Teacher Organizations and Politics in the 1970s

The NEA and the AFT.

In the 1970s two of the most powerful organizations for teachers, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), gained power and prominence as a result of the political turmoil surrounding federal funding of education. The AFT is a union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), which had a long history of militancy on behalf of its teacher members, most of whom were located in the Northeast. The NEA refers to itself as a professional organization, dominated by administrators, despite the fact that teachers comprised the bulk of the membership. A shift in power within the NEA occurred early in the decade when the AFT began to make inroads among the membership of the NEA, and the professional organization was moved to lobby more forcefully on behalf of its teacher-members in order to keep them in the fold. In...

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