During the 2024 election cycle, an internal survey of the Teamsters showed that members preferred Donald Trump two to one over Kamala Harris, suggesting that the long-term cozy relationship between unions and the Democratic Party was cooling. Something similar may be going on with teachers and their unions, presenting an opportunity for Republicans to exploit existing tensions between activist union leadership and their moderate members. If policymakers were to publicly support teachers while advancing policies that strengthen the profession, Republicans would not only attract more voters, they’d be doing a favor for teachers and students alike.

Surprisingly few surveys exist on the political views of teachers. An Education Week survey found that 43 percent of those in education identify as moderate, with a near-equal split between those identifying as liberal or conservative. In the realm of education — where transgender ideology, to take just one progressive notion, shows up in state-mandated curricula and allows boys to compete in girls’ sports — that finding signals little. A moderate compared with Trotsky does not a moderate make. After all, an analysis from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty found that upward of 94 percent of political donations from teachers still went to the Democratic Party.

To get clearer answers, Heritage ran a survey of the general population and oversampled teachers to determine how their views on various topics compare. When asked about specific issues — such as the inclusion of the 1619 Project in schools, whether America is the best country in the world for minorities, or whether the tenets of critical race theory should guide the training of educators — teachers leaned left of the general population but were by no means ideologues.

In fact, in another Education Week survey before the latest presidential election, 39 percent of teachers expressed their intent to vote for Donald Trump, and a full 49 percent of Gen Z and Millennial teachers (ages 22–44) expressed support for the Republican candidate.

That’s an astounding result. There are almost 4 million teachers in America. With that large a corps, there will of course be any number of blue-haired activists. But the large majority of teachers are quite normal. One of us, while working as a teacher, found that most colleagues were blue-dog Democrats: They liked their unions but thought that there were only two genders, that America is a great country, and that suspending minority students for bad behavior isn’t racist. They had a liberal-coded reading of American history but rejected the revisionist American histories of Howard Zinn and the 1619 Project.

If the Democratic Party continues to lean into transgenderism, particularly where children are concerned, to oppose immigration enforcement, and to take anti-Israel positions while coddling pro-Hamas elements, among other stances unpalatable to ordinary voters, a majority of teachers may soon go the way of the Teamsters, veering right while their union stays hitched to the left.

To precipitate this electoral shift, conservatives ought to sever the connection between teachers and their unions. These institutions operate get-out-the-vote campaigns, leaning on the trust of their members to run up vote totals in low-turnout elections. Get a district’s worth of teachers to support your school board candidate in a local election, and the union can quickly sway results.

At the National Education Association’s assembly last year, business items included several anti-Israel resolutions, including a recommendation to use digital media resources to educate members on the importance of the boycott, divest, and sanctions (BDS) movement and to condemn an investment in Israel’s alleged “genocide” in Gaza. Traditional academics be damned. That same union publishes LGBT book lists to get transgender themes into schools and develops messaging guides for its members to help students overcome anachronistic beliefs such as that “there are two genders.” Regardless of one’s opinion on these matters, they have little to do with reading and writing and, as the Heritage survey found, bear little resemblance to the opinions of their members.

Even on education issues, the unions betray their dues-paying members.

Student behavior has become the most important issue to teachers. Indeed, classroom disruption regularly tops the list of teacher concerns and stressors, outranking frustrations with pay and administration. As to their opinion on the matter, a representative survey from the Fordham Institute found that teachers universally support stricter discipline policies. And why shouldn’t they? It is teachers who must reckon with the pandemonium of discipline structures that are soft on consequences. Unrelenting chaos, more than anything else, makes their lives miserable.

Along with undermining discipline, the unions have advocated lenient grading policies, deputizing teachers in quasi-therapeutic roles, and, as mentioned, a host of ideologically suspect curricula — all of which makes the lives of teachers more difficult and redirects their purpose away from what teachers actually want to do: teach math, science, history, literature, finance, and other subjects that their students will need to succeed.

Aside from empty demands for negligible pay raises, neither Democrats nor unions are defending teachers, advancing policies that meaningfully improve their profession, or representing their interests — even though unions automatically deduct dues from teachers’ paychecks to supposedly do just that. Consequently, there is a large opening for conservatives to step into without betraying their principles.

To undercut union power and Democratic capture of the teacher vote, conservative governors and state legislatures have two winning policies to pursue: stricter discipline and expanded access to liability insurance for teachers.

Many states are already incorporating the former. Texas, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, and South Carolina have all passed some form of a teachers’ bill of rights, which, among other things, empowers teachers to maintain order in their classrooms through the judicious use of consequences and the removal of unruly students. Meanwhile, West Virginia recently clarified how schools should respond to violent students, and Nevada repealed onerous restorative-justice requirements, making it easier to expel violent and chronically misbehaving students. At the local level, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has published school board policies regarding school discipline and transparency as recommendations for school board members who take seriously their roles in providing a healthy educational environment.

Championing discipline is the educational equivalent of immigration restrictionism for other labor unions. It is a top priority for members, and whoever takes up the discipline mantle will win the gratitude of teachers.

But no amount of other policies will effect much change without expanded access to liability insurance and legal representation. Every teacher can tell you about that first meeting with the local union representative. He’d pitch all the (supposed) benefits of unions and end with a scare tactic: join the union or stand alone when a student inevitably falsely accuses you of misconduct and a parent comes after you with lawyers. Indeed, legal protection and liability insurance are often the only real benefits that unions provide. (Notably, they don’t do much to increase the pay of teachers, as an article in the American Journal of Political Science detailed in 2018.)

With the litigious sword of Damocles above their heads, teachers will seek security in their unions. Unions collect dues from members of all political stripes, and use them to bankroll left-wing preferred candidates. Through endorsements, unions provide Democratic electoral candidates with a “pro-teacher” appellation.

Fortunately, unions are not the only means by which teachers can get such protections. Some states, such as New York, require that local districts defend and indemnify teachers for legal action taken against them. Moreover, many alternative professional organizations exist, such as the Association of American Educators, the Teacher Freedom Alliance, Christian Educators, and many state-specific associations, which provide similar protections at a fraction of the cost.

If governors were to strengthen state-level protections or mandate that districts inform teachers of all their options for legal representation and liability insurance, they would undercut one of the primary reasons that teachers join unions. Get enough teachers to leave — and, according to research by the American Experiment, many unions are already losing thousands of their members — and the influence of unions begins to fade without any union-busting legislation.

Conservative governors and legislators can make other policy moves to champion teachers and thereby win their votes. Professional development too often focuses on useless theory or progressive virtue-signaling; policymakers could ensure that any professional-development and teacher-prep programs focus on the nuts and bolts of classroom management, lesson-planning, and instructional delivery.

Licensing rules are a nuisance. Milton Friedman’s dream to rescind all licensure requirements would likely be unpopular with teachers, but there’s room to streamline the process, reduce the financial burden for young teachers seeking accreditation, and make it easier for veteran teachers to obtain a permanent license and thereby forgo the needless, cumbersome re-up process.

Educators spend countless hours crafting tests and quizzes from scratch or surfing the web for classroom activities, using out-of-pocket paid services such as Teachers Pay Teachers, when schools should provide such materials instead. To help teachers with this labor, policymakers could either provide funds for teachers who work over the summer, crafting district-approved materials for collective use, or simply approve good, substantive curriculum, such as Core Knowledge or Wit & Wisdom, for local use.

None of these policies would turn the teaching profession into a legion of Hayek and Sowell acolytes, but it needn’t do so. Seventy percent of union-endorsed candidates win local school board elections. If conservatives could tip the scale to even 50–50, the consequences would be far-reaching. Such boards could excise woke curricula with a finer-tooth comb than any federal mandate, restore order to classrooms, redirect schools to their core focus on academic subjects, and more. It would remake and recapture American education more profoundly than any executive order ever could.

Daniel Buck is a research fellow and the director of the Conservative Education Reform Network at the American Enterprise Institute. Will Flanders is the research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.