The National Education Association, in a close vote among its 7,500 delegates at the national convention last week, has called for US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to leave office, and this vote reveals a major shift in the relationship between Democrats and teachers, the New York Times reports.
Mr Duncan has served in his post since President Barack Obama took office in 2009, but the nation’s largest teachers’ union has had trouble with many of the policies being issued by his Democratic administration, including a push to use standardized test scores as a significant part of teacher evaluations.
The straw that appears to have broken the camel’s back in this matter, though, was Mr Duncan’s support of the Vergara decision, in which a California judge declared the state’s teacher tenure laws unconstitutional and said providing teachers with tenure protection violated students’ civil rights.
NEA outgoing President Dennis Van Roekel had some very strong words about the decision, which the NEA characterized as “deeply flawed”: “Just like the meritless lawsuit of Vergara v. State of California, the ruling by Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu is deeply flawed. Today’s ruling would make it harder to attract and retain quality teachers in our classrooms and ignores all research that shows experience is a key factor in effective teaching.
“Let’s be clear: This lawsuit was never about helping students, but is yet another attempt by millionaires and corporate special interests to undermine the teaching profession and push their own ideological agenda on public schools and students while working to privatize public education,” Mr Van Roekel said in a statement.
The NEA, like the second-largest teachers’ union, the American Federation of Teachers, has supported and backed Democratic administrations since Jimmy Carter in 1976, but it has also tried to reach out to Republicans, especially those that oppose policies the teachers’ unions consider counterproductive or harmful.
Mr Duncan later rejected the NEA’s vote, according to Politico. “We’ve had a very good working relationship with NEA in the past,” he said as he congratulated President-elect Lily Eskelsen García on her win.
Some Democrats today think the national teachers’ unions don’t have the clout they enjoyed in the past, where administrations would basically outsource all education decisions to the union leadership. “The Duncan vote made them look like the lunatic fringe. It’s not exactly the way you convince the public that you’ve got a good, credible idea,” the Times quoted Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, an advocacy group that supports test-based evaluations and changes to tenure, as saying.
In addition, a big push to support lawsuits that attack teacher tenure has been started by alums of the Obama White House, Politico reports. Former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Obama campaign Press Secretary Ben LaBolt have launched the Incite Agency, and through the work of CNN anchor Campbell Brown, they hope to encourage and support lawsuits in other states that are modeled after the Vergara verdict.
There’s little doubt the NEA vote and the upsurge of big-name Democrats who support what many other Democrats consider anti-teacher policies—charter schools, tenure reform, and accountability measures that rely significantly on students’ scores on standardized tests—is shining a bright light on a division within the Democratic Party over education reform.