Gender, Race, and the National Education Association: Professionalism and Its Limitations

Abstract

Clearly written, well researched, and thoughtful, this book describes and analyzes the changing organizational structure and policies of the National Education Association (nea) through two world wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the turn toward conservatism in the 1980s and early 1990s. The NEA operated at three levels—national, state, and local. While the latter two are not ignored, the book focuses on the national level. Primary sources for the book include the NEA Proceedings (containing speeches from the national conventions, reports of national committees, and minutes of the board of directors and other governing bodies) and the Journal of the National Education Association. Wayne J. Urban's main theme is the changing nature and purpose of the organization itself. In the opening decades of the century, the national leadership presented the NEA as a professional organization in which educators at all levels, from the elementary classroom to the superintendent's office, cooperated in the common task of educating the nation's children. Beginning in the 1960s, however, a new generation of leaders transformed the NEA into what was, in effect, a teachers' union, an organization championing the interests of the teachers as employees against those of administrators and school boards, their employers.

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