National Education Association. The National Teachers Association, founded in 1857, became the National Education Association (NEA) in 1871.Its members met annually to discuss educational issues. By the late nineteenth century, the NEA leadership was dominated by college presidents like Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University. Beyond its annual meetings and proceedings, its chief influence came from committees. The Committee of Ten (1893), led by President Charles Eliot of Harvard, recommended four equivalent and thoroughly academic high‐school curricula, putting modern subjects on a par with the classics. After 1900, three developments shaped the NEA: The activism of college presidents waned while school administrators came to dominate; women successfully challenged male dominance and occupied offices (including the presidency, with the election of Ella Flagg Young in 1910); and the organization's committees (especially its Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education in 1918) endorsed school curricula that emphasized a variety of nonacademic purposes. The organization grew from 2,300 members in 1900 to 53,000 in 1920 and 454,000 by 1950.
By the 1950s, a majority of NEA members were classroom teachers, and the organization faced a challenge from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Unlike the NEA, the AFT accepted collective bargaining, and it began to sanction strikes by teachers in the 1960s. The NEA accepted collective bargaining (but not strikes) in 1962, thus becoming more like a union. In the 1960s and 1970s, the NEA achieved two major lobbying goals: federal assistance to elementary and secondary education and the creation of a federal Department of Education. By blending its long‐standing emphasis on teacher professionalism and a somewhat reluctant endorsement of collective bargaining, the NEA retained the loyalty of most organized teachers, with 2.2 million members in 1996, compared to 830,000 in the AFT. While the NEA moved toward collective bargaining, the AFT began emphasizing teacher professionalism. This convergence bred serious talk of merger throughout the 1990s.
See also
Education: The Public School Movement;
Labor Movements.
Bibliography
Edgar B. Wesley , NEA: The First Hundred Years. The Building of the Teaching Profession, 1957.
Marjorie Murphy , Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900–1980, 1990.
Carl F. Kaestle
