By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

BOISE, Idaho – The National Education Association and its state-level affiliate scored a major victory last November when Idaho voters sided with the teacher unions and repealed all of state’s 2011 education reform laws.

The unions may have won that battle, but it appears they have lost the education reform war, so to speak.

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While Idaho voters fell for the NEA’s slick marketing campaign and repealed the entire slate of K-12 reforms, they also kept reform-minded Republicans in control of the state legislature – by wide margins.

And to no one’s surprise, Republican lawmakers are using this new legislative session to re-introduce many of those 2011 K-12 reforms as stand-alone legislation.

Boise State Public Radio reports that “nearly a dozen provisions from those (repealed) laws are working through the legislature or have already been passed.”

Leaders of the Idaho Education Association – the state’s largest teachers union – say the Republicans are thwarting the will of the people, but they seem resigned to the fact that some reforms are inevitable.

“There may be a recognition on the part of those opponents that changes are going to be made and therefore it may be in their interest to come to the bargaining table … to try and shape the final outcome of these provisions,” says David Adler, head of the Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University.

“The teachers unions and the school boards association have negotiated on labor bills this legislative session,” and some parts of the 2011 reform laws “have been modified to become something teachers can live with,” reports Boise State Public Radio.

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But are the unions right in charging that Republicans are undermining the voters’ will by quickly re-introducing some of the very reforms that were rejected last fall?

Gov. Butch Otter doesn’t think so. Otter says a survey conducted right after last November’s vote found taxpayers liked some of the reforms, validating the effort to revive them.

We’d go even further.

Lawmakers don’t need a survey to give them cover for their actions. Idahoans live in a representative democracy, which means they choose representatives to write laws and make decisions on their behalf.

And the fact is that Idahoans elected reform-minded individuals to represent them in the state legislature.  That suggests that voters’ disapproval of the 2011 education reforms wasn’t that entrenched.

If it was, voters would have swept union-friendly lawmakers into power. But they didn’t.

They elected many of the same people who wrote the 2011 laws. Not only did Republicans not lose a seat in the House of Representatives, but they picked up a seat in the Senate, according to Ballotpedia.

And since Idaho lawmakers still believe the state’s school system needs an overhaul, they’re going to act on that deeply held belief.

That’s the system in which we live.

If Idaho voters don’t approve, they will force a change at the ballot box in 2014.