National Education Association

Based on Wikipedia: National Education Association

In July 2024, something remarkable happened at what should have been a routine annual meeting. The National Education Association—the largest labor union in the United States—found its own convention in Philadelphia brought to a halt. Not by external protesters. Not by political opponents. By its own staff, who walked a picket line to protest what they called unfair labor practices by their employer. President Joe Biden, scheduled to address the delegates, canceled his appearance rather than cross that line.

The irony was thick enough to cut with a scissors.

Here was the nation's most powerful union, representing 2.8 million teachers and education workers, locked in a labor dispute with the people who run its headquarters. The standoff lasted weeks, with nearly three hundred staff members locked out and unpaid until mid-August. It was an awkward moment of self-reflection for an organization that has spent more than a century fighting for workers' rights—and a reminder that even institutions dedicated to fairness can stumble when the lens turns inward.

From Professional Club to Fighting Force

The National Education Association wasn't always a union. For its first hundred years, it operated more like a professional society—think doctors gathering at medical conferences or lawyers joining bar associations. Teachers came together to discuss pedagogy and curriculum, but nobody was negotiating contracts or threatening to strike.

The organization traces its roots to 1857 Philadelphia, where it was founded as the National Teachers Association. A man named Zalmon Richards served as its first president, presiding over annual meetings where educators debated teaching methods and swapped classroom wisdom. In 1870, the group merged with several other education organizations and took on its current name.

For decades, school administrators—not classroom teachers—dominated the NEA's leadership. The power centers were small towns and rural areas, and state-level organizations called the shots on policy. This was an era when teachers were expected to accept what they were given and be grateful for the privilege of shaping young minds.

Then Wisconsin changed everything.

In 1959, Wisconsin became the first state to pass a law allowing public employees to bargain collectively with their employers. Over the next twenty years, most other states followed. Suddenly, teachers had legal tools to demand better pay, smaller class sizes, and improved working conditions. The genteel professional association model started looking quaint.

The Transformation

The shift didn't happen overnight. Between 1957 and 1973, the NEA underwent a gradual but profound metamorphosis. Classroom teachers—the people actually standing in front of students every day—began wresting power from administrators. The organization tentatively embraced collective bargaining, then strikes, then political action committees that could support friendly candidates.

A new constitution in 1973 made the transformation official. School administrators were expelled entirely. The NEA had become what its rival, the American Federation of Teachers, had been all along: a fighting union.

The AFT, based primarily in larger cities, had demonstrated that strikes worked. When teachers walked out, wages went up. The NEA watched, learned, and eventually adopted similar tactics. By the 1970s, militant politics characterized the organization. Local election campaigns, candidate endorsements, direct confrontation with school boards—all became part of the playbook.

The Merger That Wasn't

Given their similarities, you might expect the NEA and AFT to have joined forces long ago. They nearly did.

In 1998, negotiators from both unions reached a tentative merger agreement. A combined organization would have been an educational colossus, representing teachers from coast to coast. But when the proposal went to the NEA's Representative Assembly in New Orleans that July, delegates rejected it decisively.

The reasons were complicated. Some feared the AFT's affiliation with the AFL-CIO labor federation would drag teachers into battles unrelated to education. Others worried about losing the NEA's distinctive identity or being swallowed by a more aggressive union culture. Whatever the motivations, the marriage was called off.

The two organizations remain separate today, though some state affiliates have merged. Florida, Minnesota, Montana, New York, North Dakota, and most recently West Virginia in 2025 have all unified their competing teacher unions. And since 2006, standalone NEA locals can join AFL-CIO state and local federations, blurring the once-sharp lines between the two national organizations.

By the Numbers

The NEA's scale is staggering. With approximately 2.8 million members, it dwarfs every other union in America. To put that in perspective, it's larger than the entire population of Chicago.

About 71 percent of members are "active professionals"—working teachers and other certified educators. Another 15 percent are education support professionals: the bus drivers, cafeteria workers, classroom aides, and maintenance staff who keep schools functioning. Retirees make up about 10 percent, a share that has grown as the profession ages. The remaining members are students preparing to become teachers and those with lifetime membership status.

This membership translates to serious financial muscle. The NEA's budget in 2023 reached $399 million, backed by an endowment of $428 million. Most of that money comes from dues, with portions flowing to local chapters, state affiliates, and the national organization. In 2021 and 2022, the NEA returned 39 percent of dues money to state affiliates, maintaining the somewhat decentralized structure that has characterized the organization since its founding.

The numbers haven't always trended upward. After peaking at 3.2 million members during the organization's 150th anniversary in 2007, membership began a slow decline. A major blow came in 2018, when the Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that non-union public employees could not be compelled to pay "fair-share fees" to unions that represent them. Previously, even teachers who chose not to join the NEA often had to pay fees covering the cost of collective bargaining. The court's decision eliminated that requirement, and within two years, the NEA lost nearly 100,000 dues payers.

How Democracy Works at Scale

Governing an organization of nearly three million people presents logistical challenges that would give most executives nightmares. The NEA's solution is the Representative Assembly, which it calls the largest democratic deliberative body in the world.

Each summer, more than 6,000 elected delegates converge to hash out the organization's priorities, budget, and strategic direction. These delegates represent states, local chapters, and various membership constituencies. They debate proposals, amend resolutions, and vote on the nearly $400 million annual budget. They also elect the union's executive officers.

The current leadership includes President Rebecca Pringle, Vice President Princess Moss, and Secretary-Treasurer Noel Candelaria, all elected to three-year terms in 2020 and re-elected in 2023. Term limits cap everyone at two terms. Moss and Candelaria have already announced they'll run for president and vice president respectively when Pringle's term ends in 2026.

A Board of Directors handles governance between the annual assemblies. Each state gets at least one director, with additional seats for every 20,000 active members. Representatives from ethnic minority caucuses, school nurses, administrators, retired members, and aspiring educators round out the board. An Executive Committee of nine—the three officers plus six at-large members—acts when the full board isn't in session.

The day-to-day operations fall to an Executive Director, a staff position rather than an elected one. Kim A. Anderson has held that role since 2019.

Politics, Money, and Legal Battles

The NEA has been political since its founding, lobbying for laws affecting public education at both state and federal levels. But the intensity of that political engagement has increased dramatically over the decades, and it has made the organization a lightning rod for controversy.

Federal law prohibits unions from using dues money to contribute to political candidates, a restriction tied to their tax-exempt status. The NEA addresses this through the NEA Fund for Children and Public Education, which collects voluntary contributions from members for political purposes. Critics have repeatedly challenged whether the union actually complies with these rules, leading to numerous legal battles over the use of money and staff in partisan activities.

What's beyond dispute is that the NEA is a major supporter of the Democratic Party. The organization is active in the nominating process for Democratic candidates and lobbies Democratic-aligned positions on education policy. This alignment puts the NEA in frequent conflict with conservative interest groups, who view it as a partisan adversary rather than a neutral professional organization.

State NEA affiliates maintain their own political operations, lobbying legislators for school funding, pushing for or against education policies, and filing lawsuits when they believe laws harm public schools or teachers' interests. The political agenda extends from local school board races to presidential elections, making the NEA a permanent fixture in American political life.

The Long March Toward a Cabinet Seat

One of the NEA's longest-running campaigns was the push for a federal Department of Education headed by a cabinet-level secretary. The effort began in the 1920s and took nearly sixty years to succeed.

During that era, the NEA's main goals were raising teacher salaries, improving professional standards, and elevating education in federal priorities. The organization believed a dedicated department would give schools a stronger voice in Washington and ensure education received the attention—and funding—it deserved.

The goal was finally achieved in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter signed legislation creating the Department of Education as a standalone cabinet agency. It was a victory decades in the making, though the department has faced recurring threats from critics who believe education should remain primarily a state and local concern.

Tensions with the New Deal

One might expect the NEA to have been a natural ally of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, with its emphasis on government action to address economic hardship. Instead, the relationship was rocky from the start.

The NEA's primary legislative goal during the Depression was a comprehensive bill that would supplement local property taxes with federal money for public schools. Roosevelt and his allies had different priorities. Any bill that sent federal money to schools would inevitably raise the question of segregated schools in the South. The administration wasn't willing to tackle that fight.

Roosevelt also believed federal education aid should target the poorest schools, not provide across-the-board funding that would benefit wealthy districts alongside struggling ones. The NEA wanted broader support, and the positions proved irreconcilable.

The New Deal did put some relief money toward school construction, but carefully avoided channeling any funding through the Office of Education. Instead, the administration created its own educational initiatives through the Civilian Conservation Corps and other relief agencies—programs it could control without getting entangled in fights over school segregation or funding formulas.

The Integration of American Teachers

For decades, the NEA was an overwhelmingly white organization reflecting the segregated school systems of the era. African American teachers had their own organization: the American Teachers Association, originally founded as the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools.

The two groups merged in 1966, a significant step in the integration of the teaching profession. The merger, combined with the NEA's transformation into a genuine labor union, dramatically changed the organization's demographics and leadership.

Just one year after the merger, the NEA elected Braulio Alonso as its first Hispanic president. In 1968, Elizabeth Duncan Koontz became the first Black president. The leadership changes reflected a broader shift in who the organization represented and how it saw its mission.

Reading Across America

Not everything the NEA does involves contract negotiations and political battles. One of its more charming initiatives is Read Across America Day, launched in 1998 to encourage children to read.

The event was originally timed to coincide with March 2, the birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel—better known as Dr. Seuss. From 1997 to 2018, the NEA partnered with Dr. Seuss Enterprises, and classrooms across the country celebrated with readings of "The Cat in the Hat" and "Green Eggs and Ham."

When that contract ended, the initiative evolved. Since 2017, Read Across America has focused more broadly on diverse books and diverse readers, expanding beyond a single author to celebrate reading in all its forms. What began as a one-day event has grown into a year-long program, with particular emphasis during March as National Reading Month.

Early Advocacy and Reform

The NEA's political engagement predates its transformation into a union. Even as a professional association, it advocated for causes it believed would strengthen public education.

In 1912, the NEA endorsed women's suffrage—a significant step for an organization whose membership was predominantly female but whose leadership had been dominated by male administrators. As women gained more prominent roles in the 1910s, the organization increasingly reflected their priorities.

The end of World War I brought alarming news about the nation's educational failures. Military draft examinations revealed that millions of potential soldiers were illiterate, poorly educated, or in bad health. A 1918 NEA commission chaired by George Strayer blamed the problem on low-quality rural schools, especially in the South, along with badly trained teachers and inequitable funding. The commission called for $100 million in federal aid.

Congress declined to provide the money. But many states responded by establishing minimum standards for rural schools, a reform the NEA had long advocated.

The organization also championed teacher tenure and pensions. In 1920, it cautiously recommended that school boards adopt policies protecting teachers from arbitrary dismissal. By the mid-1920s, a Committee of One Hundred on the Problem of Tenure was making the case more forcefully, arguing that tenure "protects the great body of good teachers from political attack and from dismissal for petty personal and political reasons."

The pension push proved even more successful. When the NEA began promoting state pension plans in 1923, many teachers faced retirement with no guaranteed income. By 1950, every state had a pension plan in effect—a transformation in the economic security of the profession.

The Forever Fight

Today's NEA operates in an environment its 1857 founders would find unrecognizable. Teachers in some states have robust collective bargaining rights; in others, they have virtually none. Political battles over curriculum, from how to teach history to whether certain books belong in libraries, have made schools a front line in broader culture wars.

The organization's size gives it genuine power in these fights. With 2.8 million members, a $400 million budget, and a presence in every state, the NEA can shape legislation, elect allies, and mobilize opposition to policies it opposes. State affiliates file lawsuits, negotiate contracts, and pressure legislators on school funding.

But that power comes with scrutiny and resentment. Critics from the right see the NEA as a Democratic Party auxiliary more interested in politics than education. Some reformers argue that teachers' unions protect incompetent educators at the expense of students. The 2024 strike by the organization's own staff suggested that even internal relationships can fray.

What remains constant is the organization's central claim: that teachers, organized together, can win better conditions for themselves and the students they serve. Whether that claim holds up—and how the NEA adapts to a changing educational landscape—will determine whether it remains America's most powerful union for another century and a half.