Union boss’ school-choice betrayal reveals NY’s true power players

New York’s teachers’ unions have never been shy about throwing their weight around to boost spending or weaken accountability in the state’s public education system.

But things took a wild turn this month as they used that heft to turn the state’s labor movement against their own colleagues — thousands of union dues-paying teachers at private and parochial schools.

Beginning in January, American taxpayers can donate up to $1,700 to “scholarship granting organizations” that benefit K-12 students, and deduct that same amount from the taxes they owe Uncle Sam.

The provision, adopted as part of last year’s tax mega-bill, means states that join the program must now set rules and issue a list of eligible SGOs.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, to her credit, has signaled she’ll soon do so, since the alternative is to let New Yorkers’ donations flow to other states that have opted in.

For the city’s United Federation of Teachers and its parent union, the New York State United Teachers, this amounts to a five-alarm fire.

SGO benefits can flow virtually anywhere, even into public schools, because parents decide how their kids can use them.

But UFT and NYSUT fear any program that gives parents a choice — by, for instance, awarding scholarships to attend a non-public school, or making it easier to homeschool — because they know many dissatisfied families would take it.

And every family that exercises school choice sparks more uncomfortable questions about why New York spends more than any state on public schools while producing such middling student outcomes.

In New York’s labor movement, UFT and NYSUT comprise the tail that often wags the dog.

The state now has more public-employee union members than private-sector union members, mainly due to the evaporation of its manufacturing sector in recent decades.

And last week, that meant the teachers had the pull to get the state AFL-CIO, an umbrella group of public and private unions, barking away at a press conference.

New York AFL-CIO head Mario Cilento stood with the bosses of the UFT and NYSUT to proclaim that it’s “unacceptable as a New Yorker, as a citizen or anyone who cares about public education” for Hochul to go along with the federal program.

American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten joined him on stage to condemn the plan, as another opponent decried the program as “a form of racism,” “segregation,” and something to “keep the have-nots in their place.”

But Cilento’s participation in the attack amounts to nothing short of a betrayal: The NYC AFL-CIO represents more than 2,000 dues-paying members who teach at one of New York’s 100-plus unionized private or parochial schools.

These are some of New York’s most devoted educators; many of them forgo higher-paying gigs in public schools.

With their schools losing enrollment as birth rates decline, they’d benefit from any policy that sends new students their way — as long as their own union doesn’t help block it.

It would be one thing if the AFL-CIO was expressing concern about how the scholarship plan will impact the $40 trillion (and growing) national debt, or was arguing that it will somehow divert public money from existing public schools.

But it hasn’t, and it can’t: The donations will flow regardless.

The question is simply whether those donated funds remain in New York and benefit New York’s kids.

It’s hard to think of an instance where any facet of New York’s labor movement has turned its sights against the interests of a large subset of its own membership.

The AFL-CIO’s advocacy in this matter may even violate its fiduciary duties to members.

The episode highlights how much things have changed in the past decade.

In 2015, New York came close to creating its own state-level scholarship tax credit with a similar purpose.

Almost half of state Senate Democrats supported the plan, many as legislative co-sponsors.

More notably, so did a number of the state’s labor unions, both public and private-sector, which recognized that their members stood to benefit from the new options that the program could have unlocked.

But the effort was scotched by the combined efforts of the UFT and (later disgraced) Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who kept the tax credit from getting a vote in that chamber.

The UFT and NYSUT bray about their concern for kids and the quality of public education merely to distract from objective analysis about how the system they’ve shaped actually performs.

They’re willing to let their “brothers and sisters” in the labor movement suffer the collateral damage of their advocacy — and New York’s students are even more of an afterthought.

Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.