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.
The refusal of the NEA's delegates to back the merger plan makes plain just how difficult it will be for Chase to persuade his 52 state affiliates and 13,250 locals to back tenure reform, public-school choice, and other increasingly popular changes. Most of the delegates who rejected the merger did so primarily because they believed it would have decreased the power of the NEA's local memberships.
NEA officials like Robert Gilchrist, the past president of the Iowa Education Association and a vocal merger critic, insist that the vote didn't undercut Chase's credibility with the rank and file. And Chase himself notes that, in a separate vote, the NEA delegates supported the merging of state and local affiliates of the two unions.
No second term? But others say that Chase was privately dismayed by the size of the vote against the merger and that there's a good chance he won't be returned to a second, three-year term next summer. Chase responds: "I've already announced for next year; the campaign has begun."
While only a tiny fraction of NEA's locals have adopted significant reforms, plenty of state and local leaders have argued for them. And there have been some encouraging signs of wider change: 500 NEA union representatives last spring gathered in Columbus, Ohio, to learn about a "peer review" program that places both new teachers and failing veteran teachers under the tutelage of mentor teachers. The mentors, in turn, have the power to recommend the removal of underperformers from the classroom (though they don't do so often). In Seattle, the union has permitted schools to begin selecting their own teachers and to link teachers' evaluations to their students' achievement. Still, in many quarters there is intense opposition to any talk of new unionism.
Chase hasn't been helped by the fact that AFT President Sandra Feldman has done little about teacher union reforms since taking office after Albert Shanker's death a year and a half ago. Instead, while professing a commitment to teacher reforms, Feldman has frequently attacked vouchers and other "threats" to public education. She plans to present a resolution on teacher quality to the AFT convention delegates later this month, but the resolution has little edge: It calls for tougher entrance standards in teaching and peer review, but sidesteps the key issues of performance pay and seniority-based staffing.
Tokenism toward teacher reforms isn't likely to do the unions--or public education--much good. An increasing number of traditional public-school supporters are now becoming advocates of vouchers, charters, and other competitive reforms. In the Senate, eight Democrats, including Dianne Feinstein of California, sided with the Republican leadership last month, approving legislation that would permit modest tax-free educational savings accounts for students in either public or private schools. The bill would also give states financial incentives to institute performance-based pay and competency testing for teachers.
Teacher unions have had a longstanding role in shaping the Democratic Party's education platforms. But the merger defeat may also place that in jeopardy. "Among the public there is a rejection of the system as now designed," says Sen. Bob Torricelli of New Jersey, who is co-chairman of the committee that seeks to elect Democrats to the Senate. "But the movement for reform may be understood last by those in the classroom. They could find themselves out of the process. All of us are not going to wait." Torricelli cosponsored the education savings legislation in the Senate.
Congress plans to forward the education savings bill this week to President Clinton, who has vowed to veto it on grounds it amounts to a federal subsidy of private and parochial schools. Clinton has promoted a range of reforms to strengthen public schools, from higher and tougher standards to performance-based pay and other teacher reforms that clash with union policies. He has drawn the line, however, at backing reforms that would siphon public monies away from public schools.
No deal. Clinton's opposition to the education savings bill is so strong that he recently turned down a GOP offer of support for his own reform proposals in return for his signing the bill, according to a senator involved in the negotiations. Clinton's reform proposal would provide federal funding for 100,000 new teachers and $22 billion in bonds for new schools construction. White House spokesman Joe Lockhart denied that the White House received an "explicit" offer from Republicans on school bonds and funds for new teachers, but said there was a "very high degree of probability" that the White House would reject any deal from Republicans that forced it to accept education savings accounts.
Congressional Republicans say they aren't very troubled by Clinton's likely veto. Sensing voters' frustration with public education, they are eager to use the veto against the president and the Democratic party. Says Rep. Mark Neumann of Wisconsin, who is challenging incumbent Democratic freshman Sen. Russ Feingold: "Education is the No. 1 issue when we discuss social policy." Neumann plans to run television and radio ads accusing Feingold of denying families an opportunity to save for their kids' educations.
The national leaders of the NEA and AFT face a difficult future. They can fight competitive alternatives to traditional public schools. But in the absence of major reforms that restore confidence in the traditional school system, their battles won't amount to much more than a rear-guard action.
Public education's troubles Over half of the 1,795 teacher candidates in Massachusetts failed a test of basic skills. An international study found that the longer U.S. students stay in school, the further they fall behind their counterparts abroad.
Recent milestones June 9: Financier Theodore Forstmann and retailing heir John Walton pledge $100 million to establish private voucher programs in cities. June 10: The Wisconsin Supreme Court upholds the use of vouchers to send low-income Milwaukee students to parochial schools.
This story appears in the July 20, 1998 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.