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Last week, ten Democratic presidential candidates — including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders — spoke at the annual convention of the National Education Association (NEA). At the same time, NEA delegates were debating a motion that the nation’s largest teachers union only consider endorsing candidates who “publicly state their opposition to all charter school expansion.” In what struck many as a surprising twist, especially in a time of progressive militancy and when Democrats have been more likely to denounce charter schools than defend them, the NEA membership voted the motion down. In other words, the NEA’s Representative Assembly left the way open for the NEA to endorse a Democrat more inclined to seek middle ground on charters.
What’s going on? After all, the NEA has generally appeared to take anything but a centrist position on charters. Just this spring, NEA President Lily Eskelsen García thundered that states have been “starving public education” while “corporate billionaires” behind “unaccountable charter schools” work to divert “resources from our children to their wallets.” Meanwhile, in the past year, NEA affiliates have opposed charter school legislation in West Virginia and a bill sharing tax revenue with charters in Colorado, while joining a lawsuit that seeks to make charters unconstitutional in Washington state.
Well, the NEA’s anti-charter stance is complicated by the fact that the union represents thousands of charter school teachers. While just 11% of charters nationwide are unionized, the NEA represents two-thirds of them. And the NEA has sought to add more charter teachers, especially since the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus ruling that unions could not compel nonmembers to pay “agency fees.” That decision decimated a traditional source of union revenue and has led the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers to ramp up their recruiting efforts.
As we put it in the Washington Examiner last month, “Unions are stuck walking a delicate line on charters. Union leaders find charters a tempting political target, yet these attacks can make it tougher for them to recruit credibly in charter schools.” After all, we noted, “Many charter school teachers have chosen to work in charters, in part, to escape the petty bureaucracy that permeates district schools.” How these competing tensions will play out is far from clear. But if last week’s NEA announcement is any clue, union efforts to oppose charter schooling may be more fraught than they might seem at first glance.
At the National Education Association’s annual convention, delegates voted down a motion that would have required the nation’s largest teachers union to only consider endorsing candidates who “publicly state their opposition to all charter school expansion.”
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