This coming year, I have resolved to quit smoking, lose weight, and spend more time with my children. I strongly suspect that, by late January, my waistline will continue to expand like a special-ed budget, my lungs will still be in hock to Phillip Morris, and my children will still weep for their absentee father and curse the day he met the slave driver who employs him. But I am, at the least, realistic in my attempts at self-improvement.
For a real New Year's fantasy, check out the resolutions passed by the National Education Association at its summer meeting back around the 4th of July and recently compiled and released. This 95-page lulu came our way courtesy of Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency, who must have a rear end of iron to have sat through the meeting that drafted this behemoth.
Some of them are standard fare. The NEA believes (every resolution starts with this formula, which gives the document a creepy, disembodied tone, like the computer HAL from 2001) that vouchers are bad. So is for-profit education. The NEA can deal with standardized tests so long as they are used only to "improve the quality of education and instruction"--that is, so long as they have no consequences for anybody. Holding its nose, the NEA believes that charter schools can be "agents for positive change" in reforming education IF they have attached to them 22 different strings concerning their governance, financing, and regulation. Of course, the NEA further believes that charter schools should only road-test ideas to be used in regular district schools and should under no circumstances become "an avenue for parental choice." Home schooling is also out, but "when home schooling occurs"--which sounds like the unexpected onset of a terminal illness--the NEA believes that parents attempting to instruct their little ones around the kitchen table should be forced to get state teaching licenses and their curricula should be approved by the state education agency.
Not that the NEA is anti-parent, mind you. Indeed, it believes that parents are "crucial" to kids' education (thanks for that!), should volunteer in schools, set high expectations for their kids, and work hand-in-hand with teachers, the school board, and the NEA itself in doing what's best for the community. God bless us, every one. But the tone of these resolutions leaves the ineradicable impression that parents are welcome so long as they know their place. And their place is distinctly not to have high-falutin' notions about how schools should be run or which schools their cherubs will attend.
It's the section entitled "Promote and Protect Human and Civil Rights" that makes you wonder if the resolution-writing committee did its work in a hotel bar or incense-filled dorm room. The NEA has innumerable opinions on matters rather far afield of education; strongly worded beliefs on everything from genocide (against) to gender-inclusive medical studies (for) to covert espionage operations (generally against) to extremist groups (definitely against, though the population of this category remains ill-defined) to the advisability of a new constitutional convention (the NEA prefers the amendment process--and by the way, wouldn't it be nice if the NEA believed in schools where most kids learned what a constitutional amendment is and how the Constitution can be amended?). The NEA wants statehood for D.C.--no word on whether it would accept a constitutional convention to accomplish this--and a nuclear freeze, since, as the NEA solemnly informs us, it is quite sure "that nuclear war is not survivable." Finally, the NEA believes that "all visual representations using maps of the United States should depict all fifty states and Puerto Rico in their correct geographic location and relative size." This raises a host of pressing questions: What about other countries--can those maps be inaccurate? Did somebody at the meeting come out in favor of inaccurate U.S. maps? If Puerto Rico, why not also Guam, the Virgin Islands, and American Samoa? Is this just a sop to Alaskans who are tired of maps that shrink their state's true magnitude relative to others? And won't it irk the Hawaiians, whose state usually gets enlarged on maps? On such critical matters the NEA maintains a dignified silence.
This whole section of the document has the musty smell of '70s bell-bottoms and go-go boots dragged out from the back of the closet. In fact, the NEA even comes out in favor of the Metric System, which fairly screams "JimmyCarter." One is surprised it isn't foursquare for Esperanto. Still, the end-world-hunger stuff (and yes, the NEA does believe that world hunger is a bad, bad thing; it says so in Resolution I-3) is passed over rather quickly, as if the NEA were just trying to pacify its annoying hippy aunt. Instead, it saves its real efforts for the long section infelicitously titled, "Protect the Rights of Education Employees and Advance Their Interests and Welfare."
Protect and advance, indeed; this section is a virtuoso paean to naked greed and unbridled avarice. As just one example, here are the benefits that the NEA believes should be the MINIMUM guaranteed to education employees: Health, dental, vision, hearing, life, and legal insurance; workers' comp; long-term disability insurance (physical and mental); sick leave (with unlimited accumulation); personal leave (ditto); bereavement leave; parental leave; dependent care leave; sabbatical leave; professional leave; association leave (presumably to attend NEA meetings); religious leave; severance pay; tuition reimbursement; retirement compensation; unemployment compensation; benefit extension for laid-off employees; personal assault protection with leave that doesn't count as sick or personal leave; employee assistance programs; on-site child care; and "an opportunity to participate in a cafeteria-type plan." (One wonders if this is about lunchrooms. By the way, if you've never lunched at the NEA cafeteria on 16th Street NW, you're in for a treat.) Spouses, domestic partners, and dependents should get equal benefits; retirees should get unlimited insurance benefits at no cost; and nobody should ever lose these benefits because schools get closed or districts separate or consolidate. Nice work if you can get it.
In spending time debating and compiling this burgeoning manifesto, we suspect the NEA has probably already broken Resolution A-28, which calls for the elimination of needless bureaucracy. But joking aside, this document does have an effect: driving the agenda of local affiliates, coloring collective bargaining with districts, and shaping the union's political activities at every level of government. So let's hope more than a few of these New Year's resolutions go unfulfilled in 2004.
To get the entire set of resolutions (be careful, it's a 450-kilobyte, 95-page PDF), email your request to [email protected].
Justin Torres is research director of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.