NEA meets in person this year. In Chicago.
I'm about five miles from the convention site but I might as well be a million miles away.
The National Education Association is the largest union in the United States.
Between the American Federation of Teachers and the NEA there are more than 4 million education workers, from classroom teachers to bus drivers to education support staff, that are union members.
Union membership includes significant growth among charter teachers.
The NEA is meeting in person this week for the first time since the start of the pandemic.
The union meets at a historic moment in the fight to defend our rights as teachers and citizens.
Roughly 6,000 delegates will be in the hall at Chicago’s massive McCormick Place while others will represent remotely.
It has been a few years since I have been an active teaching member or delegate.
The NEA Retired holds a conference just prior to the Representative Assembly and retirees make up a relatively small number of delegates at the NEA convention.
I think there are about a total of 350 retired delegates.
Because Illinois retired delegates run statewide, it is rare that a newly retired teacher gets elected.
Thanks primarily to my activism around pensions issues, I was elected as a delegate my first year of retirement. I was a active teacher delegate for twenty years.
The union likes to refer to the Representative Assembly as “the largest democratic deliberative body in the world.”
To a degree, this is true. The convention is a business meeting. A budget is passed. There are usually over a hundred New Business Items that are debated on the floor with speakers and microphones scattered around. It goes on and on for days.
It is rare that a New Business Item that isn’t backed by the leadership or emerges from the floor sees implementation even if it is passed overwhelmingly.
In reality, like most large unions, the convention is a tightly controlled affair with leadership using all its power to get approval of what they want and defeating anything they disapprove of.
Big as it is, one of the weaknesses of the NEA is that the local, state and national structure of the union limits real democracy. National and state leadership is handed over in a practice of succession that would make North Korea jealous.
Successful challenges to the leadership are rare.
Most of the business of the RA is being reported being a wall this year, so although it’s in Chicago I will have to wait for reports from delegate friends and whatever the NEA feels like sharing with the public.
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