Reihan Salam has this take-away from the role of teacher's unions in the defeat of D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty:
Nevertheless, it is certainly clear that reform opponents have won an impressive victory. At least one reason is that WTU used the compensation they receive from D.C. taxpayers to finance Vincent Gray's campaign. This merits some reflection.
This statement tiptoes to the line of suggesting limits on the speech rights of public-sector unions without doing so, and it also reflects why Republicans' reflexive union-bashing is counterproductive when it comes to school reform in predominantly Democratic cities. Sure, teacher's unions accused Michelle Rhee of reflexive union bashing, but ultimately she was able to get an important deal with WTU that moves D.C. toward a better system of teacher accountability, because very few people think you shouldn't be able to fire a bad teacher.
In fact, one of the more notable things is how little ideological disagreement in D.C. there is on education. When the new contract was ratified, the WTU president hailed the moment as "a great day for teachers and students," despite the grumbling of some national teachers' union figures. The union was boxed into using the language of school reformers. Gray ran on the same ideological message as Fenty, just with promises to be more "respectful" about how he did things. In his victory speech, he declared triumphantly, "Make no mistake -- school reform will move forward in a Gray administration!" The only people who understood the potential substantive difference between a Gray administration and a Fenty administration are eduwonks and the unions themselves, who paid a pretty penny to engineer Fenty's defeat. We don't yet know what Gray will do -- he may slow down reform in D.C., but it's hard to say he really has a popular mandate for it.
The contract negotiations could have gone quite differently in a more ideologically divided or partisan city, and the emergence of anti-union groups late in the election suggests how. When the Center for Union Facts started airing ads bashing teacher's unions, Rhee was forced to denounce them. Union bashing didn't help the cause of school reform, or the Fenty campaign, because it made them look hostile to unions and government workers in a city full of both. I think Dana Goldstein's right that Fenty and Rhee didn't handle the politics quite right, but coming into office and questioning whether teachers had a right to bargain collectively in a city with as many government workers in D.C. would have made it difficult for Rhee and Fenty to secure one of their most important reform goals. The point is it's hard to imagine that they would have achieved what they did had they adopted conservative hostility to the basic concept of public-sector unions or used anti-union groups as political force multipliers. The goal for liberal reformers is ultimately to get the unions to buy into reform, not to destroy them.
Finally as Mike Madden points out, it's also entirely possible that if Fenty had been more in tune with the political side of being a politician, he wouldn't have had a rival at all. A better politician would have left the unions with no one to give their money to.
