Exposing the Teachers Unions' Corporatist Pro-NCLB Agenda

The new issue of Phi Delta Kappan is well worth reading, and not just because it reprints an article I wrote about high-performing community colleges early this year. There's also a priceless debate (not online, unfortunately) between Susan O'Hanian, self-styled "educational activist," and Joel Packer, head lobbyist for the NEA, wherein O'Hanian--along with University of Alabama professor Philips Kovacs--accuses the NEA of selling its members down the river by not being anti-NCLB enough. Apparently, this is because the union is just a lapdog for its corporate masters.

No, really.

Packer reaffirms that the NEA opposes NCLB and wants to gut its core accountability provisions, but also notes that NCLB is, in fact, just the name given to the most recent version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which contains a lot of worthwhile programs and also provides billions of dollars in funding to help educate poor children. So just standing on the fringe yelling for NCLB to be "dismantled," as O'Hanian does here, doesn't do much good; groups like the NEA are much more effective when they engage in the political and legislative processes in a substantive way. That involves a certain level of moderation and willingness to talk and compromise with those who disagree with you--although you'd hardly know it from the NEA's current scorched-earth campaign on the Hill, which includes demanding that Democrats sign an anti-NCLB loyalty oath, and their California affiliate running ads attacking George Miller and Nancy Pelosi.

But if you think critiquing Speaker Pelosi from the left represents the extremes of political discourse, you clearly haven't read this month's Kappan. O'Hanian and Kovacs respond by grasping for the moral legacies of, variously, Woody Guthrie, Rosa Parks, women's suffrage, abolitionists, Galileo, and Malcom X while offering a combination of anecdote, childish sentiment and gratuitous insult, such as:

We call on union leaders, members of Congress, and their Business Roundtable allies to do something radical: we ask them to listen the highly qualified teachers who work with children every day.

and

the NEA leadership's decision to side with corporate reformers rather than with the teachers who pay their salaries--but certainly not their dinner bills--says a great deal about the priorities of the organization.

Packer responds with remarkable restraint, reiterating the NEA's anti-NCLB talking points before concluding that "we will not apologize for our decision to step up to the plate and actually do the hard and painstaking work work of directly influencing the policy makers who will write the next version of ESEA."

This type of exchange actually has some value beyond entertainment purposes. First, because the fact that Kappan--the second-largest education publication in the nation by circulation, after Educational Leadership--chose to print it suggests that there are a substantial number of people who actually think this way. You see it sometimes in the more leftish/academic blogs as well. Second, because, like the writings of those who believe the principal failure of the Bush administration has been insufficient war-mongering and imperialist zeal, it serves to establish boundaries of seriousness in the NCLB debate. That's useful, if nothing else.