Larry Sand: The Nation’s Biggest Union Finds Itself in a Big Hole and Keeps Digging

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With his impeccable insight, Larry Sand has tied up the problems with the NEA into a neat little package.   He references two of the most notable names in education reform scene today, Terry Moe and Mike Antonucci.    

While Terry Moe’s book, Special Interest, predicts an earthquake which will completely change the fact of education reform, Mike Antonucci commented in a private educational conference in 2003, that the NEA was like a great stone rolling downhill, which would eventually crash and break apart.  

With Act 10 in Wisconsin granting one of the country’s most heavily-unionized states Right to Work privileges for teachers, NEA union officials are going to have a more difficult time keeping their title as the nation’s largest labor union. 

In his excellent book, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and Americas Public Schools, published a little more than a year ago, Terry Moe posited that the teachers unions would meet their end via two routes – Democrats joining Republicans, thus making education reform a bipartisan issue and the overwhelming, inevitable ascendance of online learning. Though no timetable was set forth by Moe, he didn’t think this was going to happen in 2012. However about a month ago, Mike Antonucci’s weekly Communiqué had some very pointed words from the National Education Association.

After a year of unprecedented membership losses driven by economic stresses and political attacks, the National Education Association stands at a crossroads. Unlike in the past, our shrinking membership is not the sole product of a down economy from which we could expect to eventually recover. The forces impacting us are so strong that they have indelibly changed our industry, the educational system, and society at large. Things will never go back to the way they were. Attacks on collective bargaining and the role of the union, the nation’s changing demographics, education reform efforts, and an explosion in the use of education technology and online learning have radically changed the role of educators and the system of educating our nation’s students.

We now see that Moe’s words were indeed prophetic. The NEA admits they are in big trouble and are getting it from all ends. They are losing members, hemorrhaging money and the education empire they run in most states is alienating the public. A Gallup poll released in June found,

Americans’ confidence in public schools is down five percentage points from last year, with 29% expressing “a great deal†or “quite a lot†of confidence in them. That establishes a new low in public school confidence from the 33% measured in Gallup’s 2007 and 2008 Confidence in Institutions polls. The high was 58% the first time Gallup included public schools, in 1973.

So are we going to see a kinder and gentler teachers union? Are we going to be blessed with a union that really cares about kids, and not just indulges in lip service?

 

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