Hawaiʻi ranked fifth in the country for the strength of its teachers' union, according to a new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
The analysis is an update to the institute's last ranking in 2012, when Hawaiʻi secured the leading spot. This time around, states were ranked based on 59 measures across five key areas: resources and membership, involvement in politics, labor and bargaining policies, policy wins and losses, and perceived influence.
The report indicated that unions are weaker than they were 14 years ago. Melissa Lyon, the principal investigator on the report, said this suggests that unions are still valued, especially in their role of political influence, but they are no longer the sole influential voice in decision-making.
“I think there's been a longstanding belief that teachers unions are the strongest players in state education politics, but what we find is it's a lot more nuanced than that, and it's a crowded table of voices,” Lyon said. “When we see policies, the sort of gut instinct is to assume that that's a result of teacher union advocacy or blocking, but I think this suggests that the story is more complicated than that.”
Lyon noted that the reports are not meant to illustrate national trends over time, rather they should be used for state-by-state breakdowns. However, the number of teachers who belong to a union decreased in 46 states as well as in the District of Columbia, backing the idea that union strength as a whole has weakened since 2012.
For Hawaiʻi, membership has remained strong. Although the state took fifth place overall, the number of people who belong to a union remains the highest across the country.
Hawaiʻi is the only state with a single school district and union, putting the state in a unique position that Lyon said is hard to compare to others. The Hawaiʻi State Teachers Association represents more than 13,000 public school teachers across the islands.
“Because it's going to have such diverse membership across so many different localities, different islands that are not connected or potentially even super close to each other, there's really a lot for the Hawaiʻi teachers union to handle,” Lyon said. “So the fact that they're able to retain such high membership rates is honestly quite impressive.”
Lyon noted that because of the state's single union and single district structure, the union's political influence and its policy wins and losses are hard to measure.
Many decisions and negotiations that impact teachers and schools could be negotiated at a contract level, rather than changing state policy. If negotiations do happen within teacher contracts, those changes would not be reflected in policy wins or losses.
