By: Todd Long
Submitted: 2010-09-19 00:37:05 | Word Count: 931
The best-known teacher unions in the United States are the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). However, not all public school teachers are their members, nor are all of their members public school teachers. Membership also includes support staff in the public schools, such as secretaries, bus drivers, and cafeteria workers, and some outside the schools, such as hospital nurses.
Other teacher groups include Independent Education Associations (IEAs) at the local, state, and national levels, which remain largely unknown, and Local Only Teacher Unions (LOTUs) which are almost totally unknown. There are also public school teachers who are not members of any organizations, plus private school teachers, few of whom are organized except for the National Association of Catholic Teachers. This organization, headquartered in Philadelphia, represents some, but not all, of the teachers in Catholic schools.
The National Education Association
The National Education Association was founded in 1857 in Philadelphia as the National Teachers' Association. For the first century it grew slowly, with fewer than 2,400 members in 1900 and 330,000 as late as 1964, the point at which its most rapid growth was getting underway. By 2001 NEA membership exceeded 2.3 million in more than 13,000 local affiliate organizations.
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A handful of key events led to the evolution of the NEA to its characteristics at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The first was external, in the form of the victory in New York City at the beginning of the 1960s of the American Federation of Teachers local affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers, which emerged as the dominant union from what had been more than 100 groups. Subsequent AFT victories in other urban areas, plus Wisconsin's 1962 passage of the first collective bargaining law for educators, forced the NEA to begin a transformation that initially faced both internal and external problems.
In 1960 the NEA assembly had rejected a resolution endorsing representative negotiations. Although this position was reversed the next year, for much of the 1960s the NEA stressed that it was an association and referred to professional negotiations, rather than collective bargaining, because of the resistance of many of its own members to identification as a union.
The early 1970s saw a number of major internal changes. Until then the NEA permitted members to join any combination of the local, state, and national units, although some local and state affiliates had different rules. A 1975 provision added to the NEA Constitution established a unified membership, whereby those who did join would have to do so at all three levels. Until then the NEA included departments with specific professional interests, such as administrators, math or science, and curriculum or instruction, in both basic and higher education. With the introduction of unified dues many local affiliated organizations dropped out. These included not only the professional interest groups but even the Missouri state association, which had been one of the NEA's charter members in 1857. These losses were more than compensated by the addition of huge numbers of individual members at the state and national level, most of whom, as they had always done, joined the local association at the urging of their colleagues, whether or not they had any understanding of, commitment to, or even interest in, the state and national organizations.
This membership growth was both accompanied and accelerated by the NEA's establishment of its Uniserv program, which led to the creation of hundreds of offices across the nation in cooperation with its state and local affiliates. The state affiliates employ the Uniserv staff but, with financial and coordinating support from the NEA, these staff function as quasi-NEA employees. Within less than thirty years there were 1,800 of these staff members.
In 1972 the NEA also became the first national education organization with a political action committee, one that remains among the nation's largest and most influential. By the 1990s the NEA came to have one of the largest delegations to the quadrennial Democratic National Convention and a smaller delegation at the Republican National Convention. One example of its influence was the establishment of the U.S. Department of Education by Congress in 1979, with the support of President Jimmy Carter, whom the NEA had endorsed in 1976, despite the opposition of the AFT. Teacher unions also benefit from advantages that Congress has granted unions in general, such as exemption from laws prohibiting conspiracies in restraint of trade.
Ironically, at the peak of their power and influence, the NEA and AFT face more pressures and opposition than ever before. Internal problems for the NEA include the tendency of newer teachers to show less interest in joining. A 1997 membership survey commissioned by the NEA warned that it faced "organizational death." While that is probably overly pessimistic, the NEA recognizes there are difficulties even beyond what might be expected in an influential organization with a budget of nearly $250 million, a national staff of nearly six hundred and, with its affiliates, an additional staff of thousands.
One source of tension is that nearly all of NEA's political endorsements go to Democrats, although its Democratic members, while they comprise a larger political block than either Republicans or Independents, still make up less than 50 percent of its membership. Reportedly 40 percent of NEA members regularly vote contrary to the organization's recommendations and sometimes more than half do so, as in President Ronald Reagan's 1980 and 1984 campaigns. There is also unhappiness with the NEA's adoption of positions on social issues such as abortion and gun control, which many members feel detracts from the attention that should be paid to educational issues.
