By Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer, Researh: William Heuslein • Reprinted by Permission of Forbes Magazine © Forbes, Inc., 1995
April 1995 – National Extortion Association? The National Education Association didn’t like Forbes’ nickname for it in our June 7, 1993 cover story. But we were just being objective about this strange institutional mutant, part labor union, part political faction, and its ruthless use of power in pursuit of perquisites.
The largest and richest American union, with 2.2 million members and an estimated $785 million in revenues, the NEA is also consistently the most powerful presence at the Democratic National Convention, with almost one out of eight delegates in 1992. Those delegates are the key. To a largely unrecognized extent, the NEA is a creature of the dark Democratic night – the shadow that labor union special interests have cast over state and federal governments at least since 1954, the last year that Republicans controlled House, Senate and White House.
While capitalizing on the American reverence for schooling, the NEA is also vitally dependent on extraordinary legal privileges it gained in that period, when it was transformed from a century-old “tea and crumpets” professional association into a brass-knuckled labor union. But what politics creates, politics can destroy. With the epochal Republican election victories in November, the NEA nightmare could be dispelled.
About time, too. The rise of the modern NEA has exactly coincided with what critics have called the 1963-80 “Great Decline” of the American education system. This decline notoriously affects performance (the proportion of all 17-year-olds scoring 700-plus verbal or math SATs fell by almost half; math has rebounded, verbal has never recovered). But also, even more calamitous and continuous, it affects productivity (inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending reached $5,971 in 1993, up almost a third in ten years and nearly three times the level in 1960).
The teachers union has emerged as the major obstacle to school reform, with its California affiliate spending an astounding $12 million to defeat the 1993 Proposition 174 voucher proposal. In its spare time the union fights attempts to limit taxes, to cut government spending and even to curb illegal immigration. Its agenda, in short, is more political than educational.
Like all unions, the NEA is a legally sanctioned attempt to monopolize a particular labor supply. But, unlike private sector unions, the NEA is a monopoly on top of a monopoly: The only consumer is the government-dominated kindergarten-to-12th-grade education industry. This relationship gives the NEA privileged access to public policymaking – arguably unconstitutionally – and an indisputable incentive to develop its political muscle.
So obvious is this potential for abuse that public sector unionization was long viewed as unthinkable even by labor allies like Franklin D. Roosevelt. But these scruples were abandoned around 1960. In return for union support, the Kennedy Administration allowed federal employee collective bargaining. State governments capitulated about the same time.
Coming out of a labor-dominated state, NEA President Keith Geiger, Executive Director Donald Cameron and other members of the tight-knit “Michigan Mafia” were able to convert the NEA from professional association into union – so slickly that press, public and even some NEA members still appear unaware of what has happened.
The NEA’s peculiarly deceptive structure helps keep this distressing truth from the American public. Although the NEA is in fact highly centralized, its public face is usually one of the 13,000 local-level or 52 state-level affiliates, to which each individual member must also belong.
The NEA’s interlock with the Democratic Party has developed equally adroitly. It gave its first presidential endorsement only in 1976, to Jimmy Carter, in return for his creating the federal Department of Education, a longstanding union goal. But in the 1994 election cycle, NEA-PAC gave $4.4 million, 98.7% to Democrats. And this was dwarfed by state-level affiliates’ contributions – Forbes’ 1994 estimate, extrapolating from four representative states: $35 million. For the Democrats, the NEA has emerged as one of the biggest givers – along with the trial lawyers and the Teamsters.
And the NEA puts its mouthpieces where its money is. NEA operatives moved directly into key spots surrounding the Clinton administration: Debra DeLee from NEA-PAC to acting head of the Democratic National Committee (she will organize the next Democratic convention); Sharon Porter Robinson, director of NEA’s research arm, to head of research at the Department of Education.
Accompanied by DeLee, Hillary Clinton gave the keynote address at last year’s NEA annual Representative Assembly, boosting her health care plan. At this love feast, Keith Geiger presented the First Lady with an award named after an earlier NEA president.
Assembly delegates further demonstrated their noneducational zealotry by voting to boycott Florida orange juice unless the state’s Department of Citrus stopped sponsoring Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. (It did.) Limbaugh associates express puzzlement because their man had not, by Limbaugh standards, been particularly anti-NEA. They speculate that the move was part of a wider Democratic campaign linked to President Clinton’s June 24 KMOX-St. Louis radio outburst against Limbaugh and other talk show tormentors.
(Delegates also wanted to retaliate against Forbes for its cover story. Geiger announced amid cheers that “Forbes has already been purged” from the list of discount subscriptions offered to NEA members.)
At the beginning of 1995 the NEA can best be described as unbowed but bloody. The school voucher movement and a general public disenchantment with the public school system have landed painful blows. The Republican victory in the November 1994 elections deprives the union of its staunchest sponsors in Congress. NEA’s strategic problem is acute: It must resist threats to the government school cartel everywhere; it can afford to lose nowhere. Give parents choice almost anywhere, and the dam breaks. The union panjandrums know this. The strain is starting to show.
The teacher union can still win victories. It can take over school boards, as it did last year in San Jose’s Union School District in order to divert land sale proceeds to teacher salaries, and in Virginia Beach, where it successfully – and typically – smeared an antiunion candidate for the school board as a member of the “Religious Right.” (The union candidate, who reportedly raised a remarkable $75,000 from 15 NEA state affiliates, subsequently turned out to have a bogus Ph.D. and has been convicted by a jury of campaign violations.) It can intimidate New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman, according to reports, into delaying her voucher plans for Jersey City’s troubled school system.
But although the union did eventually defeat California’s Proposition 174, aided by an unscrupulous whispering campaign that the measure would open suburban schools to inner-city blacks, it spent so much money fighting the voucher proposition that it could not play its usual role in last November’s elections. At one point it seemed possible that the head of the NEA’s affiliate would be the next Democratic governor in Alabama –where some 40% of the legislature were teachers, ex-teachers or teachers’ spouses. In fact, Republican Fob James won, in part by capitalizing on education system difficulties.
And in Michigan, where the much-feared NEA affiliate directly confronted Governor John Engler over school reform, it not only disastrously failed to defeat him but also became a political issue itself, along with its captive insurance monopoly. As a result, several of its legal privileges have been stripped away.
The NEA is finally on the defensive. Particularly intriguing is the teacher union’s defeat over California’s Proposition 187, aimed at curtailing education and welfare spending on illegal immigrants. Regardless of the merits of immigration, the presence of some four million illegal immigrants in the country quite obviously makes life difficult for classroom teachers. Yet the NEA’s California Teachers Association affiliate was the largest single donor to the ludicrously misnamed Taxpayers Against Proposition 187. Along with the California public employees union and a Mexican-owned Spanish-language TV network, it provided 80% of funds raised.
The union bosses’ stand appears to be a matter of pure political dogma. The NEA Assembly 1994 resolutions mentioned immigration only to call for making it easier. Another NEA resolution called for taxpayer funding to maintain the native languages of students “before and after” they learn English – apparently envisaging the creation of permanent linguistic minorities.
But the rank and file don’t like it. “There’s very widespread frustration in the classrooms over illegal immigration,” says Ezola Foster, a celebrated black teacher and author from Los Angeles (What’s Right For All Americans, due this month from WRS Publishing), who supported Proposition 187. “There’s lots of low morale in my school because of the union position.... They know their members are hurting because of overcrowding and bilingual education. They never do anything to help.”
Foster says union officials actively favor bilingual education, which brings a $5,000 salary increment for bilingual teachers. She says they collude with school administrators to punish any teacher who persists in complaining. Only California’s agency shop rule keeps her – and many others – in the union at all.
But political conflict is only one aspect of the NEA’s activities. Forbes has found that its influence extends much further, into issues and institutions that at first sight appear unrelated.
Funding equalization
Education arguments that are supposedly about equity for students have a funny habit of turning out to be about earnings for teachers. Example: funding equalization – the ingenious theory that different localities’ differing spending denies “equal protection” to students and must therefore be unconstitutional.
At the federal level, the Supreme Court rejected this claim in 1974. But at the state level, it has worked some 15 times. Sometimes it has turned politics upside down, as in Texas and New Jersey. Wherever the claim has been upheld, it has led to an increase in jobs in the educational system and additional dues for the NEA.
“Teachers unions have supported these cases because they lead to increased spending,” says University of Rochester economist Eric Hanushek. “The court cases are carbon-copied. The increase goes toward things like teacher salaries, reducing class size, specialized programs that add personnel.”
Thus the $36.5 million extra state aid designated to equalize Boston schools over three years after a recent court decision was effectively beaten by an $80 million teacher wage and benefit contract. “We want to make sure the money goes for real reform, not for teacher pay raises,” Governor William Weld is reported as saying. But legislative efforts to keep equalization funds out of teachers’ pockets failed.
Er - does the increased spending produce (ahem!) equality of results? There’s absolutely no evidence that it does anything more than increase taxes and expand the educational bureaucracy. “Funding is not related to school quality,” says Hanushek, editor of the Brookings Institution book Making Schools Work, which argues the point at length.
The teachers union’s response: to join in a new round of litigation aimed at educational “adequacy” – not just equal but higher spending in disadvantaged areas.
Outcome-Based Education
Judged by letters and calls to Forbes, no aspect of current education policy has aroused more intense grassroots parental concern than “OBE.” It particularly alarms parents because it downgrades content matter in favor of nebulous “outcomes” like “thinking skills,” “group learning” and associated educrat gobbledygook. Other “outcomes,” such as becoming “concerned stewards of the global environment” and “demonstrating respect for the dignity, worth, contributions and equal rights of each person,” are clearly not educational at all, but in the American context today, nakedly political. Conservative and religious parents suspect that their values are under attack. They are probably right.
The teachers union did not invent OBE. Paradoxically, it seems to have begun as a Reagan Administration attempt to enforce standards that (as often happens to education reform efforts) was hijacked and turned inside out. OBE is now merely yet another of the top-down panaceas that sweep across America’s socialized education system – just like the Soviet Union’s attempts to solve its perpetual farm crisis by nostrums like expanding into virgin lands. But OBE gets the union’s tenacious support, with opponents accused of belonging to the dreaded “Religious Right.” The head of the NEA’s Pennsylvania affiliate calls them “voucher vultures…for whom OBE stands for Opportunity to Bash Education.”
One reason for the union’s vehemence: OBE is labor-intensive and yet usually untestable. (In fact, in fully implemented OBE schemes, grades and credits could be abolished. This would reduce embarrassing questions about teacher performance.) But let’s be fair. Another reason is certainly the NEA’s genuine emotional commitment to the elitist, progressive, social-engineering culture that pervades America’s government-cartelized education establishment.
Whole Language
Also apparently suffusing the culture of the education establishment is a weird aversion to explicitly teaching phonics, the letters and syllables that build up to words. The NEA, by contrast, favors the system by which children are supposed to learn by intuiting entire words in context – an approach called “Whole Language” in its latest incarnation –for example, publishing four how-to books on the subject. Astonishingly, this war has been going back and forth for decades.
Parents dislike Whole Language because it downgrades accuracy – children are allowed to approximate meanings – and also because it seems not to work: San Diego schools, for instance, found that the percentage of first-graders scoring above the median on reading tests dropped by half after 18 months of Whole Language instruction. And a study of two schools by University of Georgia Professor Stephen Stahl shows that children at the school using traditional instruction far outperformed those at the Whole Language school. “All the evidence shows that direct and systematic phonics instruction improves reading skills when added to programs that don’t use it,” says reading authority Patrick Groff of San Diego State University.
Yet Whole Language is increasingly inescapable: Many states have actually mandated its use. Grassroots phonics groups like the National Right to Read Foundation have sprung up in protest.
The NEA likes Whole Language because of the easier standards and because of its educrat loyalties.
Bottom line: The government-monopoly education system supported and dominated by the NEA forces these essentially technical issues of pedagogy to be fought out in the political arena. Parents who favor different standards and different methods but who lack the means to send their kids to private schools have no recourse but to do wasteful political battle with the union.
Parent Teachers Association
In many parts of the country, the PTA has degenerated into little more than an auxiliary of the NEA. “You were the voice of California children!” Pat Dingsdale, president of the California PTA, told its convention to great applause last year. “PTA volunteers defeated Proposition 174; all the California Teachers Association did was put up the money.”
At least, that’s what Dingsdale said according to notes kept by Charlene K. Haar, coauthor with Myron Lieberman and Leo Troy, of The NEA and AFT: Teacher Unions in Power and Politics (ProActive Publications) and author of a forthcoming book about the PTA. Dingsdale herself vehemently denied to Forbes that she made the statement. But she flatly refused to let us see the convention video.
In fact, it is perfectly clear from leaked documents that the PTA slavishly followed the teachers union lead on the school choice initiative. The PTA even joined in the controversial effort to keep the measure off the ballot altogether by harassing its supporters as they tried to gather petition signatures. So committed is the PTA to union positions that it has been prepared to alienate its own constituency. For example, it has been willing to alienate Catholic parents, who can’t see why their tax dollars should not be used in Catholic schools. This has contributed to the PTA’s continuing membership slump, from 12 million in 1966 to 7 million today.
So why is Dingsdale so sensitive? Like the NEA itself, the PTA presents a very different local face. Most PTA members spend their time on bake sales for their schools. Many might be shocked to find the fraction of their $8 or so dues that is quietly diverted to the state and national bureaucracies – it adds up to at least $11 million a year – actually finances an auxiliary regiment in the NEA’s partisan crusade.
The IRS might be shocked, too. Under the murky law governing 501(c)(3) organizations, the PTA is supposedly barred from all but “insubstantial” lobbying on issues like Proposition 174 and elsewhere.
It seems quite clear that the PTAs are in widespread violation of this regulation. “They attribute almost nothing to lobbying expense, but virtually every session I attended was about their legislative agenda,” says Haar, who was recently asked to leave both the Virginia and Maryland PTA state conventions despite her press credentials. (Asked about Haar’s eviction, a Virginia PTA spokeswoman told Forbes: “We have rules and regulations.”)
And what exactly is the role in Washington of the PTA’s “Director of Government Relations” Arnold Fege (reported salary: $76,000) and his three-person staff? Recently Fege was quoted complaining that tax-free status often inhibits children’s advocates from direct political action.
But he seems to manage anyway. We have Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s word for it. In a letter in Education Week this fall, the Massachusetts Democrat explicitly credited the PTA with “generating and reinforcing support” for two Clinton Administration education bills, defeating voucher and school prayer amendments, and helping in the confirmation of officials like former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders. Said Kennedy: “We could not have done it without the PTA.”
The PTA has long been in the NEA’s pocket – literally: It rented space from the NEA for years before World War II, and its “government relations” staff worked out of NEA’s Washington headquarters until 1990. Once the PTA’s teacher members became unionized, it was inevitable that they would dominate the less organized parents. As early as 1968, teacher pressure forced the PTA to direct that its affiliates should be “neutral” in teacher strikes.
Parents can still make a difference. Greenwich, Connecticut, mother and former media consultant Kay Wall campaigned effectively against OBE while president of her PTA local. Other area locals have seceded to escape educrat control.
Perhaps the PTA should return to its original policy after its 1897 founding and exclude teachers from its membership. Or change its name – to Poodle Teachers Association.
American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)
With 33 million members and $360 million total revenues, AARP is more than half as big as the Catholic Church in the U.S. Like NEA, it is notoriously committed to liberal policy goals, even when alienating its members (Forbes, Nov. 25, 1991).
Less obvious is AARP’s intimate interlock with the teacher union movement. AARP was originally founded by a teacher. Its current president and president-elect were previously involved with state retired-teacher associations. Nine of its 21 directors are former educators, including at least one ex-president of an NEA affiliate.
Many AARP staffers “come out of the education world,” according to an internal source. For example, James Butler, now head of AARP/VOTE, the association’s voter mobilization education program, is a former longtime NEA state and regional bureaucrat. Bill Hayward of AARP/VOTE in California was for 20 years with the California Teachers Association, and is proud of the large numbers of CTA alumni he has brought into his AARP arm. AARP’s California State Legislative Committee is dominated by a “strong leadership cadre” of teachers.
No surprise that AARP echoed the NEA support for Clinton-style health reform – and its opposition to Proposition 174
American Federation of Teachers
In late 1994 rumors were rife of an imminent merger between the NEA and its main rival, the 875,000-member, $140-million-plus (revenues) American Federation of Teachers and its state affiliates. NEA critics were appalled. Not only would a merger enormously enhance NEA power, but it would presumably end the AFT’s (relative) openness to reform – a tradition very personally identified with its brilliant and cunning president, Albert Shanker. (This tradition is arguably not only relative but mainly rhetorical: AFT affiliates behave much like NEA affiliates and the union is equally devoted to Democrats.)
Well, this particular apple isn’t falling into the NEA’s lap anytime soon. Merger talks dramatically collapsed December 19. The AFT cited the NEA’s mandatory minority quotas and its unwieldy, centralized governing structure, which leaves the union bureaucrats in control.
But Shanker may well have cited the decisive reason in his oration to the AFT annual conference last summer.
The merged union, he said, “would be unlike any other union that now exists in this country or that ever existed.... If the organization is viewed as a big monster, and the NEA already is, by not just the right wing but by some people who are sort of near-center [probably a reference to Forbes], because of its size, does that organization become a target? . . . That’s a real danger.”
As Shanker well knows, the “monster” is indeed at last in danger. The NEA nightmare can be dispelled by light in the form of victorious Republicans at the federal and state levels. Here’s how:
➢ Ensure “Right to Work.” Bar “agency shop” laws that compel nonunion members to pan public sector unions for the alleged cost of collective bargaining. This could be done either through more state right-to-work laws (there are currently 21) or through a federal right-to-work law reversing the U.S. Supreme Court’s questionable 1977 Abood ruling. This ruling held that nonunion public employees had to pay their “fair share” of a union’s collective bargaining costs, but not for its political and ideological activities. (Although some subjects like math could command more than union rates.) Result: continuing hand-to-hand combat between the teacher unions and litigants backed by the indefatigable National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation about how much union activity is collective bargaining.
The teacher union would still exist under Right To Work. But it might turn out that many teachers don’t want to pay $400 to $600 dues a year.
➢ Reform public sector collective bargaining statutes. The teacher union’s monopoly bargaining privilege is the basis of its power – even in Right To Work states, nonmembers cannot negotiate their own terms. But in the 1960s rush to recognize most public sector unions, what legal scholars regard as a serious constitutional objection was never answered. Most public sector unions inevitably, end up bargaining policy with government. Other concerned groups are ignored – such parties as students, parents and taxpayers. This may well be a Federal Equal Protection violation.
A state level approach to this problem: Allow teachers the right to opt out of union contracts, as attempted in Michigan in 1993 and, currently, and more comprehensively, in Indiana. Or allow school boards to opt out of mandated collective bargaining.
➢ End “unfunded mandates.” A common union-backed “school reform” tactic is the “unfunded mandate” – state legislation that end-runs local voters to impose duties and costs on school districts. “Massachusetts’ 1993 reform law imposed teacher protections like restrictions on the school board authority, to hire and fire,” grumps Peter Rogers, a disgruntled former chairman of the Nahant school board management study committee. But the tactic is wearing thin: New York Governor George Pataki has just explicitly denounced it.
➢ End NEA headquarters property tax exemption. Unique among unions, this anomaly derives from the federal charter the NEA received in its professional association days – and is worth some $2 million a year, almost half NEA-PAC’s spending.
D.C. Mayor Marion Barry needs the money.
➢ End taxpayer funding of retirement benefits for union staff. Judging by Indiana’s example, this could be worth as much as $4.6 million annually to the teacher union. Rhode Island General Treasurer Nancy J. Mayer says such legislation last year saved her state $13 million. The NEA affiliate suit challenging the law has backfired: One local chapter is withholding dues to its parent in protest against union financing of the appeal.
➢ End release time with pay for teachers to conduct union business. Currently, bargained into union contracts far in excess of private-sector equivalents, this could be restricted at the state level.
➢ End teacher tenure – allow merit pay. Unions block recognizing teachers’ individual performance because it divides their flock. California Governor Pete Wilson has recently, advocated both.
➢ End government agencies’ collection of PAC contributions for private organizations. Currently, many school districts agree to deduct union PAC contributions from payrolls, cutting NEA fundraising costs and requiring individual teachers to take positive, sometimes difficult, steps to opt out.
➢ End taxpayer funding of union-sponsored National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. The federal government has already coughed up $20 million, and several states have also kicked in. Author Myron Lieberman, senior research scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio, says that the teacher unions have already, repeatedly opposed standardized testing of teachers and students, and predicts that the “standards” will simply be an excuse to jack up salaries.
➢ Give teeth to antistrike laws. Attempts to prohibit teacher strikes have been so ineffective that paradoxically strikes are at least as common in the 40 states where they are illegal. But real penalties can be imposed: A Michigan law now docks teacher pay for every day on strike – and in Iowa, not just the public employer but any district resident can sue if unions break no-strike agreements…so they don’t.
➢ Apply private-sector-type restrictions to union encroachment on management. Public sector exemption often means that teachers, spouses of teachers and even spouses of union officials can sit on school boards and vote on salary increases – regardless of any conflict of interest.
➢ Abolish Goals 2000. The NEA was intimately involved in this Clinton Administration initiative. Arguably the groundwork for federal curriculum control, Goals 2000 dangles funds before states in return for adopting OBE-ish standards – and originally tried to discourage phonics.
➢ Abolish the U.S. Department of Education. The NEA wanted this federal toehold. Chop it off. 
