NEA teachers' union nixes longtime gadfly's bid to cover convention
When the USA’s largest teachers’ union gathers in Boston this weekend for its annual business meeting, a longtime journalist and gadfly who has dutifully covered the gathering for nearly two decades won’t be there.
Mike Antonucci, a Sacramento-based freelancer and consultant whose Education Intelligence Agency newsletter has made him perhaps the best-sourced reporter covering the National Education Association (NEA), said this week that his request for media credentials had been denied — apparently because he has also, for several months, been a columnist for a news outlet that is sharply critical of unions.
It’s the first time since 1998 that Antonucci won’t cover NEA’s Representative Assembly (RA).
“All these years they’ve considered me a reporter, but now apparently they’ve decided I’m not,” he said in an interview.
Antonucci, 58, has long made his living writing and consulting about labor issues. His Education Intelligence Agency is a private, for-profit, "one-man contract research firm" focused on the inner workings of teachers’ unions. It also publishes periodic reports on public school finances and education labor.
But for the past 11 months, Antonucci has also written a column for the online education news outlet The74, a non-profit site co-founded by former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, whose advocacy group, the Partnership for Educational Justice, is closely aligned with the K-12 education reform movement.
That apparently stuck in the craw of union leaders, despite the fact that Antonucci for decades has openly criticized the union. NEA spokeswoman Staci Maiers said The74"does not meet journalistic standards as a credible news outlet, so we were unable to issue a media credential."
Reformers, including Campbell herself, have frequently clashed with unions over labor NEA teachers' union nixes longtime gadfly's bid to cover convention:
