The stunningly blatant cynicism of the NEA's agenda
On the National Education Foundation's web site it lays out a numbered list of priorities on its Federal Policy Guide, presumably an ordered list of educational legislation priorities for Representatives and Senators to refer to in judging whether their votes will be supported by the powerful union. One would think, though, that this represents, too, an ordered list of what the NEA sees as the most pressing issues in education reform are, with the general public also part of the intended audience in improving America's public education system.
Given that, one is not surprised to see that ideas like improving pre-K and early education, revitalizing elementary and high schools and increasing graduation rates top the list. Of the thirteen core issues only 3 or 4 could be characterized as tangentially being even indirectly related to teacher salary or collective bargaining for better contracts for teachers. Only issue #7 on a list of 13, "Support All School Staff, Vital Members of the Team" seems to be dedicated to the issue of compensation for education personnel directly, and does so in the context of discussing how the need is to make sure that not just teachers are compensated as well as they should be.
To be fair, on their main site's "Issues and Actions" page, "Professional Pay" does rate as one of five issues in the NEA's "Current Focus," alongside overall Education funding. However, if asked on the record, one assumes the NEA's position is that improving educational outcomes for children trump ancillary goals like increasing the Union's power to extract favorable treatment from legislators, and that goals like increasing teacher pay are meant to make sure that teacher's are compensated fairly so that competent individuals are attracted and retained as teachers. Basically, teacher pay matters because these are the people teaching your kids, not because how good a union contract is matters in and of itself.
Bizarre, then, that you can find in a story about the NEA playing political hardball with a Chicago pol that this local tactic is reflected by national leadership. The story references a speech given by retiring NEA exec Bob Chanin to the 2008 NEA annual conference where he explicitly places all goals related to educating children as subordinate to increasing the amount of money and bargaining power that the NEA can accumulate:
That's a somewhat shocking admission for the NEA to make; these guys aren't mining coal or playing Major League Baseball. While every union's goal (as a sort of labor cartel) is to manipulate the market by coordinating the price at which labor will be supplied and thereby get more money for the same work by its members, the teachers union sells itself as nice. If your representatives craft a piece of education "reform" legislation in such a way that the NEA loves it the NEA would have you believe that this bill will do good at improving education in America: the NEA is concerned about teacher's pay, but it is also a group that advocates for improving educational outcome.
Strange, though, that a group that claims to care about educational outcomes would say that while those goals guide their efforts that reform "must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights and collective bargaining." And of course, that the NEA's advocacy is effective not because of something as inane as having good ideas and a soapbox, but rather it stems from power, which stems directly from hundreds of millions of dollars in union dues.
So when education reformers not affiliated with the NEA suggest things like allowing competition between schools, giving parents the choice between their local public school or a voucher to be used to pay for tuition at a charter school or private school that does not employ Union members, or when a disinterested social scientist questions just how effective reducing class size from 25 to 15 is at improving outcomes, or when some other reformer suggests incentivizing teacher pay based on performance as measured by standardized tests, you have to question whether the NEA is following the creed that is embodied by its website or by a speech at their annual meeting that got a round of enthusiastic applause. If an effective education reform threatens to decrease the number of unionized teachers and therefore the amount of dues the NEA collects and therefore its power, does the NEA oppose that policy because it would decrease its collective bargaining power? If they do, do they say so openly or do they try to come up with confusing, bogus studies that come to opposite conclusions to muddy the waters and seem like they still care about the children.
If it is the latter, then it wouldn't really matter whether allowing parents who live in an area where their children would be forced to attend a failing public school to get a voucher to pay for private, non-union-supporting education was a great idea with the potential to drastically improve educational outcomes, the NEA would oppose it. The NEA's policy page on charter schools, which are publicly funded schools that are run without all the regulations of traditional public schools and sometimes outside the scope of traditional regulators, is instructive. While the NEA does not come out and demonize charter schools, it says that charter schools can only be supported if they fulfill a number of criteria:
So while the NEA's position on Charter Schools seems superficially nuanced and appears to be guided only by a primary mission of improving outcomes--we tentatively support the idea of Charter Schools if they are implemented in a diligent fashion-- if you look at the fine print their support for Charter Schools hinges on their teachers and administrators being unionized. Increased power trumps even the ideological goals of the organization. Imagine if a large longitudinal study came out that showed that a key feature of successful charter schools was that teachers and administrators could be hired and fired much more easily than in a school with a collective bargaining agreement the NEA signed off on; the NEA's instinctive reaction would be vehement opposition to the validity of the data and if it came to it to legislation based on its conclusions. Such data and conclusions threaten its very rationale for existence--that well-paid and content teachers are needed to get good results and that collective bargaining and unionized teachers are required to attract and keep those teachers--and therefore the NEA, as it admits when the target audience is not the public, cares about improving education, but improving education must be prioritized below increasing the bargaining power and legislative influence of the union.
The NEA's political allies are mostly Democrats, but Republicans are far from being innocent when it comes to taking money from this union in exchange for compromising on key aspects of educational reform that would demand that, like in every private sector industry, that teacher's jobs and pay are related to their competence and performance, not how long they've been in the same classroom. Both parties bow to this powerful lobby: the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind Act was full of concessions to the NEA and while the Union did not support many of the parts of the original bill that would attempt to add competitive pressure to public education outcomes in practice the NEA successfully watered down the changes it sought to implement in teacher incentives and objective measurement of performance of teaching basic skills. When you think about education reforms in the future think about who you're talking to and if their information you have or that you hear came from a source that was ultimately parroting the conventional wisdom of the NEA-- for instance the dogma that small class size is crucial certainly creates demand for more teachers but it's not clear it improves outcomes universally. If so consider that they support educational reforms that help educate America's children... so long as that policy happens to involve an increase in the number or salary of unionized teachers.
Given that, one is not surprised to see that ideas like improving pre-K and early education, revitalizing elementary and high schools and increasing graduation rates top the list. Of the thirteen core issues only 3 or 4 could be characterized as tangentially being even indirectly related to teacher salary or collective bargaining for better contracts for teachers. Only issue #7 on a list of 13, "Support All School Staff, Vital Members of the Team" seems to be dedicated to the issue of compensation for education personnel directly, and does so in the context of discussing how the need is to make sure that not just teachers are compensated as well as they should be.
To be fair, on their main site's "Issues and Actions" page, "Professional Pay" does rate as one of five issues in the NEA's "Current Focus," alongside overall Education funding. However, if asked on the record, one assumes the NEA's position is that improving educational outcomes for children trump ancillary goals like increasing the Union's power to extract favorable treatment from legislators, and that goals like increasing teacher pay are meant to make sure that teacher's are compensated fairly so that competent individuals are attracted and retained as teachers. Basically, teacher pay matters because these are the people teaching your kids, not because how good a union contract is matters in and of itself.
Bizarre, then, that you can find in a story about the NEA playing political hardball with a Chicago pol that this local tactic is reflected by national leadership. The story references a speech given by retiring NEA exec Bob Chanin to the 2008 NEA annual conference where he explicitly places all goals related to educating children as subordinate to increasing the amount of money and bargaining power that the NEA can accumulate:
Despite what some among us would like to believe it is not because of our creative ideas. It is not because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about children and it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.
And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of millions of dollars in dues each year, because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them, the unions that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees.
This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing dropout rates, improving teacher quality and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary. These are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights and collective bargaining. That simply is too high a price to pay.
That's a somewhat shocking admission for the NEA to make; these guys aren't mining coal or playing Major League Baseball. While every union's goal (as a sort of labor cartel) is to manipulate the market by coordinating the price at which labor will be supplied and thereby get more money for the same work by its members, the teachers union sells itself as nice. If your representatives craft a piece of education "reform" legislation in such a way that the NEA loves it the NEA would have you believe that this bill will do good at improving education in America: the NEA is concerned about teacher's pay, but it is also a group that advocates for improving educational outcome.
Strange, though, that a group that claims to care about educational outcomes would say that while those goals guide their efforts that reform "must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights and collective bargaining." And of course, that the NEA's advocacy is effective not because of something as inane as having good ideas and a soapbox, but rather it stems from power, which stems directly from hundreds of millions of dollars in union dues.
So when education reformers not affiliated with the NEA suggest things like allowing competition between schools, giving parents the choice between their local public school or a voucher to be used to pay for tuition at a charter school or private school that does not employ Union members, or when a disinterested social scientist questions just how effective reducing class size from 25 to 15 is at improving outcomes, or when some other reformer suggests incentivizing teacher pay based on performance as measured by standardized tests, you have to question whether the NEA is following the creed that is embodied by its website or by a speech at their annual meeting that got a round of enthusiastic applause. If an effective education reform threatens to decrease the number of unionized teachers and therefore the amount of dues the NEA collects and therefore its power, does the NEA oppose that policy because it would decrease its collective bargaining power? If they do, do they say so openly or do they try to come up with confusing, bogus studies that come to opposite conclusions to muddy the waters and seem like they still care about the children.
If it is the latter, then it wouldn't really matter whether allowing parents who live in an area where their children would be forced to attend a failing public school to get a voucher to pay for private, non-union-supporting education was a great idea with the potential to drastically improve educational outcomes, the NEA would oppose it. The NEA's policy page on charter schools, which are publicly funded schools that are run without all the regulations of traditional public schools and sometimes outside the scope of traditional regulators, is instructive. While the NEA does not come out and demonize charter schools, it says that charter schools can only be supported if they fulfill a number of criteria:
- A charter should be granted only if the proposed school intends to offer an educational experience that is qualitatively different from what is available in traditional public schools. [In other words, a mere quantitative improvement in perforamance using non-union administrators and teachers would not be acceptable]
- Charter school funding should not disproportionately divert resources from traditional public schools. [Charter schools can't come to receive more than a small portion of public education dollars even if they do a better job at teaching children than traditional (NEA dominated) public schools]
- Local school boards should have the authority to grant or deny charter applications; the process should be open to the public, and applicants should have the right to appeal to a state agency decisions to deny or revoke a charter.[We should be able to apply political pressure against charter schools at either the local level or the state level, wherever we have more power]
- Charter schools should be subject to the same public sector labor relations statutes as traditional public schools, and charter school employees should have the same collective bargaining rights as their counterparts in traditional public schools.[Charter schools are really only good if they give more money to the NEA and function exactly like our failing public schools]
So while the NEA's position on Charter Schools seems superficially nuanced and appears to be guided only by a primary mission of improving outcomes--we tentatively support the idea of Charter Schools if they are implemented in a diligent fashion-- if you look at the fine print their support for Charter Schools hinges on their teachers and administrators being unionized. Increased power trumps even the ideological goals of the organization. Imagine if a large longitudinal study came out that showed that a key feature of successful charter schools was that teachers and administrators could be hired and fired much more easily than in a school with a collective bargaining agreement the NEA signed off on; the NEA's instinctive reaction would be vehement opposition to the validity of the data and if it came to it to legislation based on its conclusions. Such data and conclusions threaten its very rationale for existence--that well-paid and content teachers are needed to get good results and that collective bargaining and unionized teachers are required to attract and keep those teachers--and therefore the NEA, as it admits when the target audience is not the public, cares about improving education, but improving education must be prioritized below increasing the bargaining power and legislative influence of the union.
The NEA's political allies are mostly Democrats, but Republicans are far from being innocent when it comes to taking money from this union in exchange for compromising on key aspects of educational reform that would demand that, like in every private sector industry, that teacher's jobs and pay are related to their competence and performance, not how long they've been in the same classroom. Both parties bow to this powerful lobby: the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind Act was full of concessions to the NEA and while the Union did not support many of the parts of the original bill that would attempt to add competitive pressure to public education outcomes in practice the NEA successfully watered down the changes it sought to implement in teacher incentives and objective measurement of performance of teaching basic skills. When you think about education reforms in the future think about who you're talking to and if their information you have or that you hear came from a source that was ultimately parroting the conventional wisdom of the NEA-- for instance the dogma that small class size is crucial certainly creates demand for more teachers but it's not clear it improves outcomes universally. If so consider that they support educational reforms that help educate America's children... so long as that policy happens to involve an increase in the number or salary of unionized teachers.
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