- Education
- Reforming Education
In a new episode of Factual Foundations of Policy, Michael Hartney and Melissa Lyon join host Tom Church to examine the role of teachers’ unions in American education at a time of declining student achievement, post-COVID learning loss, and rapid technological change. Drawing on research about union membership, collective bargaining, and teacher strikes, the discussion explores how unions shape both education policy and working conditions. It also reviews evidence on their effects on education spending, teacher compensation, and student outcomes.
The conversation highlights the continued political influence of teachers' unions despite declining membership in many states and explores how labor relations intersect with broader debates about public education. Hartney and Lyon also examine the role of unions during COVID-era school closures and consider how AI, school choice, and demographic changes may reshape the teaching profession in the years ahead. The episode concludes with a discussion of unions' place in civic life and potential reforms to improve transparency, accountability, and public trust in educational governance.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Michael Hartney is the Bruni Family Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, an associate professor at Boston College, and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He is also a research affiliate at Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG), and, in 2020-21, a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell Hoover National Fellow. Hartney’s scholarly expertise is in American politics and public policy with a focus on state and local government, interest groups, and education policy. Hartney’s first book, How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American Education, published by the University of Chicago Press, was awarded the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) prize for the best book on education politics and policy.
Melissa (Mimi) Lyon is an assistant professor of public policy at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany, SUNY. Lyon studies the political economy of education, focusing on inequality, governance, and teacher politics and policy. She is a quantitative social scientist who works at the intersection of education policy, political science, and labor economics. Her aim with this work is to contribute new knowledge that helps to inform how we can make educational systems more equitable for students and teachers. Her current projects center around three interrelated components of the political economy of education: teacher unionization, teacher labor markets, and state-level education governance.
Tom Church is a policy fellow at the Hoover Institution. He studies health care policy, entitlement reform, income inequality, poverty, and the federal budget. Church’s research interests include tax-advantaged savings accounts for health care, the fiscal effects of a federal public option, state-based regulatory reform, pro-growth federal tax policy, and the distributional effects of entitlement spending reform. He has researched the fiscal effects of major health care proposals and is a co-author of Choices for All, a set of common-sense health care reforms. He contributes to Hoover’s Healthcare Policy Working Group, the Fiscal Policy Initiative, and the Tennenbaum Program for Fact-Based Policy.
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