TERRY MOE MADE his name in the early 1990s when, with John Chubb, he co-authored a much-discussed book arguing for a system of publicly-funded private school vouchers. The central thesis of Politics, Markets and America’s Schools was that “direct democratic control” of public education was “incompatible with effective schooling.” Chubb and Moe argued that private school vouchers would create efficient markets in education, and that “choice is a panacea.”

Two decades later, with vouchers and similar schemes serving one-third of one percent of the public school population, Moe has written a scathing critique of the single force in American politics most responsible for preserving public education against privatization efforts: American teachers and their unions. The book, which has glowing endorsements from Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, comes as teachers and other public employees are under siege from Republican governors in Wisconsin, Indiana, and elsewhere.

The book’s title, Special Interest, invokes a term historically applied to wealthy and powerful entities such as oil companies, tobacco interests, and gun manufacturers, whose narrow aims are often recognized as colliding with the more general public interest in such matters as clean water, good health, and public safety. Do rank and file teachers, who educate American school children and earn on average about $54,000 a year, really fall into the same category? Moe thinks so.

His indictment of teachers unions is an exaggerated version of one familiar to readers of the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Unions, he writes, make it “virtually impossible to get bad teachers out of the classroom.” They oppose school choice, oppose merit pay, and oppose efforts to have excellent teachers “assigned” to high poverty schools where they are needed most. But Moe goes further. Teachers unions “are at the heart” of our education problems. “As long as teachers unions remain powerful,” Moe writes, the “basic requirements” of educational success “cannot be met.”

This is a caricature of the teachers unions, and there are two main problems with it. The first is that the picture Moe paints is outdated. Unions now favor many elements of the education reform agenda, so long as reasonable accommodations are put in place. They now support school choice within the public school system, but oppose private school vouchers that might further Balkanize the nation’s students. Many teachers unions also favor getting rid of bad educators, not based strictly on test scores or the subjective judgment of principals, but through “peer review” plans which call for expert teachers to come into a school and work with struggling educators and in some cases recommend termination. And unions in New York, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere favor merit pay, so long as it includes school-wide gains, which encourage cooperation between teachers. If unions do not favor plans to allow administrators to “allocate” teachers to high poverty schools against their will (a policy that is reminiscent of forced student assignment for racial balance during the days of busing), they do favor paying teachers bonuses to attract them to high poverty schools. In New York City, teachers were recently willing to give up perks like sabbaticals in order to prevent layoffs—a development which would have been both bad for teachers and increased class size for students.