By its own admission, the Oregon Education Association (OEA) — the state’s largest teachers union — finds itself in the throes of a "membership crisis."
It is a crisis of its own making.
According to the union’s most recent internal documents, OEA reported an active membership of 41,784 out of 48,774 represented educators during the 2019-20 school year. By 2020-21, however, that number had shrunk to 41,127 — perhaps in part because the workforce shrank by nearly 1,000 teachers during the COVID pandemic.
But in the most recent 2021-22 school year, OEA membership continued to decline to only 40,634 dues-paying members, even though the total number of OEA-represented teachers topped 50,000 for the first time.
Nearly one in five teachers have now broken ranks with OEA. In just three years, OEA’s membership rate has dropped from 85.6 percent to 81.2 — with no end in sight.
If the union wants to blame someone for those defections, its leaders need only look in the mirror.
Until 2018, Oregon was one of 23 states without right-to-work protections for government workers, meaning teachers and thousands of other public employees were required to financially support union activities.
That changed in 2018 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Janus v. AFSCME, affirmed that mandatory union payments violate public employees’ First Amendment rights.
Knowing members could suddenly walk away without losing their jobs, OEA and other government unions could have responded by simply working harder to provide a service worth paying for.
But of course, that is not what happened.
Over the last several years, teachers and the American public have seen firsthand how government unions are more aggressive political organizations than membership-based professional associations.
Nothing illustrates the union’s priorities better than its own finances. The National Education Association (NEA), OEA’s parent affiliate, reported spending more than twice as much on political expenditures than it did on representational activities for its members.
This is far from the only example of how teachers unions’ actions are often at odds with the interests of the teachers they represent.
Remember, these are the same unions that had no qualms about politicizing the COVID pandemic. For example, while demanding public schools remain closed to in-person learning despite credible evidence showing youngsters seldom contract the virus and almost seldom die of it, OEA and its labor allies successfully blocked hundreds of children from continuing their education at virtual public charter schools in 2020.
Predictably, already-poor student assessment scores plummeted to record low levels. Once again, however, Oregon legislators ran interference for the unions by quietly approving a union-backed bill in August 2021 extending until 2024 a temporary suspension of the state requirements that students demonstrate proficiency in reading, writing, and math to graduate from high school.
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In the meantime, the union resumed its stealth war against parental influence by demanding even the youngest students be exposed to explicit sexual content and embracing Critical Race Theory curriculum.
Is it any wonder educators are leaving their unions in droves?
Strangely enough, teachers want to teach. They’re embarrassed that their students are falling further and further behind every year in the educational basics they need to hold a job and support a family because unions and the politicians they’ve corrupted want to turn our classrooms into indoctrination centers.
Teachers are realizing that their unions support policies actively harming the students and the profession they love.
In Oregon and across the country, thousands of teachers are telling their union, "We’re sick of this, and we’re done with you."
That may seem like a crisis for the unions, but it’s great news for the rest of us.
Jason Dudash is the Oregon Director of the Freedom Foundation.
