Same old same old: new union leadership does not change a thing.(feature)(Essay)

In July, the two major teachers unions entered a rare planetary conjunction, with both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) choosing new presidents at their national conventions barely a week apart.

At the NEA, Dennis Van Roekel moves up to the top rung of the officers' ladder after serving two terms as vice president, succeeding Reg Weaver. Van Roekel, 61, is a former high-school math teacher who seems to revel in his anonymity. In his acceptance speech, he said a reporter had called him a "mystery man."

"I want to tell you [who I am]," he told the NEA delegates. "The mission and vision of this organization absolutely defined who I am, what I care about, and what I believe in."

Randi Weingarten, 50, who adds the national presidency of the AFT to her current responsibilities as head of the United Federation of Teachers, its New York affiliate, has had much more on-stage experience in the theatre of American politics. At the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, she declared, "Federal education policy must be about a lot more than testing. ... When those children walk through the doors of our classrooms, they bring us their dreams, their potential and their trust. And sometimes they bring empty stomachs, untreated ailments, and life experiences that can chill you to your core."

Besides her work with the teachers union, Weingarten has been chair of New York City's Municipal Labor Committee, which coordinates negotiations for the city's many public-service unions. As principal negotiator for three contentious contracts in New York, she faced down two mayors, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg--neither one a pushover--and succeeded in winning a cumulative 43 percent raise for her teachers from 2002 to 2008. She was adept at maneuvers on the tricky three-way territory occupied by the union, the city, and the legislature upstate in Albany, which is often unsympathetic to the state's southern metropolis.

Given the unions' public profiles, you might not even realize that the AFT, at 1.4 million members the second-largest AFL-CIO affiliate, is less than half the size of the NEA, which signs in with 3.2 million (see Figure 1). But Weingarten's team is quite effective at orchestrating publicity.

 
Who's Growing Faster? (Figure 1) 
Five times the size of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in 
1970, the National Education Association (NEA) by 2008 was a little 
over twice as large, adding 2.1 million new members compared with 1.2 
million for the AFT. 
 
         AFT     NEA 
 
1970     205    1100 
2008    1400    3200 
 
SOURCE: American Federation of Teachers; National Education Association 
 
Note: Table made from bar graph.