Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.insight From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: COVER STORY Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 13:30:17 EST Message-ID: \SE COVER STORY \HD Clinton on the Education Fence \BY Elena Neuman \CR INSIGHT SUMMARY: Critics of the National Education Association say its major goal is preserving the status quo. And they worry that despite promises to change the education system, Bill Clinton will be in the union's camp, dooming any chances of meaningful school reform. TEXT: "If I become president, you'll be my partners," Bill Clinton announced to leaders of the National Education Association in December at a meeting of the organization's candidate screening panel. "I won't forget the people who brought me to the White House." That's exactly what foes of the educators union are afraid of. In recent years, the association has grown into the largest labor union in the country, with 2.1 million members and an annual budget of more than $164 million. It has opened a Clinton/Gore office and allocated $3.5 million to promote the ticket, not counting the donated labor of members working as campaign volunteers. Nearly 400 NEA members at the Democratic National Convention made up the largest single bloc of delegates at Madison Square Garden, one out of eight. The NEA is an imposing presence on the political landscape, as most every politician knows and as Democratic politicians in particular appreciate. Though the union's teacher membership is quite balanced (800,000 registered Democrats, 600,000 Republicans and 700,000 independents), the NEA has supported Democratic candidates in the past four presidential elections and in numerous state and congressional elections. Exit polls in 1980 and 1984 showed that more teachers voted for Reagan than for Carter or Mondale. The NEA's leaders, by contrast, are "not liberal, they're left-wing," says Bill Bennett, who frequently clashed with them as a Reagan administration secretary of education. The positions staked out by the national headquarters in the past decade - especially on issues tenuously connected to education - tend to bear out Bennett's assessment. In the early eighties, the NEA called for a nuclear freeze and halting aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. It has promoted statehood for the District of Columbia and support for the National Endowment for the Arts (it once considered asking the government agency to change its name so their abbreviations wouldn't conflict). The NEA backs abortion rights and distribution of contraceptives from school-based health clinics; at this year's national convention a resolution that the union take no position on these controversial issues to avoid splitting the membership was ruled out of order. Most pertinently, the NEA has consistently opposed a passel of education revision proposals, ranging from merit pay for teachers, teacher competency testing and standardized testing for students to tuition tax credits, vouchers and other programs that would foster parental choice of schools, whether public or private. Just as consistently, it has promoted its own agenda: increased federal spending on education, mandatory teacher tenure and federal legislation to override right-to-work rules that limit the union's bargaining power in 16 states. "The NEA has lost touch with their membership and become more a political machine than a teachers organization," complains Polly Broussard, chairwoman of the Coalition of Independent Education Associations and executive director of Associated Professional Educators of Louisiana. "Their point is to gain political control and power. They're not really an inclusive, new-idea organization. They have an exclusive, we-know-it-all attitude which does not serve education well. And if Bill Clinton is elected, he'll pay the piper; we'll see more money thrown in deep, endless holes and disappear. We won't see education reform." This was certainly the case during the administration of Jimmy Carter - the only candidate endorsed by the NEA who has won the presidency. In return for the union's support (which included sending hundreds of thousands of teachers on the campaign trail), Carter established the Department of Education as a Cabinet-level bureaucracy heavily staffed with NEA sympathizers. (Previously, education had been a division of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.) But Clinton, at least on paper, is not a typical deep-pocket Democrat on the issue of education. Since his gubernatorial victory in 1983, he has made education reform his favorite issue. As a young governor, he increased the Arkansas sales tax from 3 to 4 percent (the largest increase in the state's history) to finance higher spending on schools and teacher salaries, and he initiated an impressive list of innovations. Most notably, in 1984 he incurred the wrath of the NEA when he pushed through one of the nation's first statewide teacher competency testing programs (the bitter pill was sweetened with the salary increases). He also introduced a limited school choice program. The results of such changes have not been particularly noticeable, however. According to statistics compiled by the University of Arkansas, the state ranks 44th in the nation in Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, 47th in per capita state and local spending on education and 49th in teacher salaries. Seventy-seven percent of Arkansas high school graduates require remedial instruction upon entering college. In his campaign handbook, Putting People First: How We Can All Change America, Clinton promises "a real education reform package" in the first 100 days of a Clinton-Gore administration. What those reforms will be, however, is not entirely clear. If he does propose teacher competency testing, as in Arkansas, the NEA will not be pleased. "We would not be happy about it, and we'd let him know," says Mickey Ibarra, political advocacy manager for NEA government relations. The question is not whether Clinton should be taken at his word when he promises education reform, but which words should be given credence: those he has addressed to voters in general or those he has spoken to the NEA. At the moment, he is wearing two very different education caps; one favors change, the other would preserve the status quo with higher spending. Should Clinton win the Oval Office, will he be the education president or the NEA president? Few would dispute that public education in America is in bad shape. A 1983 Department of Education study, A Nation at Risk, tapped into a deep well of discontent with the public schools and sparked widespread efforts at all levels of government to identify and implement reforms that can make a difference. Most observers agree that money alone will do little to improve students' performance. Teacher salaries, for example, have risen 51 percent since the early eighties - well ahead of inflation and comparable white-collar jobs in the private sector. Yet verbal SAT scores have declined to an all-time low of 422. In 1960, the country spent $15.6 billion on precollege public education. This year that figure is expected to reach $445 billion, a huge increase even after inflation. (And the money is being spent on fewer students; public school enrollment is 47.6 million, down from a high of 51.3 million in the 1971-72 school year.) National polls show that year in, year out, education remains one of the issues of greatest concern to the American public and that a majority of both the public and teachers favor widespread education reform. George Bush and Bill Clinton have not competed for the title "education president" for nothing. According to a Gallup Poll conducted in September, 70 percent of Americans endorse the idea of putting education dollars in the hands of parents - in the form of vouchers - rather than delivering them directly to schools. While the proposal is a favorite of conservatives, as the NEA never tires of pointing out, support for vouchers extends far beyond GOP precincts. Broken down demographically, the Gallup figures reveal that 86 percent of blacks and 84 percent of Hispanics support vouchers. Furthermore, 61 percent of the people polled expressed a willingness to take tax money from public schools, give it to parents of school-age children and allow them to spend it on other public schools or on private religious or secular schools. This is the constituency President Bush has tried to woo with his GI Bill for Children, which he sent to Congress in June. Bush proposed authorizing $500 million in fiscal 1993 and additional amounts in later years to provide $1,000 scholarships to children of middle- and low-income families. Each family would be free to use the money at any accredited school, public, private or religious. The goal is to give families control over the allocation of their tax dollars and let competition do the rest. Popular schools, presumably where the quality of education is superior, would flourish; ill-favored schools would suffer and be forced to either improve or close. A study by Robert Genetski and Associates, a Chicago economics consulting firm, predicted that Bush's bill would not only revolutionize the nation's school system, it would save taxpayers money. In 1990, operating costs per student in public schools averaged $4,841; in the private sector, educating a child costs an average of $1,902. The popularity of school choice has already been proved beyond the paper-and-pencil calculations. In Milwaukee, a voucher program aimed at low-income families has been successfully implemented through the efforts of Democratic state Rep. Polly Williams, a former Wisconsin campaign chairwoman for Jesse Jackson. Introduced experimentally in 1990, the program distributed up to $2,500 to each of 1,000 children for tuition at private schools. The money came from reductions in the state's public school budget. Williams's program has been heralded by the Bush administration and conservatives and vilified by liberal politicians, the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers (a competing teachers union with a membership of 796,000). One Democrat who did express interest in the Milwaukee program, however, was Bill Clinton. On Oct. 18, 1990, the governor wrote Williams after reading a column in the Washington Times about her revolutionary program. "I read Don Lambro's recent column about your version of the school choice bill in Milwaukee," he wrote. "I am fascinated by that proposal and am having my staff analyze it. I'm concerned that the traditional Democratic Party establishment has not given you more encouragement. The visionary is rarely embraced by the status quo." Strong words of encouragement from a man who may be president. But he disavowed them at the NEA annual convention in July in Washington. There to accept the union's endorsement, Clinton promised to appoint a secretary of education who "believes that public funds should be spent on public schools." "I just don't think that with the situation we're in now, we can afford to divert public funds to private schools when we're already uncompetitive," he said amid a gale of applause. In case his comments to the NEA left any room for doubt, Clinton reiterated his rejection of private school choice in an October interview on ABC's Good Morning America. "Now is not the time for a national mandate to siphon off limited funds to private schools," he told interviewer Charlie Gibson. "The evidence is that if you do this, it's just going to spawn further flight from the public schools and let Bush and everybody else off the hook in trying to make them better. . . . Of course the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers endorsed me - because I care about their kids, I care about what happens to teachers and I understand something about education. It's not just a bunch of election-year rhetoric with me." Voters may wonder. A press secretary for the Clinton campaign, Avis LaVelle, explains the missive to Williams as a standard "letter of encouragement for her creative thinking about education. At no time does that letter indicate support for private school vouchers." Clinton spokesmen further insist that he is not averse to school choice. He has, after all, openly endorsed public school choice. So has the NEA. Public school choice means just what it sounds like - allowing families to choose which public school to send their children to (while not paying extra for the privilege). "Public school choice is not a radical transformation of the system," says Terry Moe, a professor of political science at Stanford University and coauthor of Politics, Markets and America's Schools. "You're still going to have school boards and superintendents and central office bureaucracies and all the rest of the traditional democratic control structure. And amid the status quo, you'll have more parent choice. [But] everything will be basically the same." That's what the NEA wants. The union has consistently opposed any reform that might divest it of hard-won influence over educational policy-making, teacher accreditation and school administration. "The NEA and other establishment groups have recognized that school choice in general is popular, and therefore they have tried to take advantage of the ambiguity by saying [they] favor school choice," says Moe. "What they mean is they want the public school system to stay essentially the way it is." The NEA has a history of shooting down politicians who stray from the reservation. When Clinton imposed the competency test on Arkansas's 24,000 teachers in 1984, the union's then-President Mary Hatwood Futrell said testing was really a method of weeding black teachers out of public schools. "The NEA will not stand idly by while the teachers of Arkansas are made the scapegoats in efforts to improve the quality of public education," she said. The measure was pushed through the General Assembly only after Clinton threatened to hold the state school budget hostage. The imbroglio, in the end, was much ado about nothing. Ninety-one percent of the teachers passed on the first try and teachers who failed could keep their jobs by earning six hours of additional college credit. Once certified, teachers were in the clear; the Arkansas law said nothing about retesting. In Tennessee in 1983, then-Gov. Lamar Alexander, now Bush's secretary of education, also incurred the NEA's wrath. He proposed the largest tax increase in his state's history - 15 percent - to raise an additional $210 million for education. He also called for a statewide reading and math test for eighth-graders, a 20 percent pay raise for teachers and a merit or incentive pay system whereby good teachers would be rewarded and bad teachers demoted. Alexander proposed evaluating the state's 46,000 teachers every five years. In response, the state NEA affiliate, the Tennessee Education Association, initiated a lobbying effort to kill the so-called Better Schools Program. Mass mailings warned teachers of lost tenure, professional NEA lobbyists descended on Nashville, and the bill was indeed killed before it ever came to a vote on the floor. A few months after that, however, a poll found that 61 percent of Tennesseans favored Alexander's plan, and the program was passed in 1984 in a special session of the General Assembly. The Alexander and Clinton proposals, both of which included tax increases and raises for teachers, bear remarkable similarities. In fact, Alexander and Clinton have at times worked hand in hand on national education reform proposals. Clinton's adviser on education, Michael Cohen, was a vocal member of one of the winning design teams in a competition conducted by Bush's New American Schools Development Corp. to create "break-the-mold" schools. But at the same convention where Clinton was awarded the NEA endorsement, any mention of Alexander's name provoked boos and hisses from the teacher delegates. To Alexander, the NEA's enmity is a badge of honor. "I think it will be very hard for Bill Clinton to be a real education president with the NEA leaders draped around his neck," he says. "The Democratic constituency on education is the business-as-usual crowd - the crowd that has control, likes the schools the way they are and thinks a good education program is the maximum amount of money for the least amount of change. That's the Democratic constituency, and sometimes it's hard to tell whether the national Democratic Party is a precinct operation for the NEA or the NEA is a precinct operation for the national Democratic Party." Former Secretary of Education Bennett agrees. "In a Clinton administration you can expect an NEA president. You can expect the party line. You can expect noises and body feints and head fakes to centrist positions, even to ideas of experimentation. Even the words 'choice' and 'testing' might cross his lips, but essentially it will be the party line. . . . SPECTRE will be dictating policy," Bennett says, referring to the shadowy enemy organization in old James Bond movies. The NEA of today is far removed from its roots. Founded in 1857 in Philadelphia by a group of 10 state teachers organizations, its stated goal was to "elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching, and to promote the cause of public education in the United States." Although admission was open to anyone involved in the teaching profession, the NEA was an elite organization composed primarily of school superintendents, principals and administrators. Throughout most of its history, NEA leaders bristled at the idea of joining hands with organized labor. They saw themselves as an organization of white-collar professionals, not unlike the American Medical Association or the American Bar Association. Their role was to police the profession, establishing high standards to enhance the reputation of members. Not until the late sixties did the NEA begin its transformation into a labor union. In response to competition in cities from the American Federation of Teachers, a self-avowed education union affiliated with the AFL-CIO, the NEA chose to embrace collective bargaining and union-style organizing. Carol Applegate, a former high school English teacher in Michigan, remembers it well. She took time off from teaching in the sixties to raise her family, returning in 1969 to find the NEA a very different organization from what it had been. "In the interval that I had been out of school, they had become unionized, and when I realized that I refused to join," she recalls. "They no longer represented my views. They had become more concerned with salaries and money than they were about students and education." Applegate was fired in February of that year for refusing to pay dues to the NEA affiliate in Grand Blanc, Mich., and she remained unemployed for 2 1/2 years as she pursued reinstatement in the courts. In June 1969, the Michigan Legislature passed legislation proclaiming it legal to fire a teacher for not paying dues to a union. Because her dismissal had occurred six months before the "agency shop" law passed, Applegate won her suit and was reinstated with special dispensation not to have to pay union dues. All other teachers in her school were subject to dismissal if they refused to pay. To this day, Applegate maintains that there's "something wrong with a 'professional' organization that would take steps to fire a person who is a highly rated teacher simply because that person disagrees with the union. I feel very strongly that this is wrong for education and wrong for individual freedom," she says. "I think it's totally unprofessional." Applegate joined and is now on the board of the National Right to Work Committee, a group fighting similar agency shop and mandatory union bargaining laws in 34 states and the District of Columbia. Other teachers tell of similar battles touched off by their refusal to join an organization whose views they could not endorse. Robert Roesser, a former professor at the University of Detroit, was fired in 1984 after refusing to pay dues to the university's Professors' Union, an affiliate of the NEA's state chapter, the Michigan Education Association. A practicing Catholic, he didn't want to join an organization that endorsed the right to abortion. Roesser, now an electrical engineer at General Motors, didn't resume teaching, though he eventually won the suit he brought against the union with the help of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. A number of independent teachers groups have been formed to represent such antiunion teachers. There are independent education associations in many of the 16 states that do not have agency shop or mandatory union bargaining laws - Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi and West Virginia, among others. A group called Concerned Educators Against Forced Unionism, a division of the National Right to Work Committee, is fighting to add to the number of "right-to-work" states. Technically speaking, no teacher can be forced to join a union. If a state has passed a mandatory union bargaining law, teachers - even those who choose not to join and pay dues to the union chosen by the majority - are automatically represented by that union. In states with agency shop laws, however, a teacher may be compelled by the state to pay the portion of union dues that goes toward bargaining and contract enforcement. Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia have such agency shop laws. "They say, 'We have to represent you, so you should pay for it,' " says Jo Seker, former director of Concerned Educators Against Forced Unionism. "But nobody asked them to represent us. Many teachers didn't want the representation, and yet they are being forced to accept it." Actually, for an NEA local to collect agency fees, a majority of the teachers must first vote to be represented by it. NEA dues - local, state and national combined - vary from $100 to $400 a year depending on the state. On average, agency shop fees are anywhere from $20 to $100 a year less than full dues, and the union is required by law to provide a full accounting of its spending to both members and the nonmembers it represents. The figures supplied are a source of endless frustration to nonmembers, who suspect that the amounts going toward bargaining and contract enforcement may be lower than the agency fees they pay. But determining whether some of their money is being used for the NEA's many political and lobbying efforts requires poring over hundreds of dense pages of accounting figures. Union opponents like to cite a case decided last year by the Supreme Court, Lehnert vs. Ferris Faculty Association, in which the NEA and its affiliates were found to have spent 90 percent of their dues on activities other than collective bargaining. Of the $284 in annual dues that James Lehnert, a professor at Ferris State College in Michigan, would have had to pay to the local, state and national unions if he hadn't sued, only $28.59 was found to have gone toward collective bargaining. Lehnert was probably an exception to the norm, however. The NEA has said in the past that only about 10 percent of its budget is spent on nonbargaining activities; the Right to Work Committee counters that political spending is 63 percent. The real figure probably lies somewhere in-between. The NEA has thrived during a period of generally declining union power for much the same reason that other public worker unions have. It doesn't face the marketplace discipline that constrains traditionally powerful unions such as the Teamsters or the United Auto Workers. Strikes by teachers, for example, don't often hurt their income, because state laws specify a minimum number of school days. Teachers can easily regain lost wages by working extra days at the end of the school year or during vacations. Moreover, since these unions are in the public sector, there is no market pressure to keep costs down or standards of service up. Stanford's Terry Moe says it's simple: "Unions in the private sector in the past were pretty much sheltered from competition, particularly international competition. They were in automobiles, coal, steel, communications, and could strong-arm management and jack up costs and all the rest of us would pay the market rate. That's what an absence of competition allows them to do." But with increased competition from abroad, these unions have seen their clout diminish. "That leaves one gigantic sector where there is no competition, where unions are still able to do this - and that's government," says Moe. "That's the growth industry for unions. And the taxpayers are paying their way." The NEA is also management and labor rolled up into one. As a former professional organization, it usually sets state standards for teacher certification (NEA President Keith Geiger also is board chairman of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education), academic curricula, class size and teacher working conditions. And as a collective bargainer, the union is in a position to demand higher salaries and benefits. Both functions serve the NEA well when it comes to fighting efforts by states to weed out deadbeat teachers through competency testing or merit pay or for achievement tests that would track the performance of the nation's public schools. "They're running education and have control of our schools, but nobody controls them," says Jane Ping, president of Indiana Professional Educators and winner of a recent union dues case involving the NEA that went to the Indiana Supreme Court. "They're a private organization; the public has no control over them. Yet they're making public policy; they're spending taxpayer funds the way they want, and there isn't much the public can do about it." The Reagan and Bush administrations made their opposition to NEA demands quite clear, and vice versa. "A significant portion of our job involved saying no to all these rather unusual ideas that would come up through the bureaucracy about how Washington ought to run local school districts," recalls Gary Bauer, who was an aide to Bennett and is now president of the Family Research Council. "And most of those ideas were right out of the NEA playbook." Clinton's relations with the NEA have been far more complicated - at times friend, at times foe - setting the stage for some interesting power struggles for his ear should he gain the White House. The NEA is clearly hoping that the Clinton it endorsed is the man who will be elected, not the governor it once opposed. It then might finally gain the insider position at the federal level that it has been gunning for over the past 12 years. Chester Finn, a longtime proponent of change in the education system and an ally of Bennett's, says, "I do believe that Bill Clinton, if you could put him in an isolation booth and remove all political considerations, would have sound ideas about education and what it needs." Finn worries, however, that "the real Bill Clinton is the one who wants to get elected and stay elected." That, he says, would add up to "a recipe for a business-as-usual administration when it comes to education." This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM