'AN INSTITION AT RISK'
The National Education Association has good reason to fear another trade group's growth
BY JOE ENGE

Joe Enge serves as an education analyst with NPRI, as chairman of EdWatch Nevada, and as a member of the Carson City School Board. Author of two world history textbooks, Joe was a high school teacher in Nevada from 1988 to 2006 and a Fulbright teacher to the former Soviet Union. You can read more of his articles at www.edwatchnevada.com

The National Education Association (NEA) has valid reasons to fear the growth of the Association of American Educators (AAE), which is nonunion, for teacher membership. Aside from offering an alternative to partisan politics and non-educational agendas of the teacher labor unions, the AAE poses a greater threat. The following excerpt from an AAE publication explains exactly why.

A decade ago, the National Education Association (NEA) retained the Kamber Group, a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm, to conduct an internal study to determine, among other things, why the NEA was not attracting the new generation of teachers entering the field of education. The NEA must have been in dismay by the results of the report, which the Kamber Group entitled "An Institution at Risk."

The study found that young teachers view themselves as professional and do not relate to labor unions or wish to be associated with them. This presents a real problem for the NEA, which is not just a union, but the nation's largest labor union. Compounding the NEA's problem is the fact that there will be more new teachers hired in the next few years than in the past two decades because of retiring "baby boomer" teachers. In addition, the Kamber report shows that these new millennium teachers like many of the reform ideas that are anathema to the NEA, such as performance pay tied to accountability tests. Just the opposite, the NEA is, for better or worse, married to a one-size-fits-all salary structure for teachers and is against almost all accountability measures.

In short, the report summarized that in order to reach the new generation of teachers, NEA must begin projecting a "more professional image." That was a decade ago. What has been the NEA's response? It has been busily trying to merge its state affiliates with the state affiliates of the nation's other large teacher union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), a division of the AFL/CIO. This seems to fly in the face of the Kamber Group recommendation. How does merging with an organized labor coalition like the AFL/CIO project a "more professional image?" As one member of the Florida NEA affiliate, which recently merged with the AFT group, put it, "I thought we were teachers, not Teamsters."

Enter the Association of American Educators, (AAE). At the about the same time the NEA was seeing the "hand writing on the wall," a group of nationally recognized educators came together to form a new kind of teacher's association. They felt the two unions had grown monolithic and were leading our public school enterprise in the wrong direction. This group of teachers, which includes a number of National Teachers of the Year, felt it was time for a new voice speaking for mainstream teachers in America.

"Something had to be done," said Gary Beckner, AAE's Executive Director, "and we didn't feel the unions were capable of morphing back zinto a truly professional voice for teachers, as the Kamber Group suggested."

AAE was formally incorporated as a nonprofit professional educators association, offering many of the same benefits to teachers that the teacher unions provide, such as liability insurance - but at a fraction of the cost and without the partisan politics and controversial social agendas. Beckner says, "Teachers are indeed teachers by calling, but they can only be professionals by choice."

That message seems to resonate with the new generation of teachers, as well as with those veterans who feel disenfranchised by the unions. AAE is the fastest growing national nonunion teachers association in America and is leading the effort to create professional career options for teachers, unlike the other organizations that merely protect the status quo.

While the NEA has embraced the losing tactic of disinformation, the AAE continues to grow. There are good reasons why the best and the brightest in teaching are joining the AAE. Give a gift that counts this Christmas by pointing teachers to the AAE at www.aaeteachers.org or e-mail info@aaeteachers.org. It's better than an apple and lasts longer. LW