"Free Palestine" at the NEA Representative Assembly in Philadelphia.

It has been about a decade since I have been an elected delegate to the National Education Association annual national convention called the Representative Assembly.

For over two decades my attendance as a delegate to my union convention meant that like thousands of other educators I spent the Fourth of July away from family and non-delegate friends.

The NEA likes to refer to its annual meeting as the largest democratic deliberative body in the world.

Any delegate can propose a New Business Item and with the support of their state caucus or the signatures of a handful of their delegate supporters, it can be considered by the entire meeting of the rest of the 7,000 delegates.

Even if the New Business Item is passed by the delegates, NBIs that the union’s leadership consider problematic can end up in a black hole of follow-up procedures or bureaucratic implementation (or lack of implementation).

I’ve proposed a few like that myself over the years.

The delegates tend to split into two groups over NBIs.

Some of the union delegates believe that the Representative Assembly should only address issues that are specifically about issues of direct concern (I would say narrowly) to our work as a union teachers.

Other delegates argue that our union must address the issues of social justice, war and peace and politics more broadly.

I’m not in Philadelphia this year.

But it appears that the war in Gaza has become an issue at this year’s NEA RA as it should.

Some delegates are proposing a number of NBIs that call for the NEA’s active opposition to the genocide in Gaza.

As a retired teacher, former NEA member and former local union president and former delegate to twenty years of national meetings, I support this effort.

As expected, a group of non-delegates have shown up outside the Philly convention to attack the NBI’s, and the teachers who have offered them for discussion and a vote, as anti-semitic.

Ironically, one of the NBIs specifically addresses the issue of equating support for peace in Gaza with antisemitism.