WASHINGTON, D.C. – America’s teachers unions are giddy about a potential of a Hillary Clinton presidency.

“I think she’s going to be different,” American Federation of Teachers President Rhonda “Randi” Weingarten told Vox.com. “What we’ve learned about her in all these years is she understands teachers are really important to kids.”

That’s union speak that means Clinton is more likely than the current president to cow tail to Big Labor.

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Barack Obama’s education policy, after all, hasn’t been the most union-friendly.

Through his Race to the Top initiative, Obama encouraged states to adopt better teacher evaluations that incorporate student performance on standardized tests, which the AFT and the National Education Association – the nation’s largest teachers union – absolutely hate.

“When the Obama administration took office, only three states used students’ test scores as a factor in their evaluation systems,” Vox pointed out. “Now more than 40 have designed systems to do so.”

Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan has also criticized seniority and teacher tenure, perhaps the unions’ most critical issues.

“Awarding tenure to someone without a track record of improving student achievement doesn’t respect the craft of teaching, and it doesn’t serve children well,” Duncan said in response to the verdict in Vergara v. California, which overturned the state’s teacher tenure law.

“Likewise, in the unfortunate circumstances when teachers must be laid off, letting them go solely on the basis of seniority, without taking quality into account, doesn’t serve our students well. Such policies ignore teachers’ effectiveness and undercut the public’s confidence in public education,” he wrote.

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And then there’s charter schools, which Obama promoted through RTTT.

Publicly funded and privately run charter schools are the teachers unions’ mortal enemy because educators in charters are typically not unionized, and threaten the union monopoly on education employment.

Vox also highlighted another district difference between Clinton and Obama: merit pay, or teacher pay based on student performance.

In the 2008 Democratic primary, “Obama supported merit pay for individual teachers” while “Clinton wanted entire schools to be rewarded, arguing that merit pay for individual teachers was ‘demeaning’ and would lead to unhealthy competition between educators.

“She eventually won the AFT’s endorsement,” according to the news site.

Essentially, the nation’s teachers unions would be happier if the federal government slowed their roll on reforms, or dial them back.

But not everyone in the Democratic party are excited about that possibility.

Leaders of the national group Democrats for Education Reform told the New York Times they’re worried about Clinton’s “longstanding ties” with Big Labor, and what that might mean for educating the nation’s youth, Vox reports.

DFER Executive Director Joe Williams said Obama has been a “strong ally” in the fight for education reform, voters generally support reform policies, and “if candidates want to meet voters where they are, they should, too,” according to a memo sent to DEFR board members cited by the Times.

For now, Clinton seems to be riding the middle ground.

“I think it will be different than the Obama administration in the sense that both the teachers’ union and the reformers will really feel like they have her ear in a way they haven’t,” Ann O’Leary, a Clinton education advisor, told the Times.

“She believes we need to have some kind of ways that we can measure student progress,” she said, but Clinton is “also sympathetic that the test regime has become very burdensome in driving the education system in ways that many people think is problematic.”