained by the country’s changing demographics, which have seen in the number of students of Middle Eastern origin. Both Jewish and Muslim Americans have tended to vote Democratic in recent elections, but the mounting salience of Israeli-Palestinian conflict had generated tension that was being felt “first in the classroom,” Jennings said.

“What has caused this change, and caused the local unions to adopt these resolutions, is that the number of Muslims in the country has doubled” , Jennings said. “When the teacher opens her door on Monday morning, she may have five Palestinians in there.”

Weingarten has generally attempted to in the public debate, while also opposing BDS resolutions and as a “progressive Zionist.” The AFT resolution appeared to reflect that nuance, leaving out the invocations of Israeli “genocide” or “settler colonial violence” seen in the rhetoric of some other teachers’ unions.

David Dorn, who headed the AFT’s International Affairs division for decades before retiring 10 years ago, applauded the resolution as one of the best he had seen from an advocacy group. During his time with the union, he remembered, he had found the work of drafting such documents “hard and boring.”

“They mean nothing. It’s a piece of paper that is usually forgotten 24 hours later,” Dorn lamented. “But that was a good resolution, and maybe she can have the union play a good role under the circumstances.”

Dorn represents a tradition of international activism within the labor movement that helped shape geopolitics throughout the 20th century, but isn’t well remembered today.

Under the , who led the AFT from 1974 to 1997, the union energetically worked to bolster democratic movements and labor rights throughout the world. Its maneuverings were sometimes controversial, as when the stridently anticommunist Shanker and his allies Nicaragua’s far-left Sandinista government in the 1980s. But even decades later, the AFT still touts its work to in Poland and challenge apartheid rule in South Africa.

The fall of Soviet Communism — along with the passing from the scene of Shanker and other internationally minded figures at the AFL-CIO — led to a decline in unions’ outreach overseas, Dorn said. Weingarten “wasn’t really steeped in that tradition” to the extent of her predecessors, he added, and many organizational leaders are now more focused on sustaining their membership at home.

“Going to conferences or making statements is one thing, but I don’t see many unions using their own resources and grants” to effect change abroad, Dorn said. “It’s too bad, but life goes on, and the Cold War is over.” 

While acknowledging that the AFT has been “more limited” in the range of its international involvement over the last few years, Weingarten said the union still played a robust role promoting issues of democracy and self-determination on the world stage. After Weingarten made a 2022 visit to Ukraine, for example, the Federation and partnered with a Polish teachers’ union to deliver them to schools affected by Russia’s attacks on the country’s power grid.

“Other unions have really ratcheted down, but we’ve always had an international department,” Weingarten said.

Post-Janus realignment

What the spate of ceasefire resolutions will accomplish — and what they signify for a labor movement that has attained more prominence in recent years even as it has — remains to be seen.

Some have , at a time when schools are faced with expiring COVID relief funds and students experience profound learning challenges, their designated bargaining representatives are staking their credibility on a conflict unfolding thousands of miles away. Others are distressed that their organizations haven’t gone farther to demonstrate opposition to Israel’s actions.

William Galston, a veteran scholar at the Brookings Institution who has previously advised Democratic presidential candidates, observed that unions weren’t the only political players to comment outside of their traditional areas of interest. With the members of America’s ideological camps increasingly converging toward shared preferences — such that the AFT, the Sierra Club, and Planned Parenthood share many of the same donors and preferred candidates on the left, while NRA and Americans for Prosperity do so on the right — groups that previously organized around a relatively narrow slate of issues are under more pressure to demonstrate their adherence to a party line.

“They used to be more narrowly focused on occupational issues, but for purposes of coalition maintenance, unions and other activist organizations are called upon to take positions on a very wide range of issues,” Galston said.

The Hoover Institution’s Hartney offered an additional theory. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME, the case that forbade public sector unions from extracting fees from non-members, those organizations were left with a choice: quiet their political activities to attract more potential members, or tie themselves closer to Democratic politics to further engage their most enthusiastic organizers. While potentially polarizing, he said, the second course might be more workable in the short run.

“It’s possible that they’re doubling down on appealing to their true believers by making them feel extra valued,” Hartney said. “Maybe they can get double the PAC donations from true believers to offset the fact that they’ll get zero support from the marginal person who can leave post-Janus.”

Even so, there is a risk of significant downside in any position that leaves daylight between national entities like AFT and the Biden White House, especially in an election year in which all segments of the Democratic coalition will be called on to help reelect the president. Polling continues to suggest that Biden’s stance on the war is , and a union-led opposition to Israel’s operations in Gaza could highlight that faultline.

Weingarten said she was unconcerned about the possibility of a split between her union and the president, pointing to Biden’s and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s furious efforts to contingent on hostage releases. Notwithstanding the substantive differences between that policy and activists’ hope of a more lasting peace, she added, key officials are “very much involved in attempting to get to a ceasefire.”

“There’s a big difference between what the president of the United States can say publicly and what the president of the United States operationalizes privately.”