Will Teachers Save Public Schools?
As alternatives like vouchers and charter schools gain momentum, time may be running out
While many Americans spent the Fourth of July weekend barbecuing and watching fireworks, Ken Swanson, a veteran sixth-grade teacher from Belvidere, Ill., was at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. He joined teachers from throughout the nation at a meeting whose outcome demonstrated the uncertain fate of reform in public education.
The 42-year-old Cubs fan and elected representative to the National Education Association had gathered with the other 9,714 local delegates of the giant teachers union to vote on a plan of historic proportions--the merger of the NEA with its archrival, the American Federation of Teachers. But rather than affirming four years of negotiations, as the NEA's national leaders had expected they would, Swanson and other delegates resoundingly rejected the merger: 67 percent of the delegates' votes were needed to approve it, but it won only 42 percent. The election's outcome was an extraordinary rebuke to the NEA's leaders and has far-reaching consequences for American education.
Frustration with public schools has mounted in the 1990s, and the number of charter schools and other alternatives to traditional public schooling has risen steadily. Conservatives have long backed such reforms. But now others are adding their support, including African-American leaders troubled by the quality of education minority students receive in urban school systems. Combining the NEA's 2.4 million members and the AFT's 975,000 into a single organization--a mega-union representing 80 percent of the nation's teachers--would have ended a "wasteful rivalry" between the two organizations, their leaders argued, and would have created a more powerful defense against public education's critics.
The NEA and AFT are already the two most influential organizations in American education, with huge memberships and vast resources. But the unions are widely perceived as barriers to the improvement of public education, especially in teaching. And despite the unions' strength, the advocates of alternatives to traditional public schools have been gaining ground. For example, a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows that 41 percent of the public believes unions to be part of the problem in public education. If the teachers unions don't embrace serious reform, the champions of charters, vouchers, and other market-based alternatives will gain even more of an upper hand.
Inertia is the enemy. The unions' national leaders understand this reality. "We cannot go on denying responsibility for school quality," Robert Chase, the president of the NEA, declared in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., 18 months ago. "We must revitalize our public schools from within or they will be dismantled from without." A public relations study done for the NEA warned that inertia was the union's worst enemy: If the union fails to act in the name of reform, the study said, it risks "further marginalization and possibly even organizational death."
Since his Press Club speech, Chase, a burly, soft-spoken former social studies teacher from Danbury, Conn., has urged his rank and file to shift from old-style industrial unionism, with its emphasis on wages, hours, and working conditions, to a "new unionism" that emphasizes high-quality teachers and high-quality schools. To Chase, the biggest challenge facing the teachers unions today is whether they can bring about real reform before alternatives become so widespread that the traditional public system is relegated to a secondary status. Chase viewed the merger as the most important step the unions could take to meet that challenge.
advertisement
