Clark is wrong on Idaho’s teachers’ union reform bill | Opinion
Strong opinions should be supported by strong facts.
Unfortunately, Bryan Clark’s recent column slamming conservative state lawmakers as “cowards” for their handling of legislation to end taxpayer support for teachers’ unions expresses the former but manages to omit the latter almost to a word.
Clark levels two unfounded allegations: First, that the process used to pass HB 516 was intentionally “sneaky” and meant to “silence” the bill’s opponents, and, second, that the legislation itself amounts to “an attack on teachers.”
Regarding process, legislation similar to HB 516 was first introduced in 2024. It had a successful committee hearing in the House of Representatives but came up short on the House floor.
It was introduced again in 2025. This time, after another successful committee hearing, the House passed the bill. Upon its arrival in the Senate, however, the State Affairs Committee chair, Sen. Jim Guthrie, R-McCammon,, single-handedly killed the bill by refusing to schedule it for a hearing.
This year, the proposal came back as HB 745 and, after a third committee hearing in the House, passed the chamber by an even greater margin than before. In the Senate, it was referred to the Commerce and Human Resources Committee.
The committee chair, Sen. Dan Foreman, R-Moscow, had co-sponsored the bill and committed to hearing it, but subsequently came to an undisclosed arrangement with the teachers union, the Idaho Education Association (IEA), and reversed course, refusing to schedule it for a hearing.
Only after pleading unsuccessfully for a hearing for the better part of a month did the frustrated Senate majority circumvent Foreman’s unexplained intransigence by amending the substance of HB 745 onto another bill on the Senate floor, HB 516, and sending the measure to Gov. Brad Little’s desk.
Though you wouldn’t know it from Clark’s invective, the bill’s opponents have had three years to make their case and have done so loudly.
The problem is that their arguments, and Clark’s, simply don’t hold up.
Nothing in HB 516 prevents teachers from joining a union, nor does the legislation stop teachers unions from collectively bargaining with school districts.
On the contrary, the bill simply ensures that the IEA cannot abuse the collective bargaining process to secure special privileges and taxpayer support for itself that aren’t similarly available to other private, politically controversial, special interest organizations.
HB 516 would prevent school districts from using public payroll systems and personnel to deduct union dues from teachers’ paychecks or from using tax dollars to cover the cost of teachers’ dues, but any educator who wants to can already sign up for union membership online using a process the IEA itself describes as simple and easy.
Further, the bill would require unions to reimburse districts if teachers are released with pay from their classroom duties to engage in union operations and activism. According to Freedom Foundation research, Idaho taxpayers currently pick up the tab for half a million dollars or more each year of paid leave for teachers performing union work — even lobbying — instead of their teaching job.
Additionally, the legislation would prevent school districts from handing over teachers’ personal contact information to a union without their consent and bar districts from forcing educators to sit through union membership solicitations on work time.
Polling shows that Idaho voters back these common-sense reforms by wide margins, and that includes many teachers.
As one Lewiston educator wrote in support of these reforms, “policymakers should recognize that the union doesn’t speak for many, or even most, Idaho teachers.”
Unions are perfectly valid organizations and a storied part of American civic life, but they don’t deserve special treatment or taxpayer subsidies.
The legislature got the message. Hopefully the governor will, too.
Maxford Nelsen is director of research and government affairs at the Freedom Foundation, a 35-year-old nonprofit organization which promotes individual liberty, free enterprise, and limited, accountable government. It is not affiliated with the Idaho Freedom Foundation established in 2009.