This is a book review by Melissa Arnold Lyon published in Perspectives on Politics, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1017/S153759272300138X

For many years education was seen as an apolitical arena due to a belief that Americans shared a basic understanding of the value of education and its ends, with key questions relating to means delegated to education experts. This apolitical view began to erode at the end of the twentieth century and was replaced within the political science literature by a powerful argument that education was not just political, but was dominated politically by one particular interest group: teachers’ unions. Michael Hartney’s new book, How Policies Make Interest Groups, pushes this argument further, investigating why teachers’ unions continue to be such a dominant interest group in contemporary education politics.