By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Last year, Time.com reported that a group of researchers stumbled across “one of the most heavily guarded trade secrets in the world”: the secret recipe for Coca Cola.

By most accounts, the discovered recipe wasn’t an exact match, but it was close enough to cause Coca Cola officials quite a scare.

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Like the “soda sleuths,” some education reformers in Tennessee have made their own game-changing discovery: They’ve determined that teacher unions exert so much control over public education largely because they elect friends and surrogates to local school boards.

This result is that teacher unions choose the school officials who sit across the bargaining table during contract negotiations. This tactic has yielded generous returns for many school employee unions, and has caused frustration for many parents and taxpayers who believe schools should put student needs first.

Reformers are waking up to this reality. The Commercial Appeal reports that national education reform groups poured “tens of thousands of dollars” into recent school board races in Memphis, Tennessee.

“National money has long been part of school board elections,” the paper writes. “But until now, it was raised mostly by teachers’ unions.”

Mike Petrilli, executive vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, told the paper that reform groups have figured out it’s not “enough to publish white papers and op-eds. They need to be engaged in political advocacy.”

The Commercial Appeal reports that “Stand for Children” spent $153,000 on seven local school board races, and succeeded in ousting two longtime board members, who were presumably friendly with the local teachers union.

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The paper notes that many of the reform groups “are registered as social welfare groups … (and) aren’t bound by campaign contributions caps” or rules requiring them “to reveal their donors’ identities.”

These exemptions have caused some teacher union-allies to claim “outside” groups are buying elections to advance an anti-labor agenda.

But Billy Orgel – a newly elected school board member who received help from “outside” groups – sees it differently.

“If any of these groups have an interest in furthering education, either locally or nationally, I am all for that,” Orgel told the Appeal. “It’s a voice. It does not always produce results, but it gets the message out to voters.”

If reformers replicate this strategy across the country, Americans will begin to see school boards that consistently put the needs parents and students ahead of the demands of school employee unions. That would go a long way toward ensuring that K-12 dollars are spent on things that benefit children, which will only improve public education.

The teacher unions’ code has been cracked, their secret recipe has been revealed.

But whether or not more reform groups make use of this information remains to be seen.