Charter, tax credit groups again outspend teachers' unions on lobbying

By BILL MAHONEY and ELIZA SHAPIRO 

5:39 a.m. | Feb. 8, 2016

While teachers' unions remain near the top of the list of the state’s highest-spending interest groups, a position they’ve occupied for decades, they no longer dominate education lobbying in New York.

The unions have been joined by several groups supportive of issues they’ve opposed, such as expansion of charter schools and a tax credit that would redirect money to private schools, according to a POLITICO New York analysis of lobbying reports submitted to the Joint Commission on Public Ethics and campaign finance disclosure reports submitted by state-level candidates and parties to the Board of Elections.

In all, labor groups and their key allies on education issues spent $8.3 million on political activity in 2015. Charter schools and their influential lobbying arms spent a little over $9 million, and tax credit advocates, $5.7 million, according to the lobbying and campaign finance reports.

For the second consecutive year, reform groups, including charter and tax credit advocates, outspent unions on lobbying, contradicting the argument often made by reform groups that unions dominate state education policy by pouring money into their lobbying efforts.

The $23 million spent last year is down from $30 million in 2014, which is at least partially attributable to the fact that statewide elections were held in 2014.

The decrease is likely also driven by the changed political calculus for both unions and charter groups after most of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s sweeping education reform proposals failed during last year’s legislative session.

In the last six months of 2015, two key education factions pulled back their advocacy efforts as imminent threats to unions subsided and charter groups dialed back their lobbying efforts in accordance with Cuomo’s shifting priorities.

Early last year, New York State United Teachers and the United Federation of Teachers were facing existential threats from state government and advocates.

Cuomo proposed a series of reform proposals that would have been anathema for the unions, and a lawsuit seeking to overturn the state’s teacher tenure protections was working its way through the courts.

But a year later, Cuomo has largely reversed his education agenda in favor of union initiatives, including strong criticism of the Common Core and a de-emphasizing of standardized test scores in teacher evaluations. The teacher tenure lawsuit has stagnated in court as unions file a stream of motions intended to kill it.

On the other side, some of the state’s most confrontational and influential charter groups — Families for Excellent Schools and Success Academy — have halted the massive (and expensive) rallies they held twice a year to push for charter-friendly legislation.

Charter groups in general have a wonkier set of legislative priorities this year — mostly focused on adjusting complex funding formulas — compared to the two previous sessions, when charters fought for their right to expand across the state.

Despite an overall spending dip, some particularly powerful individual charter networks had consistent spending in 2015 compared to the previous year.

Success Academy, the state’s largest and most politically connected charter network, spent $190,313 on lobbying in 2015, and nearly $200,000 in 2014. A spokeswoman for the network did not respond to a request for comment. Success spent about four times as much as KIPP, another influential charter network with schools across the nation.

While Families for Excellent Schools' 2015 lobbying effort fell to $3.4 million from $9.7 million the year before, the group’s total was still likely enough to place it among the five biggest lobby clients in the state. The group is known for its combative lobbying style, and aired a series of television ads criticizing Mayor Bill de Blasio and unions during last year’s legislative session.

A spokesman for FES declined to comment on the group’s spending.

StudentsFirstNY, another influential education reform group that has advocated both for charters and for Common Core standards, increased its spending on lobbying nearly tenfold in 2015, to $2.4 million, the lobbying reports show. StudentsFirst was a particularly vocal supporter of Cuomo’s education agenda early last year, before he switched gears to accommodate unions in late 2015.

Jenny Sedlis, the group’s executive director, said in a statement that she was pleased reform groups were finally matching the influence of unions.

"For years, the teachers unions flooded Albany with millions of lobbying dollars resulting in a virtual monopoly on influencing education policy,” she said. “Now, students finally have a voice and they will continue to have that voice in 2016 and beyond.”

Additionally, several hedge fund managers whose political money has primarily flowed to charter school supporters in the past continued to remain active.

They contributed $2 million to state candidates and parties last year, primarily to Cuomo and the Democratic account he controls. Additionally, New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany, an independent expenditure committee created by StudentsFirstNY that supported Senate Republicans in 2014, seems poised to be involved in this year’s elections, having raised $2 million from hedge funders Daniel Loeb and Paul Singer in June.

The union side continued to be dominated by NYSUT, which spent $4.6 million for lobbying and made more than $500,000 in campaign contributions. This is down from $8.9 million in in spending in 2014, a decrease largely attributable to the fact the union’s Super PAC was mostly dormant in a non-election year.

“NYSUT’s education spending comes from approximately 170,000 teachers and other educators who want to have a voice in state education policy. They contribute an average of a dollar per paycheck to ensure their voice is heard,” spokesman Carl Korn said. “That’s a stark contrast to the six and seven figure checks written by hedge fund billionaires who want to impose their version of ‘reform’ on parents and teachers despite having never taken a step inside a public school classroom.”

The UFT was responsible for an additional $1.5 million in political activity, according to the lobbying reports.

“We work hard on behalf of our students, teachers and parents,” UFT president Michael Mulgrew said in a statement. “Our efforts are funded by thousands of teachers kicking in a couple dollars a month, or $5 or $10, to make sure their voices — and the students and parents they advocate for — are heard. That’s our strength. Compare that to the other side, where a couple dozen people account for their huge war chests.”  

Other allies of teachers' unions on issues such as charters and the tax credit, including the labor-backed Alliance for Quality Education and several school districts, combined to spend $1.7 million.

The biggest jump in spending came from supporters of the tax credit, who pushed for the measure for the entirety of last year's legislative session. The tax credit would allow credits for donations to scholarship funds that could be spent at private schools. Supporters have argued it could provide low-income families with more educational options and help support the state’s struggling parochial schools. Opponents, however, say it’s an end-run against the state constitution’s prohibition on directing taxpayer funds to religiously-affiliated institutions.

This issue is likely to remain at the center of education policy negotiations in Albany in 2016. The governor placed it in this year’s budget proposal, and the Senate passed a version on its second day in session this year.

Advocates have indicated they’re going to continue pushing for the proposal; Cardinal Timothy Dolan has said one of the lesson’s from last year’s failure to get a credit enacted was that they should “try even harder” this time around.

And it seems these reinvigorated efforts will at least partially take the form of increased spending. Supporters of a tax credit have recently created both a new PAC and an independent expenditure committee.

Groups tied to the Coalition for Opportunity in Education, which has since renamed itself the Invest in Education Coalition, spent $5.2 million of the $5.7 million spent by the tax credit’s supporters in 2015, the vast majority of which went toward lobbying rather than campaign donations, the lobbying reports indicate.

“This demonstrates that school choice, especially for lower-income families that can’t move to Westchester or afford pricey private schools, is a powerful idea that’s not going away,” said coalition spokesman Bob Bellafiore.

CORRECTION: Paul Singer was misidentified in the original version of this article as "Paul Simon."