Category: Education

Thoughts upon Leaving San Diego

I returned Tuesday from eight days in San Diego, scene of the 147th Annual Meeting of the National Education Association.

NEA, with 3.2 million members, is the nation’s largest union. It holds its Annual Meeting over the Independence Day holiday every year in a variety of cities, returning to Washington in Presidential election years. The Annual Meeting typically brings together 15K-17K people; as a staff member, I am part of that number, but I am not a voting delegate.

The most remarkable feature of the Annual Meeting is the Representative Assembly. Every local within NEA is eligible to send a delegate to the RA, either on its own or (in smaller locals) by clustering with other locals, and members also elect some at-large delegates. The result is that the Representative Assembly typically runs between 9K and 10K voting delegates, making it the world’s largest deliberative assembly: think of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions combined, and then add 50% more delegates.

Unlike those venerable conventions, however, where state delegate chairs control who speaks, every NEA delegate is free to speak on any issue. (Fortunately, most do not. If every delegate spoke for two minutes even once, we’d be there for 300 hours!) So in addition to being the largest deliberative assembly in the world, it is also among the world’s most open.

(Although NEA is frequently painted as a liberal force, its members are far more evenly arranged along the political spectrum than its critics consider, and the delegates reflect that. Virtually every ideological movement is represented at the RA: at least two educators-for-life groups had space in the 2009 exhibit hall, and the wacky creationists had a booth there. Every year the Peace and Justice Caucus collects liberal social issues as if they were rare shells and then shows off their collection by advocating those issues as New Business Items and Legislative Amendments. Like the educators they represent, most delegates are more pragmatic than the extremes; most proposals from the ends of the spectrum lose.)

This year, NEA made an attempt to modernize its proceedings with some technological advancements. Many of the proceedings are posted on YouTube, and one of my favorites (which I had to miss because I had some NEOEA business to do during the RA) is the farewell speech of Bob Chanin, NEA’s longtime General Counsel. Chanin’s work with NEA began just as teacher unionism was heating up, and his 25-minute talk is an entertaining look at the past, present, and future of that movement. I recommend seeing it, and if I’ve done it right the YouTube version should appear here.

Some great quotes: on NEA’s decision to become a union, “NEA concluded that teaching is not akin to the clergy, that it is not unprofessional, unethical, or immoral for teachers to make a living wage, for teachers to have adequate fringe benefits, and most importantly, for teachers to have a voice in determining the conditions under which they spend every day of their working lives.”

On the opposition that NEA attracts from public-school critics: “The bad news (or, depending on your point of view, the good news) is that NEA and its affiliates will continue to be attacked by conservative and right-wing groups as long as we continue to be effective advocates for public education, for education employees and for human and civil rights.”

On the balance between education reform and union issues: “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.”

Charter Shools Should Report to Elected Boards

(Before heading off to San Diego, I sent the following to The Plain Dealer, which added it to their online blog page.)

Many of the problems separating House and Senate negotiators working on a new budget is a difference on the funding of Ohio’s charter schools. The House budget imposes new oversight requirements on charter schools and, perhaps anticipating that many will not be able to meet those requirements, provides less money for them. Those increased oversight provisions for Ohio’s charter schools are appropriate and necessary.

As a teachers’ union leader in two local school districts, I spent many years advocating for my members, and those activities frequently led me into conflicts with boards of education. And as a taxpayer in my home district, I have sometimes found it necessary to contact members of my local board of education regarding their public decisions. So although I have never served as a member of a local school board, I have had reason both as an employee and as a taxpayer to criticize the work done by members of local boards of education.

That said, I believe that their governance by elected boards of education is an important characteristic of public school districts and offers an example of the ways in which charter schools should be held more accountable. Many of the issues for which charter schools are sometimes criticized would be eliminated if the law required them to operate as public entities, and specifically, operating under the same open-meeting provisions as public boards of education.

One of the reasons for the creation of Ohio’s charter schools back in the nineties was the perceived need for schools that could innovate without excessive governmental interference. As worthy as this idea was, most voters want charter schools to be held accountable to the public in general and not just to the tiny community of families who avail themselves of their services. Because they are spending public dollars, charter schools should be subject to the same accountability provisions as traditional public schools. Their reporting to a locally-elected board of education conducting its business in public would be an important way to bring transparency and accountability to the operation of these schools.

Those that can’t operate accountably shouldn’t be allowed to remain in operation.

A Good Night for All of Us

(Note: Voting on Friday, May 5, Ohio Education Association Representative Assembly delegates elected Jim Timlin as OEA’s Secretary-Treasurer and re-elected Marsh Buckley as a National Education Association Director from Ohio. Both men are members of northeastern Ohio locals and the North Eastern Ohio Education Association.)

Voting results for the recent elections hadn’t even been officially announced last week when a friend from outside NEOEA congratulated me on the election results. “It’s a good night for you and your colleagues,” he told me.

I knew what he meant, of course. Candidates don’t win offices in the state’s largest public employee union without effective planning and leadership. Both candidates had good campaign plans, and NEOEA leaders did an effective job of making sure that NEOEA delegates voted. My friend was congratulating me on an outcome that my elected leaders had worked toward, and which I had supported (off hours, of couse) as a retired volunteer. My friend meant the compliment well, and I accepted it as graciously as I could; but he had it wrong.

The election of Jim and re-election of Marsh were a triumph for NEOEA only if they were the right choices for OEA. If somehow they prove to be the wrong choices for OEA over the next three years, northeastern Ohio members will suffer just as much as our colleagues throughout the rest of the state. Not that I expect that to happen: I’m sure they’ll serve well and make all of us proud. But my point is simple: NEOEA doesn’t win unless OEA wins.

There are those throughout OEA who fear NEOEA because our wealth and size create power. (More on that in another column some other time.) NEOEA’s delegation is the largest among OEA’s district associations, but it’s a highly diverse, independent-minded group. Since the ballot is secret, just holding onto the base is a challenge for most NEOEA candidates. And since we don’t have anywhere near a majority of the delegate votes, a candidate from NEOEA has to both energize his or her base and earn votes from other parts of the state. Both Jim and Marsh did that.

The point? Our candidates didn’t win because of NEOEA’s size and wealth. They won because they were strong candidates who ran good campaigns. The May 5 election wasn’t a victory of NEOEA over the rest of the state; it was a victory for all of us and for public education in Ohio.