NEA vs. NCLB: follow the money
Flush with dues cash, the NEA has been bringing in plenty of hired guns to fight NCLB:
The nation’s largest teachers union has spent more than $8 million in a stealth campaign against President Bush’s education reform law, paying for research and political opposition in an effort to derail it, according to a Washington think tank that supports the law.
A report to be released today by the group Education Sector says the National Education Association (NEA) has given at least $8.1 million to education, civil rights and policy groups that have opposed or criticized No Child Left Behind, Bush’s far-reaching and controversial effort to reform public schools.
The law’s critics cried foul in 2005, when documents revealed that the Bush administration paid TV and radio commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote it on his syndicated programs. The revelations led to a government-wide inquiry.
For the new report, Education Sector senior fellow Joe Williams examined federal tax forms filed by the NEA. He does not charge that the union broke or evaded the law. But "at the very least, it appears the NEA has actively pursued partnerships" with groups fighting the law, he says.
The donations "are not necessarily a quid pro quo," but they are "a connection worth knowing," says Williams, a former education writer for the New York Daily News.
The full report can be found here. A few nuggets:
On the eve of a 2004 debate between Vice President Dick Cheney and Democratic challenger Sen. John Edwards at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Communities for Quality Education advertised on three billboards in downtown Cleveland. All three publicly dared moderator Gwen Ifill to ask the candidates about the shortcomings of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The eye-catching signs, one of which was located near Cleveland Browns Stadium, pictured Ifill on one side and Cheney and Edwards on the other. They read: "Hey Gwen, Ask them why we pay $1.5 billion to label our top schools failures."
At the time, Ohio had deemed some of the state’s top-performing districts—including Hudson and Shaker Heights—to be failing under NCLB. Districts were claiming that they were spending millions of dollars to implement the new law and that teachers’ jobs were being threatened. Who better to raise this important question on whether or not the federal law was working than an independent "education advocacy group" with seemingly no horse in the race?
What most Ohioans didn’t know, however, was that the "education advocacy group" was essentially a nonprofit subsidiary of the National Education Association.
Communities for Quality Education is not unique in appearing to receive most of its funding from the NEA or its state and local affiliates. Another nonprofit outfit, the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, has supported a host of studies and reports critical of NCLB and "high-stakes testing." All have been funded entirely with money from the NEA and several state affiliates. Based in East Lansing, Mich., the center pays particular attention to issues in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. In addition to receiving two separate payments of $100,000 each from the NEA in the 2004–05 fiscal year, the center collects an additional $60,000 per year in membership dues from state affiliates in the Great Lakes region.
Center officials note that they have never hidden the fact that the center is supported by the NEA. "This financial support does not dictate the mission of the center nor does it determine the topics of research and projects that we support," Teri Battaglieri, director of the center, wrote recently.
To date, however, none of the center’s reports on testing or NCLB would be considered supportive of either. Often the center’s work, while based on empirical data, is presented in inflammatory ways, usually by overhyping worst-case scenarios and forecasts. One study commissioned by the center declared that nearly all schools in the Great Lakes region would eventually be considered failing under NCLB, one of the scare tactics often used nationally to discredit the feasibility of the law. In the case of Michigan, for example, the report presented a doomsday scenario based on the fundamental requirement that all students must be proficient in their subject areas by the 2014 school year, a goal that many critics—and even supporters—of NCLB believe to be unreachable. At the same time, however, data maintained by state education officials showed that 88 percent of Michigan’s 3,670 public schools made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under NCLB in 2005, meaning they were not currently considered "failing schools." Additionally, of the failing schools in Michigan that have been forced to undergo restructuring because of NCLB (a factor that wasn’t considered in the union-funded work), 85 percent met state standards in the 2004–05 school year.13 The Great Lakes Center and the NEA’s Michigan affiliate are also linked on a personal level: Teri Battaglieri is married to Michigan Education Association Executive Director Lou Battaglieri.
Some of the most powerful voices of support for the NEA’s opposition to NCLB come not from groups started by the unions but from outside organizations that already have established relationships and reputations with policymakers, reporters, and editorial boards. The NEA has funded the work of a number of these organizations.
In February 2006, for example, the Harvard Civil Rights Project—a well-known and prolific education policy center run by professor Gary Orfield—released four separate studies that were critical of NCLB. The NEA funded all of them, and that fact was disclosed in each paper, but coverage of the reports by major news organizations such as Reuters and the Chicago Sun-Times made no mention of the NEA funding. Nor did the Civil Rights Project’s press release on the research or an NEA press release praising the reports.
"The Harvard Civil Rights Project studies provide the first look at the effects of NCLB on poor, minority children, and the view is more alarming than even we expected," said NEA President Weaver in the NEA release. "Instead of improving education and options for poor, minority students, NCLB appears to present more barriers."
Another long-established think tank that has been vocally opposed to NCLB and receives significant funding from teacher unions is the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute (EPI). The institute, which is highly visible in the national press, tends to focus on the impact of other societal problems on schools. EPI’s Richard Rothstein, a former New York Times columnist, argued in a 2004 essay in The American Prospect that NCLB and its testing requirements were "doing great and needless damage" to students. The NEA paid EPI $70,000 in 2005, a fact not disclosed in the essay.
As Eduwonk correctly points out, this really isn’t the same as the Williams payola flap; there’s nothing wrong with the NEA funding likeminded organizations as part of pursuing an agenda. We wonder if that newfangled Think Tank Review over at Arizona State University is going to shine some additional sunlight on these groups! Oh–well, prob
ab
ly not.
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