By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

BOISE, Idaho – Election Day was just over a week ago, and most Americans are enjoying the return of normal life. Yard signs have been taken down, the robocalls have ceased, and the most obnoxious TV commercials once again belong to the pharmaceutical companies, instead of the politicians and special interest groups.

The winning political candidates and groups are happy, too. They’ve finished with their celebrations and are busy preparing for the new legislative season which begins in January.

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The only people still dwelling on last week’s elections are those who watched their cherished candidate or cause go down in defeat. These folks are performing political postmortems to find out where things went wrong and to make sure future efforts don’t fail.

Education reformers are in the postmortem group.

It’s true that reformers scored important charter school victories last week in Georgia and Washington State. But it’s the defeat of historic education laws in Idaho and South Dakota that have them hanging around the coroner’s waiting room.

By decisive margins, voters in Idaho rejected three “Students First” reform laws that affected almost everything in the state’s public education system, from restricting union collective bargaining powers to placing laptops in the hands of every high school student and teacher in The Gem State.

Likewise, South Dakota voters decided to scrap recently passed K-12 reforms that gave performance bonuses to teachers, phased out tenure and provided financial incentives to recruit teachers for hard-to-fill positions.

The voters’ rebuke was as stunning as it was thorough, and it’s left education reformers to wonder: If these policies can’t win in politically conservative “red” states, can they win anywhere?

‘What national teacher unions can do’

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Policy experts believe the disappointing results were less about the policies themselves and more about the effective – and ruthless – media campaign waged by the National Education Association and its state counterparts.

Ron Williamson, president of South Dakota’s Great Plains Public Policy Institute, marvels at the money the NEA poured into the state to repeal the reform law.

“They came in tough, very tough. The NEA bought up the airwaves, as far as TV was concerned,” Williamson tells EAGnews.

The nation’s largest labor union also blanketed the state with postcards and newspaper ads, spending a total of $1 million in political advertising. That’s an enormous amount of money in a rural state that isn’t accustomed to intense media campaigns.

“We had a little taste of what national teacher unions can do,” Williamson says.

Wayne Hoffman, executive director of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, says Idahoans saw similar union tactics.

“The national and state teacher unions poured millions into the campaign,” Hoffman tells EAGnews. “The unions’ messaging was absolutely stellar. They managed to take the education reforms and twist them into something they weren’t.

“They lied their way to victory.”

Hoffman says the NEA and its state counterpart, the Idaho Education Association, appealed to voters’ right-of-center instincts and made the false argument that the K-12 reforms violated conservative political principles.

For instance, the teacher unions said the reforms would lead to tax increases, and they argued that the classroom technology plan – to provide all Idaho high school students and teachers with a laptop – wasn’t fully paid for.

Neither of those charges was true, says Hoffman.

The teachers union also ran ads claiming that state restrictions on the collective bargaining process – which limited contract talks to salary and benefits – undercut local control of the schools.

The exact opposite is true, says Hoffman.

Now that Idaho’s “Students Come First” reform laws have been revoked, Hoffman explains, the previous state statute once again becomes law.

Under that law, school districts are required to negotiate with the local teachers union, and union contracts stay in effect (or “evergreen”) until both sides agree to renegotiate. That means current school boards will be tied to contracts and working conditions that were ratified years before they took power – a reality that turns the idea of local control on its head, Hoffman notes.

“Voters were fed a real whopper about what these reforms meant and what the conditions were before the reforms were passed,” Hoffman says. “Unfortunately voters believed what they were told.”

The NEA and the South Dakota Education Association also played the local control “card” in taking down South Dakota’s reform law.

Williamson says the unions successfully convinced voters they would be denied the opportunity of choosing the policies that are best for their schools and their students.

“The local control thing is the overriding issue,” he says when asked why Republican voters didn’t vote for the K-12 reforms.

He adds that some voters may have been scared off by the wide scope of the reforms.

“For South Dakota, that was really the first time the governor and the legislature has taken a shot at revamping education,” Williamson says. “It covered too much, too early. It made it very difficult for the voters to understand.”

In addition to the NEA’s anti-reform media blitz, the union also pushed an initiative to raise South Dakota’s sales tax, in order to increase K-12 funding. That forced conservative reformers into fighting a two-front battle, and only added to voters’ confusion.

“Nobody had the money or the resources to counter the campaign the union put on,” Williamson says.

A shot across the bow

Both men say voters haven’t seen the last of the education reform initiatives.

“I’m telling legislators that there are things that must be addressed, maybe one at a time (instead of as a package),” Hoffman says.

He believes that debating the merits of each individual proposal will make it much more difficult for the unions “to hide behind a big marketing campaign to convince voters that something nefarious is going on.”

Likewise, Williamson believes that South Dakota isn’t done with attempting to improve the state’s public education system, and says the recently completed election represents the beginning of the process.

“It was a difficult first step, but I think we’ll be able to move forward,” he says.

They both agree that NEA leaders not only wanted to kill off their state’s particular reforms, but they hoped to send a warning shot across the bow of education reformers in other states who might be considering similar initiatives.

“They looked at Idaho as a place where they could teach a lesson to other states,” Hoffman says.

The NEA’s no-holds-barred take down of these reforms was clearly meant to rattle the confidence of reform advocates.

The real lesson reform advocates should take away from these results is that they must carefully explain to citizens how each reform works and how it will benefit students and their families.

America’s public education system is in disarray, and the need for speed is understandable. But without adequate explanation, the unions will continue to successfully convince voters that the reforms are too severe and bold, and transformative action will never occur.