Ed Week’s Jacobson writes-up the AFT’s new campaign to “fix” No Child Left Behind. Good piece, real texture.
But isn’t the AFT’s basic problem that they’ve waited too long to publicly get in the game? To its credit, when NCLB was being put together, the AFT put forward some serious ideas about accountability attempting to address some of the intended and unintended consequences of NCLB’s provisions. Eduwonk says “serious” in the sense that they were different than the NEA’s ideas which, despite their lame protestations, amounted to, and still amount to, basically no accountability at all.
Since then the AFT’s staff has rightly cringed (and sent corrective emails, phone calls, and pleas) every time the phrase “teachers’ union” and “NCLB” are used together arguing that they’re in a different place than the NEA and that the umbrella phrase is inappropriate. (Humorous — in a wonky way — aside: At a recent PPI-Urban Institute conference on teacher collective bargaining a free-thinking (or non-talking points reading) representative of the UFT pointed out that the AFT and the NEA were not in the same place on NCLB. Before he’d fully sat down an NEA lobbyist was on his feet lamely trying to argue that (a) the NEA supports NCLB, who knew? and (b) there is no difference between the NEA and AFT positions. Whatever. Now and then it still astounds that we even play these games…)
The fact is that, though Eduwonk’s not on board with every AFT proposal, there is a difference, to the AFT’s credit, between its position and that of the NEA both in substance and intent. It has something to do with where the core of their membership is located (AFT is more urban, NEA more suburban and rural) and somewhat different philosophies.
However, because the AFT remained quiet for so long while the NEA trashed, distorted, and campaigned against the NCLB law, they’ve lost the rhetorical high ground. They let themselves get lumped in with the NEA. Now, when the AFT says let’s “fix” NCLB, most serious people think of that phrase in the sense that the NEA uses it, where “fix” actually means “eviscerate.”
So, rather than rely on others to make the distinction between the AFT and the NEA clear in various outlets, the AFT needs to do that itself. Sure, it’s tough at a time when labor is under attack from a very unfriendly administration and facing its own internal struggles, but it’s what the AFT needs to do if it really wants to stake out an independent position in this debate. Otherwise, all the ads they’re running now about NCLB are just, albeit inadvertently, reinforcing the NEA message and putting them on the wrong side of this debate.
BTW: Inside Baseball Buried Lede? New Unionism patron saint Adam Urbanski says he would have preferred that the AFT take a more hard line like the NEA on NCLB? The subtleties distinguishing New Unionism and the old kind often elude Eduwonk…