NEA Delegates Reject Merger Plan, But Door to Unity With AFT Still Open Delegates to the National Education Association's annual meeting soundly rejected a plan July 5 that would have paved the way for the union's merger with the American Federation of Teachers. J uly 18.
Unity is far from a dead issue for the nation's two major teacher organizations.
Read reactions to the votes and look ahead to what's next in unifying the two groups. The short history of an Education Department initiative designed to improve teaching, the National Partnership for Excellence and Accountability in Teaching, has been one of confusion and change, with its leaders struggling to define its mission and defend its very existence. Though many educators described the first-year results from Virginia's new Standards of Learning tests, in which 97 percent of schools failed, as a starting point and pledged to raise scores in the future, others lost no time in questioning both the tests and the passing scores that were set for them. The Arizona plan, adopted in 1997, does not include vouchers in the sense of the publicly financed choice programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland. But like those programs, it benefits students attending religious schools.