Behind The Curtain

EIA’s Antonoucci — who has sources that should be the envy of any education reporter — got his hands on a recent NEA member survey and has repackaged it as a report (pdf) you can read yourself. A lot of it is the same old stuff. For instance though the NEA trends to the left politically, its members are more representative of the politics of the general population.

Yet some of the data here are more interesting. For instance, about one in three teachers say they are “not at all” involved with the union and among new teachers (3 years or less) this figure rises to almost half. Only about 15 percent of teachers describe themselves as very involved in union activities or processes. There is also some interesting data about the political skew as it relates to the size of NEA locals.