PROFESSIONAL TEACHERS OR POLITICAL UNION?

PROFESSIONAL TEACHERS OR POLITICAL UNION?

“It’s in their DNA," Bailey said. “They can’t help themselves.”

Tracey Bailey and I were discussing teacher unions and their seeming drive to politicize education with partisan endorsements and controversial social issues. He is Director of Educational Policy for the Association of American Educators and was National Teacher of the Year in 1993; is extraordinarily articulate, and his command of his subject has enabled him to testify for the AAE before Congressional committees. We talked while he drove south on Interstate 95 and I hunched over my keyboard in Phoenix balancing a portable phone on my shoulder. I was trying to understand the differences between the NEA and AFT on the one hand and the regional teacher associations on the other for which the AAE is a national umbrella.

"The big turning point was in the early seventies," Bailey said. Before that time, the NEA had been more loosely organized, and a teacher could belong to a local organization not affiliated with the national. When the American Federation of Teachers suddenly began drawing members away from the NEA, it took a more assertive approach to organizing.

“The trigger really was what happened to the dues a teacher paid, changing to what was called unified dues. This meant that like it or not, a large portion of your local dues would go to the national teacher union.