In case you were wondering, the National Education Association has decided that it opposes the No Child Left Behind Act. Meeting in New Orleans this week, union members approved a plan to lobby Congress to drop or amend major portions of the law, allow states control over when its accountability measures will - if ever - take effect, and provide new federal funding for its implementation. Union leader Reg Weaver stirred up the crowd with a blistering attack on No Child Left Behind (a phrase, the union decided, it will no longer dignify by repeating, preferring instead to call it the "reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act"). Fulminating about Education Secretary Rod Paige's characterization of the union as a "coalition of the whining," Weaver announced a full-court legal press to challenge the law as "the granddaddy of all unfunded federal mandates." More in sorrow than in anger, he told the 9,000 delegates, "Team NEA, we would love to stay out of politics and in the classroom, but as long as Washington favors millionaires over children, we have to fight." The union's adverseness to politics might be slightly more believable if the membership hadn't also passed resolutions calling for a public relations campaign "on the consequences of the Bush administration's tax cuts" and endorsing "progressive tax reform and other means of redistributing corporate wealth," and raised more than $1.2 million for its political action committee. Somewhat counterintuitively, Weaver later characterized the anti-NCLB public relations and legal campaign as an effort to find "common ground" with Republicans on education policy.
"NEA vows to undo President Bush's education programs," by Greg Toppo, USA Today, July 6, 2003,
"NEA takes stand against Bush education law," by Bess Keller, Education Week, July 7, 2003,
"NEA 'reaching out' from the left to GOP," by George Archibald, Washington Times, July 8, 2003,