NEA President Dennis Van Roekel held a telephone town hall meeting for RA delegates last night. Delegates could call in with questions. I called with a question about last year’s no confidence vote of Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top, what response we got from the administration and what that means for a July 2011 NEA endorsement of Obama.
I called shortly after the teleconference began. No surprise that I didn’t get to ask my question. And I missed the first quarter of the Bulls game while waiting.
The unusual early no-strings endorsement of Obama is part of the NEA’s sitting at the table strategy. If you object to their strategy, the leadership will tell you that if you don’t agree to discuss just about anything, you will have no influence on the outcome. In this case, Dennis argued that if we don’t endorse Obama this year, we won’t have any influence on the campaign.
Is that really true?
Will the Democrats ignore the 3 million member NEA if we don’t endorse him now?
Ha! Well, they might. They seem to have ignored us so far. But I can’t see how a no-strings endorsement will change that.
Michael Moore talked to Lawrence O’Donnell the other night about the idea of sitting at the table.
The topic is Medicare, but the point is made at about 6:45 of the interview.
Fred Klonsky 
Fred, I will miss the RA this year for the first time in many because I retired. Had I been there, I’d want to support the NEA purchasing a table. Our table. And we can tell THEM what’s on our table…and they can come to OUR table…if they’re nice. A table would be much cheaper than the disaster of Race to the Trough, evaluation by test score, “merit” pay, and the other disasters we keep saying we have to be at THEIR table to talk about. I am so sick of approaching THEIR table as supplicants, accommodators, “collaborators”…collective bargaining taught me that we should be equals with management…since that doesn’t seem to happen anymore, we need our own table.
Oh, by the way…Dennis Van Roekel came and addressed the Massachusetts Teachers Association Annual Meeting of Delegates, and gave the usual NEA ride. While he was speaking, I passed around the actual quote “unions have failed to lead on the issue of teacher quality”…with the question “who said this?”
Dennis Van Roekel.
Applause was “polite” for his speech. Dennis always seemed to me like a nice guy who couldn’t be rousing if his life depended on it…but now his messages are ringing hollow.
What do you think would happen if Van Roekel goes ahead with the no-strings early Obama endorsement, there ends up being a big floor fight, Obama gets the NEA endorsement, but with a big no vote?
Or is that what the Obama operatives are actually hoping for? Their version of Bill Clinton’s Sister Souljah moment.
The Democrats would love it. They can claim both teacher support and claim they “stand up to unions.” It’s clear they think they have further to go to lose the teacher vote. And they will push for it.
I’m glad to hear respected teachers and bloggers criticizing the NEA’s blanket endorsement of Obama. Obviously, his education policies, alone, should be sufficient for teachers to recognize him as an enemy. It is equally refreshing to hear criticism of our mainstream unions’ obsession with maintaining a “Seat at the table,” a tactic that fetishizes political action at the expense of organizing.
However, I would argue that our unions should get out of the politics game completely: no endorsements and no funding for candidates.
First, it is a tremendous waste of resources. Even well-funded unions like the NEA cannot really compete against Bill Gates or the Koch brothers. (In 2010, Democrats received 72% of their funding from big business). For all that money, “our” guy may not even win. Consider the huge amount of money CWA spent on Corzine’s campaign against Christie, despite the fact that Corzine slashed wages.
When a “friend” of labor does get elected, like Jerry Brown, in California, there is still no hope of K-12 funding being restored to its anemic levels of three years ago (when CA was still 47th in the nation in per pupil spending), let alone any serious resistance to NCLB or the charter/voucher juggernaut. Furthermore, Brown supported the mass firing of thousands of state workers and the slashing of services for seniors and the mentally ill, as well as childcare and for the poor and healthcare for their children.
Ultimately, working people need to recognize that they have distinctly different interests than the ruling elite, including the politicians. Our real power is in our ability to withhold our labor and to disrupt business as usual. This is much more powerful than our campaign contributions or our vote. While the politicians love our money, they fear our power when we act in concert. If we truly hope to end NCLB, fight off the endless cavalcade of “reforms,” or improve our living conditions, rank and file workers need to organize themselves and prepare to fight, not only against the ruling elite, but against their own union bureaucracies.
We have been screwed and screwed again with seats at the table. Bill Gates gave us a seat at the table for his evaluation nonsense, getting us a seat at the table with NY State, and they just reneged on their offer. We got a seat with Bill addressing the AFT convention, after which he blasted teacher pensions and funded every anti-union group under the sun. We got a seat at the table for mayoral control, an unmitigated disaster, then got another seat at the table and demanded modifications to it. When we didn’t get them, we endorsed it anyway.
I say bury the table, bury the seats, and then, just in case, bury the shovel.