National Education Association
NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION
NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION (NEA), the largest professional educational organization in the United States, grew out of the National Teachers Association (NTA), which was established in 1857. Through the activity of the NTA, the Office of Education was established in the federal government in 1867. The NTA was reorganized as the National Education Association in 1871, and in 1906 it was chartered by Congress. Initially representing the ideals and interests of the nation's leading educators, including public school officials, college and university leaders, and educational journalists, the organization experienced a significant transformation after 1917, when the national office moved to Washington, D.C., where it could hopefully influence federal policies. Thereafter, emphasis was placed on recruiting and serving the needs of classroom teachers, mostly female; membership grew from 8,466 in 1917 to 220,000 in 1931. The Research Division was founded in 1922, serving the interests of both teachers and administrators. The NEA survived the Great Depression, but with a significant loss of membership and increasing competition from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). While not challenging the authority of school administrators, the NEA created a committee on equal opportunity in 1935 to study gender and racial salary inequities, with most attention devoted to assisting female teachers. The association grew during World War II, when it linked education to the war effort with the creation of the Commission on the Defense of Democracy in Education. Membership escalated through the decade, reaching 454,000 in 1950, with increasing emphasis from the national office on strengthening the local and state associations.
Continuing its conservative approach during the 1950s, the NEA had little organizing success in the larger cities. Beginning in the 1960s, this would change when the organization transformed itself from a professional organization to something resembling a teachers' union in response to the increasing number of teachers' strikes led by the AFT. While the NEA had a membership of 1.1 million in 1970 (compared to the AFT's 205,000), it had growing difficulty in mobilizing teachers at the local level. The NEA leadership initially shied away from sanctioning collective bargaining, but substituted what it termed "professional negotiations," which amounted to the same thing. The publication by the NEA of the Negotiations Research Digest in 1967 also indicated an increased commitment to collective bargaining. Another sign of change was the creation in 1972 of a national political action committee to enhance political lobbying and campaigning, giving the NEA increasing national clout.
The NEA had little interest in civil rights matters until the 1960s. Starting in 1926, the organization formed a relationship with American Teachers Association (ATA), the national organization of black teachers, but membership remained segregated, particularly among the southern affiliates. The NEA officially supported integration in 1963 and the number of segregated southern affiliates gradually decreased, although there were still eleven the following year. The NEA and the ATA officially merged in 1966 and by decade's end, only the Mississippi and Louisiana affiliates had refused to accept the merger, for which they were expelled from the NEA in 1970. Merger was not completed in these two states until the late 1970s. The NEA, meanwhile, strongly supported school desegregation.
By the 1980s, the NEA had become a progressive, activist, integrated teachers' union with strong presidential leadership and an active political agenda; it generally supported the Democratic Party's candidates and policies. Merger with the AFT was increasingly broached but uncompleted as of 2002, when the NEA had 2.7 million members distributed in all fifty states and 13,000 communities. It continued its commitment to improving teachers' salaries and school programs, while issuing NEA Today and numerous other publications, all within the context of protecting urban public schools from political pressure for increased school privatization.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Murphy, Marjorie. Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900–1980. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Urban, Wayne J. Gender, Race, and the National Education Association: Professionalism and Its Limitations. New York: Routledge Falmer, 2000.
Wesley, Edgar B. NEA: The First Hundred Years. New York: Harper, 1957.
Ronald D.Cohen