Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) – Michael Hartney, the Bruni Family Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the 2024 recipient of the American Political Science Association (APSA) prize for the best book on education politics, a prize awarded annually by APSA’s Education Politics and Policy Section.
At APSA’s 120th Annual Conference, which took place September 5–8, 2024, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Hartney was recognized for his first book, How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and Education (University of Chicago Press), which critically assesses the power and influence of teachers’ unions in American politics and education. APSA’s Education Politics and Policy Section award committee unanimously and enthusiastically selected Hartney’s monograph for its top prize in a crowded field that included fifteen other books.
How Policies Make Interest Groups showcases how the decision to give collective bargaining rights to teachers fundamentally altered the balance of power in American public education, moving it in a decidedly pro-union direction. The consequences of this momentous decision, Hartney shows, have been enormous.
Since the early 1980s, a bipartisan group of reformers has sought to improve American education by pushing for greater school choice and accountability. However, since these proposals threaten the power of teachers’ unions (e.g., lost funding and jobs), Hartney shows, the unions have successfully used their government-granted power to resist reform.
The upshot is an education system that today is mired in mediocrity and lacking dynamism—a reality that became all too clear during the height of the COVID pandemic, when many unions used their influence to delay reopening schools, a decision shown to be partly responsible for widespread learning loss.
Hartney is an associate professor in the department of political science at Boston College and a nonresident senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He is also a research affiliate at Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and a previous W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at Hoover (2020–21). He earned his PhD from the University of Notre Dame and his bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University.
