Last month, the National Education Association claimed a
substantial victory when it and other public-sector unions
convinced Ohio voters to repeal the state’s ban on collective
bargaining. Although most voters were more likely annoyed that Gov.
John Kasich and the Republican-controlled legislature denied such
privileges to unions representing local police officers and
firefighters than with any effort to curb teachers’ union power,
the successful repeal allowed the union’s president, Dennis Van
Roekel, to
proclaim that citizens “sent an unequivocal message to
those who play politics with the lives of teachers… we got your
back.”
But this election, along with
the
successful recall of a school reform-minded Michigan state
legislator, and the NEA’s efforts to co-opt the Occupy Wall Street
movement, offers a glimpse into the strategy the nation’s largest
teachers’ union will use to battle with both
the nation’s
school reform movement and fiscal conservatives inside the
nation’s statehouses — especially those in the Midwest, where the
majority of its rank-and-file members reside — over the future of
America’s woeful public schools.
Since March, when governors in
Ohio and Wisconsin successfully passed bans on requiring districts
to
bargain collectively with NEA and American Federation of
Teachers affiliates, the NEA has taken a more
militant approach to beating back reformers.
In July, the NEA successfully enacted a two-fold increase in
the member dues dedicated to political campaigning. The $10 a
member increase adds another $40 million to the union’s war chest,
easily boosting its position as one of the biggest donors in
American politics. Through its super-PAC — the recipient of $5.4
million in member funds since last year — the NEA is looking to
take advantage of the Citizens United ruling and further
leverage its prime role as an electoral big spender.
The NEA’s state affiliates are pouring millions into
combating school reform groups such as the tough-talking Michelle
Rhee’s StudentsFirst and the quieter American Federation for
Children, as well as beat back reform-minded governors and movement
conservatives opposed to public-sector unions. In Ohio, the NEA
affiliate there poured $5 million into something called We Are Ohio
as part of the successful repeal of the collective bargaining
ban.
In Idaho, the national union has ladled $157,000 to
Idahoans for Responsible
Education Reform, which has worked closely with the union’s Gem
State chapter to put up a voter referendum aimed at overturning a
series of reforms — including banning collective bargaining —
successfully championed this year by tough-talking Gov. Butch Otter
and the state’s school superintendent, Tom Luna. Meanwhile the
NEA’s Pennsylvania affiliate, which is battling against Gov. Tom
Corbett’s efforts to launch a new school choice initiative,
increased its political spending by 9 percent (to $14.8 million),
according to the union’s
LM-2 filing with the U.S. Department of Labor.
But it is the NEA’s efforts to cozy up to the Occupy Wall
Street crowd and other progressive groups that generally disdain
their center-left (and more often, school reform-minded)
counterparts that has become its latest strategy. Since its
2009-2010 fiscal year, the NEA and its affiliates have poured
$516,625 into progressive outfits in order to gain their support.
This included $46,625 to Progressive Majority (whose leadership
include former National Abortion Rights Action League big Gloria
Totten, and Service Employees International Union political
director Jon Youngdahl), and $15,000 to Good Jobs First, which pats
itself on the back for tracking tax breaks given to companies (even
as the NEA and the AFT have also feasted off public
coffers).
The biggest recipient of the
NEA’s largesse is ProgressNow, a St. Paul, Minn., grassroots
outfit started eight years ago by Howard Dean acolyte Bobby Clark
and Michael Huttner (a former Clinton administration official who
is as notorious for his
sparring with columnist Michelle Malkin as he is for his
evangelism for lefty causes). With a board featuring such Democrat
operatives as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s former chief of
staff, Susan McCue, and America Votes Executive Director Greg Speed
— ProgressNow and its 18 state chapters has made its bones by
focusing strictly on the state and local political mobilizing that
rivals such as MoveOn.org eschew. This makes it well-suited for the
kind of state-targeted efforts the NEA is undertaking to preserve
its influence.
The NEA, along with its bellicose Michigan affiliate,
handed over $20,000 to ProgressNow’s Michigan affiliate, during its
last fiscal year. ProgressNow, in turn, gave the union its money’s
worth by rallying its members to help successfully recall a state
representative, Paul Scott, whose success in passing an array of
school reform measures aroused the NEA’s ire. The fact that
ProgressNow and other progressive groups helped the NEA best Rhee’s
StudentsFirst (which backed Scott to the tune of $73,000) and
accuse her group of opposing gay rights, likely made the union even
more grateful.
The NEA’s Ohio affiliate tossed $20,000 to ProgressNow’s
Ohio branch, where it played a less-significant role in the repeal
of the state’s collective bargaining ban (except when one of its
memos declaring that its allies couldn’t count on what was an
eventual victory was
leaked to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent). But
given the successes, one can expect the NEA to provide ProgressNow
even more financial backing.
It wasn’t always this way. Unlike the rival AFT (which is
legendary for building coalitions with groups such as the
NAACP) the NEA has spent most of its 154-year history using its
ties to education establishment players such as the National
Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (a beneficiary $2.3
million in NEA largesse over the past seven years alone) to
influence
education policy. Over time, the union’s role (along with the
AFT) as the leading player in Democratic Party politics, along with
its war chests, armies of rank-and-file workers, relationships with
suburban school districts, and location in the Midwest far away
from reform hotbeds on the East and West Coasts, all but assured
that it would keep states and districts servile.
But while the NEA and AFT slept, the school reform
movement grew from a collection of Southern governors and big city
mayors to a wider movement. Their success in passing the No Child
Left Behind Act in 2001 marked the slow decline of the NEA’s
influence in education policy. As the school reform movement gained
traction, especially within the very Democratic Party circles the
NEA once dominated, the union took on a new strategy: Reaching
outside the cozy circle of the education establishment to build
ties to other elements within the Democratic Party’s activist
wing.
Between 2005-2006 and 2008-2009, the NEA has increased its
donations to nonprofits by nearly a six-fold, from $4 million to
$26 million. But it hasn’t worked out as well as the NEA expected.
The Center for the American Progress, which picked up $110,000 in
2008-2009 (and another $25,000 last year), has been one of the
foremost players in the school reform movement; other groups such
as Al Sharpton’s National Action Network has backed the expansion
of charter schools, one of the NEA’s bête noires.
Meanwhile the NEA’s ties to the ostensibly now-defunct Association
of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN, the subject of
yesterday’s Spectator
report), to which it gave $396,452, gave the union a black eye
after the group’s alleged voter fraud, advice on tax-dodging, and
other misdeeds came out two years ago.
While the NEA’s current efforts to curry progressives are
bearing some fruit so far, it may not last. It does nothing to win
over the average voter, who has no sympathy with teachers’ unions,
and are frustrated with the fact that
one out of every three fourth-graders is functionally
illiterate. Nor does it work wonders with centrist and liberal
Democrats, who are among the most supportive
of the reforms the union opposes. While they have been
unwilling to back collective bargaining bans, they have been just
as willing to team up more-conservative reformers and fiscally
conservative governors on ending the array of degree- and
seniority-based compensation, defined-benefit pensions, and
near-lifetime employment that has contributed to the woeful
performance of traditional public schools in improving student
achievement (and has saddled taxpayers at least $1.4 trillion in
pension deficits and unfunded retired teacher healthcare that will
take decades to pay down).
Meanwhile the NEA has to worry that progressives may
eventually catch on to the fact that the union is one of the very
fat cats these left-leaners detest, with 437 employees earning at
least $100,000 a year, according its 2010-2011
federal labor filing, four more than were on the payroll last
year; union president Van Roekel himself earned $460,060, a 16
percent increase over the previous year. The NEA’s own
inability to deal honestly with members about its fiscal
activities — including its unwillingness to explain how
two former employees siphoned off $227,626 over five years and
the collapse of its once-powerful
Indiana affiliate — makes the union seem no better than some
of the Wall Street outfits progressives decry.
In short, the NEA’s influence over American public
education will remain in decline.
