Tom Church

Policy fellow at the Hoover Institution and host of Hoover’s Factual Foundations of Policy. He studies health care policy, entitlement reform, income inequality, poverty, and the federal budget, and contributes to Hoover’s Healthcare Policy Working Group, Fiscal Policy Initiative, and Tennenbaum Program for Fact-Based Policy.

Teachers’ Unions Remain Powerful as Membership Falls and School Politics Shift

Michael Hartney and Melissa Lyon argue that teachers’ unions remain central actors in American education, but their influence is harder to measure than collective-bargaining law alone suggests. In a Hoover Institution discussion hosted by Tom Church, they describe unions as layered national, state, and local institutions that shape spending, working conditions, strikes, COVID reopening decisions, and now debates over AI and the purpose of schools. Both see unions as durable, but increasingly defined by transparency fights, voluntary membership, and the politics of what schools are meant to do.

Hoover InstitutionJun 3, 202616 min read