Janus Is ‘Bunker Hill’ of the Parent Revolution 

Right to Work Victory For Teachers Galvanizing Real School Reform

When the 2019 academic year began a little less than five years ago, all but 16% of America’s school-aged children were enrolled in traditional, district-based government schools — which are overwhelmingly unionized.

But since that time, Big Labor’s stranglehold over our nation’s K-12 education has steadily loosened. 

In the 2020-21 academic year, the share of schoolkids attending charter schools or private schools (both of which are overwhelmingly union-free) or being home-schooled rose from 16% to 19%. 

At first, many education observers believed this would be only a temporary exodus that would reverse itself once teacher union bosses and their allied school administrators agreed to end the disastrous “remote education” experiment that commenced soon after the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

But in 2021-22, despite the extremely belated end of the COVID-19-related government school lockdowns, the charter/private/home-school component of K-12 education rose again, to 21%.

Teacher Exodus From Unions Preceded Children’s Exodus From Big Labor-Ruled Schools 

National Right to Work Committee and National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation President Mark Mix commented: “The exodus of vast numbers of American children from union boss dominated government education systems since 2020, which by all indications is still ongoing and may well accelerate over the next few years, is closely related to another exodus that began a couple of years earlier. 

“I’m talking about the decisions undertaken by hundreds of thousands of educators since 2018 not to bankroll a teacher union once they were no longer forced to do so by law. 

“In 2017, roughly 2.66 million people who were actively employed as educators across the U.S. forked over a total of close to $1,000 apiece in mostly forced dues and fees to the mammoth National Education Association [NEA] union and its subsidiaries. 

“At that time, K-12 public school employees in nearly two dozen non-Right to Work states could still be fired for refusal to pay national, state and local dues to NEA union bosses, or to officials of the nation’s second largest teacher union, the American Federation of Teachers [AFT].  

“But that all changed on June 27, 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Janus v. AFSCME.” 

Dollars NEA Bosses Get From Educators Annually Down By Nearly a Quarter-Billion? 

“Janus,” Mr. Mix continued, “was orally argued and won by then-Right to Work Foundation staff attorney and current Foundation Vice President Bill Messenger. 

“It is arguably the most dramatic expansion of employees’ freedom of association since the New Deal. In this case, the High Court decided that public employers all across the country may not fire civil servants for refusing to pay union dues or fees. 

“Bill argued this case free of charge, all the way to the Supreme Court, on behalf of independent-minded Illinois civil servant Mark Janus. 

“In addition to Bill and other Right to Work Foundation attorneys, legal help came from the nonprofit Liberty Justice Center in Chicago. 

“Because the Supreme Court decided that forced union dues and fees as a condition of public employment violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments, the aggregate number of civil servants paying union dues in states that still lack private sector Right to Work protections is now an estimated 1.2 million below what it would have been otherwise. 

“By 2023, the number of actively employed educators bankrolling the NEA was down to 2.45 million, nearly 215,000 below what it had been pre-Janus. 

“The money formerly captive educators are now keeping for themselves may be depriving NEA officials of nearly a quarter-billion dollars in annual revenue!” 

Risky COVID-19 Shakedown Temporarily Offset Janus-Induced Revenue Losses 

By early 2020, top NEA and AFT bosses could anticipate that the share of new education hires joining a teacher union in states like California, Illinois, and New York in the future would be far smaller under the voluntary system ushered in by Janus than it had been when union dues payment was compulsory. 

That explains the desperate determination of NEA President Becky Pringle, AFT President Randi Weingarten, and vast numbers of their cohorts to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic by lobbying, with dismaying success, to keep schools closed throughout most if not all of the 2020-21 academic year. 

“Ms. Pringle, Ms. Weingarten and Co. surely knew there could be a major parental backlash against medically unwarranted school lockdowns that dragged on and on,” observed Mr. Mix. 

“But they were evidently willing to take the risk in order to procure, as they did in March 2021, roughly $200 billion in federal ‘stimulus’ money for government schools, to be doled out over the course of several years. And they knew a substantial portion of that money would end up in union coffers, partially offsetting their Janus-instigated revenue losses up to now.” 

More and More States Are Breaking up Big Labor-Favored Education Monopolies 

However, the backlash against teacher union bosses’ COVID-19 power grab turned out to be much more vast and sustained than Ms. Pringle and Ms. Weingarten could have imagined. 

The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids From the Radicals Ruining Our Schools, a new book by Corey DeAngelis of the American Federation for Children, vividly describes the series of legislative defeats NEA and AFT lobbyists have suffered on the school choice issue since 2021, largely because of this backlash. 

School choice programs effectively break up public school districts’ education monopolies, which help teacher union bosses while hurting schoolchildren and their parents. 

As of 2021, not a single state had a universal school choice program making money directly available to all kinds of parents to spend on alternative schools or educational paths for their children. 

But as of the beginning of this year, as Keri Ingraham of the Independent Women’s Forum reported back in January, 10 states were granting “all families statewide funding to select the school of their choice.” 

“While Corey DeAngelis’s otherwise excellent book overlooks Janus,” said Mr. Mix, “I am confident that the recent remarkable progress of school choice advocates in state after state could not have happened without this victory for educators’ free-speech rights. “Janus was the school choice movement’s Bunker Hill. Without it, teacher union bosses wouldn’t have been so tempted to overplay their hand during COVID-19. And they would almost certainly have retained the ability they had prior to 2020 to block virtually all meaningful reforms of how state and local governments furnish education services.”

---

This article was originally published in our monthly newsletter. Go here to access previous newsletter posts.

To support our cause and help end forced unionism, go here to donate.

---