Teachers’ unions appear in The Bob Zadek Show as institutions that shape both what is taught in K-12 schools and whether families can exit the public school system. In one episode the unions are described as radical institutions aligned with Critical Race Theory and Critical Gender Theory; in another they are described as the decisive political obstacle to Arizona’s universal education savings account program. Both treatments present the unions as a highly organized bloc whose institutional interests diverge from those of parents and, on one account, of teachers themselves.
Unions and radical ideology in K-12
Bob Zadek opened the topic by asking what there is about the teaching profession that leads K-12 teachers around the country to embrace Critical Race Theory, and why teachers appear almost universally to support it Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth (2022).
Jonathan Butcher disputed the premise that all teachers support it. He cited a lawsuit against the application of Critical Race Theory in Evanston, Illinois, filed by a teacher, and another filed by school administrators in Missouri. In his account, teachers who speak out do so because the diversity training programs they are forced to undergo as part of professional development days compel them to affirm ideas that violate their consciences about America’s founding ideals. He said the lawsuits demonstrate that the support is not universal.
Butcher then turned to the unions themselves: teachers’ unions are radical institutions, he said, and they support not only the discriminatory ideas of Critical Race Theory but also the radical ideas that come from Critical Gender Theory, which he described as a close cousin of Critical Race Theory and also developing from the original Critical theorists. As an example he said teachers’ unions support the idea that schools should not tell parents when students go to school and choose to assume a different gender, policies he said are now in place in schools in New Jersey, California and Kansas. He attributed the unions’ alignment with Critical Race Theory to a shared radical worldview on America’s institutions.
Butcher’s account of the mechanism was strategic rather than spontaneous. The Critical theorists, who he said base their ideas on Marx, understand that once you get a hold of the institutions of learning you can change the future of a nation. Getting into the school system and reaching children when they are most impressionable plants a seed; the long game is to wait for those seeds to sprout in college or after college and then to control the conversation. On this account K-12 is not the goal but the tool by which the greater goal is achieved. He added that the original theorists did not merely want to change instruction in the United States: they wanted to take apart American law, disrupt American culture with Marxist ideas, and take left-of-center political thinking to whole new radical places, and schools were one of the institutions they could work through.
Unions as the obstacle to school choice in Arizona
In the Arizona episode, Matt Beienburg described the state of education funding before the legislation at issue. Arizona, he said, had been one of the best leaders across the country for school choice and educational freedom. Families otherwise faced a default in which a student had to attend a school based upon their zip code, which he called arbitrary and a tie between a family’s educational opportunity and that area. Arizona had open enrollment, letting public school students opt out of their local public school for a different public school or even a different school district, and it had public charter schools that are independently operated, tuition-free, and still public schools but not run by the teachers’ unions and the school districts in the same way as the traditional system. During the pandemic, he said, families desperate for options often found none, and charter schools nearby had waitlists out the door Arizona’s School Choice Reform is a Model for the Nation (2022).
The new legislation, which Beienburg said the Arizona legislature had just passed and Governor Doug Ducey had signed and called for in his State of the State address, took the state’s ESA program—Education Savings Account, called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts in Arizona—and made it universal. Under it, a family that would rather not have a child attend a public school can take some of what taxpayers were going to spend on that kid, put it into an account operated and managed by the parents, and use it for any educational purpose: private school, at-home education, learning pods or micro-schools, tutors or textbooks. Beienburg said a typical student gets about $7,000 a year, that unused funds roll over rather than being use-it-or-lose-it, and that leftover funds can eventually be used for higher education. Bob Zadek summarized the arrangement as the family being given control over roughly $7,000 of the government’s money to spend on any approved educational activity, and Beienburg compared the account to a health savings account rather than an IRA.
Asked why such legislation took so long, Beienburg answered that the opposition comes down to two words: teachers’ unions. Arizona’s ESA program, which he said the Goldwater Institute helped pioneer about 10 years earlier, had been on the books for a small portion of Arizona’s students, with about one in four Arizona students eligible until the new law. Over that decade other states tried limited versions of ESAs, and at every step, he said, teachers’ unions radically opposed them. His example was West Virginia in 2018, where Red for Ed protests took place at capitals demanding pay raises for teachers—also in Arizona, he noted—and where a proposal would have increased pay for teachers and also allowed ESAs. The teachers’ unions, he said, decided they would rather forgo extra pay for their teachers than allow ESAs to be established, because they see this as competition and do not want another game in town. He described the unions as having a monopoly over the system, dominating school board elections and dominating policy and curriculum, and therefore seeing reform as a threat to their hold over education. As a highly organized, mobilized and politically active group, he said, the unions had been successful at blocking this sort of reform in states up until now.
Beienburg also described the broader political alignment. Unified opposition now comes from the left, which he said is increasingly controlled by the teachers’ unions, making opposition to school choice a litmus test on the left even as such policies help constituencies that leftists and progressive reformers claim to be trying to help. Bob Zadek asked whether groups purporting to represent minorities were active in the fight; Beienburg said those groups largely fall in line and take their cues from the teachers’ unions. He singled out the NEA, the National Education Association, which he called the largest union in the country, saying it had gone out of its way to pass resolutions on left-leaning political progressive social causes, including what he described as extreme CRT-aligned positions that treat everybody and view them based upon race. He contrasted this with polling: Education Next, a Harvard-affiliated education journal, polls every year, and one just before the pandemic asked whether people support school choice if a program would offer taxpayer funding to help defray the costs of private education. Black and Hispanic families supported it at three, four to one ratios, he said, while support among unionized teachers was the complete inverse. In his reading, these groups put their own desire for professional and political gain ahead of the constituencies they claim to support.
On why the bill passed when it did, Beienburg credited strong leadership from Governor Doug Ducey, who said in his State of the State address to send him the bills and he would sign them, and lawmaker Ben Toma, who sponsored the legislation and worked to bring together a coalition of members. In Arizona the majority party had only a one-vote majority in both the Senate and the House, so every member had to be on board. He also pointed to the post-COVID environment, in which families were made an afterthought by public health officials and by the unions, with schools closed and mask mandates enforced on young children, and parents scrambled for options such as micro-schools and pods. The state budget, he noted, added over $600 million of ongoing public school funding each year at the same time it passed the universal ESA program.
Across episodes: no development
The two episodes treat teachers’ unions from different angles rather than advancing a shared argument over time: the earlier episode, with Jonathan Butcher, addresses unions as promoters of Critical Race Theory and Critical Gender Theory in K-12 curriculum and training, while the later episode, with Matt Beienburg, addresses unions as the political opposition to Arizona’s universal ESA legislation. The excerpts show no development or change in the treatment between them, and the two guests do not engage each other’s claims.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the internal structure, governance, membership figures, or collective bargaining role of teachers’ unions, and they do not name the specific unions involved in the Evanston or Missouri lawsuits. They do not give the name or number of the Arizona legislation, the date of its passage, or the outcome of any legal challenge beyond Beienburg’s statement that the Arizona Supreme Court has already ruled on the funds question. No union representative or opposing scholar appears in these excerpts to answer the characterizations made by Butcher and Beienburg.