Michael Antonucci is no friend of teacher unions.
He’s a libertarian who has covered the teacher union beat for years. He has his own blog and pens the Union Report for The 74.
When I was a regular delegate to the NEA Representative Assemblies, I would sometimes drop by the reporter coral (they weren’t allowed on the convention floor) and exchange views.
We differed on politics but his facts were dead on. Even a high-level NEA staffer confided in me that they often turned to Antonucci’s reports to find out what was really going on inside the NEA.
His latest data shows that in blue states Janus has had very little impact on union membership.
In red right-to-work states, membership is bleeding.
The biggest losers were Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Each was a right-to-work state or became one during this period.
If some of those states seem familiar to union teachers it is because they notice that some of these states saw major state-wide teacher strikes in recent years.
If that seems contradictory it shouldn’t.
Most of those strikes were organized by militant teachers independently of the NEA and the AFT by educators who organized online and through alternative networks.
Here’s the sad news.
When a proposal was made to the last NEA RA to establish a national fund that NEA members could contribute to and give NEA support to red state strikers, leadership opposed it and the plan was defeated by a handful of delegate votes.
Antonucci says he thinks NEA leaders have given up on the red state teachers.
NEA isn’t worried that the agency-fee affiliates will dwindle and die. There is no evidence that is happening, and it would take decades even if it did. Instead, the weak affiliates may continue to fade, making NEA similar to the American Federation of Teachers — a teachers union confined mostly to blue states.
Fortunately there are rank and file teachers who plan to bring the proposal back to next year’s Representative Assembly.
They’re not ready to give up on their colleagues in the red states quite so easily.
Fred Klonsky 
This is slightly off topic, but shows the damage that is being done in a red state. I sent this article, along with my comments, to Senator Niemeyer [R-IN] and Representative Chyung [D-IN]. Niemeyer sent out a snail mail news letter telling about what a great job Indiana is doing to fund schools. He did not say that private charter schools will receive more money than K-12 public schools for this coming school year and next year.
……..
Schools leader: Indiana ‘in desperate need of a lot of teachers’
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Indiana is in the middle of a teacher shortage.
As many students across the state returned to school, the Indiana Department of Education School Personnel Job Bank on Tuesday showed more than 600 available teacher positions.
“We’re in a teacher shortage. We’re in an administrator shortage. We’re in an educator shortage,” said Jennifer McCormick, the state superintendent of public instruction, on Tuesday. “We’re also in a bus driver shortage. We’re in a school cafeteria worker shortage. The list goes on.”
“A lot of it goes back to pay,” McCormick said. “We can tip-toe around the issue, but a lot of it, when you have unemployment this low across the state of Indiana and across the nation, it goes back to pay.”
McCormick said 3,500 teachers were on emergency teaching permits in 2018. The Department of Education’s website says, “An Emergency Permit is issued at the request of a school district in a content area for which the district is experiencing difficulty staffing the assignment with a properly licensed educator.”…
https://www.wishtv.com/news/indiana-news/schools-leader-indiana-in-desperate-need-of-a-lot-of-teachers/
IN KY, we have a local union, JCTA, that is in cahoots with the large private equity firms. It is sad to see such corruption, but goes a long way to explain why our union damages members’ interests, and has allowed our pension to drop to 31% funding. Teachers in KY have no union, in effect. Local union President, Brent McKim, after eliminating term limits through a constitutional maneuver, has clung to office for 18 years. Sick.
Reblogged this on What's Gneiss for Education.
Without a strong union to take on the administration, teachers end up financially broke. This is especially widespread in red “right to work (for less) states”. If they can’t afford to buy enough food, medicine, and other necessities for their family, they are going to feel they can’t afford to keep paying union dues.
(different you tube came up, intended to put up Pete Seeger “teacher’s blues”)