Next NEA leader's first task: Win back public - Caitlin Emma - POLITICO.com:

Next NEA leader's first task: Win back public

The new president of the largest teachers union in the country will become the voice of roughly 3 million teachers at perhaps the most critical moment in the National Education Association’s history.

First item on the agenda: Win back the public.

NEA's Lily Garcia on Common Core

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Union watchers say the newly elected Lily Eskelsen García — a former school cafeteria worker teacher, folk singer and Utah teacher of the year — has a “hell of a job” ahead of her. She faces court cases challenging teacher tenure and job protections, the defection of historically loyal Democrats, growing apprehension over the Common Core, diminishing ranks, public relations campaigns painting her union as greedy and a complicated chessboard of state and local members with a variety of interests.

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Eskelsen García, elected Friday, has big plans: She wants to further shift the union away from its longstanding and reflexive support of Democrats — which it has already begun. She wants to banish what she says is a loaded word — tenure. And she wants to lead a campaign against high-stakes decision-making based on test scores at the same time she firms up her union’s support of the Common Core.

But to do any of it, she has to make clear not just what the union is against, but what it’s for, said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform.

In an interview with POLITICO, Eskelsen García said indeed, the union must be clear about its agenda.

“People will take a bad idea if we don’t offer them something better,” she said.

DRAWING BATTLE LINES

At the union’s annual convention last week in Denver, where Eskelsen García was officially elected, some teachers said it’s time for a leader who will play hardball with the feds and push back against Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s agenda, which includes evaluating teachers in part by student test scores and supporting the growth of charter schools, often staffed by non-union teachers.

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“We need a fresh face for the NEA, someone who will stand up to the conservatives — and stand up to Arne Duncan and say, ‘We don’t agree with your plans,’” said Reed Bretz, a high school fine arts teacher in the Kenowa Hills public schools in Grand Rapids, Mich. Current

Tuesday, July 8, 2014