THE RIGHT BOOKS

Sooner or later, with the inevitability of a professional big-game hunter confronting a rogue elephant, every conservative columnist stumbles upon the subject of the National Education Assocation, and Dan C. Alexander Jr.’s Who’s Ruining Our Schools? The Case against the NEA Teacher Union (Save Our Schools Research and Education Foundation, 777 14th Street, N.W., Suite 747, Washington, D.C. 20005; $3.95) offers this columnist the chance for an open shot. Like the elephant, the NEA is the Gargantua of its native habitat; like it, too, it possesses a disproportionately small brain, heavily armatured with bone. Mr. Alexander, president of Save Our Schools and the former chairman of the Mobile (Alabama) County School Board, is the Karamojo Bell of his profession, delivering with fatal accuracy a compact five-hundred-grain slug from an angle no other writer I have read has mastered. Who’s Ruining Our Schools? is one of those books with its own order form at the back, which you imagine being shipped in close-packed rounds, like live ammunition.

For those unfamiliar with the organization’s history, the NEA, founded in 1857, is the country’s oldest surviving teachers’ association. As late as 1947 the NEA considered itself a purely professional body, adamantly opposed to the unionization of teachers; not until 1961, when its hand was forced by the aggressive American Federation of Teachers, did it organize a local affiliate in New York in an attempt to win the exclusive right to represent the city’s public-school instructors. The NEA lost that battle, but, as Alexander recounts, went on from defeat to win the war in short order. It hired Saul Alinsky to fly around the country organizing local affiliates, until, by 1976, all fifty states had unified memberships (meaning that if you belong to the local you are required to belong to the state and national organizations as well). In 1960 the NEA had 713,994 dues-paying members, compared with 1,700,000 in 1985; in 1984-85, it spent $90 million at the national level, an 18-fold increase from 1957, and had won control over better than 70 per cent of America’s public-school classroom teachers. By the late Seventies, too, all pretense of being a professional organization had been abandoned: “Instruction and professional development,” Mary Hatwood Futrell, NEA’s then-president, stated in 1982, “have been on the back burner to us, compared to political action.”

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Sooner or later, with the inevitability of a professional big-game hunter confronting a rogue elephant, every conservative columnist stumbles upon the subject of the National Education Assocation, and Dan C. Alexander Jr.’s Who’s Ruining Our Schools? The Case against the NEA Teacher Union (Save Our Schools Research and Education Foundation, 777 14th Street, N.W., Suite 747, Washington, D.C. 20005; $3.95) offers this columnist the chance for an open shot. Like the elephant, the NEA is the Gargantua of its native habitat; like it, too, it possesses a disproportionately small brain, heavily armatured with bone. Mr. Alexander, president of Save Our Schools and the former chairman of the Mobile (Alabama) County School Board, is the Karamojo Bell of his profession, delivering with fatal accuracy a compact five-hundred-grain slug from an angle no other writer I have read has mastered. Who’s Ruining Our Schools? is one of those books with its own order form at the back, which you imagine being shipped in close-packed rounds, like live ammunition.

For those unfamiliar with the organization’s history, the NEA, founded in 1857, is the country’s oldest surviving teachers’ association. As late as 1947 the NEA considered itself a purely professional body, adamantly opposed to the unionization of teachers; not until 1961, when its hand was forced by the aggressive American Federation of Teachers, did it organize a local affiliate in New York in an attempt to win the exclusive right to represent the city’s public-school instructors. The NEA lost that battle, but, as Alexander recounts, went on from defeat to win the war in short order. It hired Saul Alinsky to fly around the country organizing local affiliates, until, by 1976, all fifty states had unified memberships (meaning that if you belong to the local you are required to belong to the state and national organizations as well). In 1960 the NEA had 713,994 dues-paying members, compared with 1,700,000 in 1985; in 1984-85, it spent $90 million at the national level, an 18-fold increase from 1957, and had won control over better than 70 per cent of America’s public-school classroom teachers. By the late Seventies, too, all pretense of being a professional organization had been abandoned: “Instruction and professional development,” Mary Hatwood Futrell, NEA’s then-president, stated in 1982, “have been on the back burner to us, compared to political action.”