Welcome back to Ten Blocks. This is Teddy Kupfer and Associate Editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Michael Hartney.

He's an assistant professor of political science at Boston College and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

His research focuses on state and local politics, interest groups, and education policy.

And his new book, due at this month, is called How Policies Make Interest Groups,

Governments, Unions, and American Education. Michael, thank you very much for joining.

Thanks, Teddy. It's good to be here.

So let's start with this book. I'll give you the floor. Why don't you just describe the basic

argument? What's this book about? So at its core, the book asks, why is it the case that certainly in the

contemporary, and I would call that since a nation at risk, which was this big important government

report that came out in the early 1980s that put school reform on the nation's political agenda. Why is it the case that in education

politics, teachers unions have been and continue to be the most dominant interest group?

And the book argues that it's not an accident. It's not an accident that teachers' unions and their members tend to vote more than other

constituencies and school board elections, that their policy preferences are oftentimes

much more reflected in education policy than other education interests or stakeholders, whether those are parents or

taxpayers, civil rights organizations. And the book argues that the reason for this dates back to

changes that took place in the 1960s and 1970s when state governments adopted labor laws that essentially, I'll use a non-j bargaining way to put it,

that government picked winners and losers.

And those labor laws made teachers unions winners in the interest group marketplace.

And the reason or the way that they did that was that under American labor law, under public sector labor laws, once recognized as the exclusive representative union, that is once a majority of teachers vote and say they want to be represented by a union vis-a-vis their employer, which is the school district, that they

automatically have a seat at the table in education decision-making. So if you think back most

recently to COVID school disruptions, in states where teachers unions are empowered under

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