National Education Assn. President Holds Pivotal Role in U.S. Politics

Mary Hatwood Futrell remembers walking to a segregated black school in Lynchburg, Va., as a skinny child taunted by other youngsters about the raggedy clothes she wore.

“Kids can be really cruel,” Futrell says. “They called me ‘Seemo’ for ‘See mo’ holes than you do clothes. I didn’t have a lot of clothes. I had a lot of holes.”

The only taunts Futrell hears these days are aimed not at her wardrobe but at the National Education Assn., the giant teachers’ union she heads. Some of the sharpest barbs have come from the White House and its secretary of education.

As a schoolgirl, Futrell did not hesitate to let fly with a stone at her tormentors on the streets of Lynchburg. Her accuracy earned her a second sobriquet: “Deadeye.”

Tough Ripostes

She still lets adversaries have it, not with rocks but with tough ripostes that have established her as the most prominent and outspoken president in the 130-year history of the NEA.

There will be ample testimony to her popularity among the rank and file when the NEA holds its annual convention over the Fourth of July weekend in Los Angeles.

Futrell, 47, a business teacher from Alexandria, Va., is expected to be unopposed--just as she was in 1983 and 1985--when she seeks an unprecedented third two-year term as president of the 1.85 million-member NEA, the country’s biggest union.

The NEA presidency was once an almost ceremonial post limited to a single year, and some presidents did not even bother to move to Washington for their term. In the mid-1970s, in the midst of its transformation from a sedate professional association to a tough trade union, the NEA began allowing its leaders a longer leash.

By staying at the helm of NEA instead of returning to her junior high school post across the Potomac River, Futrell will play a pivotal role in deciding which presidential candidate the union will back in the 1988 elections.

Bastion of Liberalism

The union, long a bastion of liberalism, virtually was in the Democrats’ pockets in the last three presidential elections, although 45% of its members voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 41% in 1984.

This time around, with a bumper crop of candidates already in the field, the NEA is leaving open the possibility of endorsing Democrats and Republicans. In July, the union will launch a formal inspection process leading toward endorsements of one or more candidates Dec. 3, in time for the primaries.

“We’re not ruling out anyone,” Futrell said. “We will give everyone a fair shot.”

In the presidential race, the union’s strength lies not so much in its rich political war chest--teachers now pour nearly $2 million a year into the NEA Political Action Committee, many through dues checkoff--as in its ability to deploy a small army of astute volunteers to ring doorbells, stuff envelopes and get out the vote.

“They’re after our person power more than the dollars,” said Kenneth Melley, the NEA’s director of government relations. “We’ve got 4,000 members per congressional district.”

‘Brainwashing’ Children

Despite the NEA’s ragged relationship with the Reagan Administration--President Reagan once accused it of “frightening and brainwashing schoolchildren” about nuclear arms and race issues--Futrell said her offer stands for all candidates, including Vice President George Bush.

The union may find itself in a no-lose situation for 1988, as growing concerns about America’s trade deficit and waning competitiveness have most politicians talking about the need to improve U.S. schools.

Teachers already have benefited handsomely in the 1980s from an upsurge of public interest in education.

The average salary for America’s 2.2 million public school teachers was $26,704 in the academic year that just ended. Salaries went up $1,500, or 5.9%, from 1985-86, and they have doubled in the last decade, although the NEA points out that after inflation teachers are making just 6.5% more than in 1976-77.

Futrell insists that public schools are barely “treading water” despite budget increases that have outstripped inflation in recent years.

Blames Administration

She blames the Reagan Administration for shrinking the federal contribution to the nation’s schools from 9.2% to 6.2% in the last seven years.

“If we, as a nation, are to maintain our No. 1 ranking worldwide, we clearly have our work cut out for us. . . . Investing in quality education is like putting money in the bank,” Futrell said.

She accuses Reagan Administration officials of “attempting to subject education to a ‘talk’ cure. They believe there’s no problem in education that cannot be solved by a quick quip or trite adage.”

“Give me a break! And give the American people a break,” responded Secretary of Education William J. Bennett. “Once again the NEA reveals its cash-register mentality. While continuing to resist every promising and significant education reform in the states, the NEA returns to its favorite obsession--money.”

Bennett said Americans spend “more on education than ever before and more than any other country in the world. . . . Important reforms are being made. When will the largest and most intransigent of the nation’s education associations figure it out?”

Merit Pay Opposition

Reagan pummeled the NEA in 1983 for opposing merit pay, calling the union a major obstacle to better schools. “Until NEA supports badly needed reforms in salary, promotion and tenure policies, the improvements we so desperately need will only be delayed,” he said.

Former Education Secretary Terrel H. Bell, now a professor at the University of Utah, said: “I think that during the Futrell era there have been some positive changes in NEA. I believe Mary is a little more politically astute than her predecessors.”

The NEA is still officially dead set against merit pay, and Don Cameron, its executive director, predicted that “most merit pay or career ladder plans . . . will atrophy and go by the wayside” within five years.

But a major NEA affiliate in Fairfax County, Va., the nation’s fourth-largest school district, has agreed to support a merit plan sweetened by large across-the-board raises at the outset.

Futrell has mended fences with educators who distanced themselves from the NEA in the 1970s when the union embraced collective bargaining and strikes and warred against standardized tests. The NEA recently joined hands with the national associations of school principals and administrators to issue a joint guide to teacher evaluation.

Competency Exams

Futrell has led her union, inch by inch, toward backing such measures as competency exams for new teachers and creation of a national board to set standards and certify top teachers.

The national standards board was the central recommendation last year of a Carnegie Corp. task force that Futrell served on alongside Albert Shanker, president of the rival union, the American Federation of Teachers.

The task force called for a virtual revolution in the way schools are run, including creation of a new category of “lead” teachers who would function like doctors in a hospital and command salaries of $60,000 or $70,000 a year. The report was unanimous--to a degree. Futrell appended a list of her “deep reservations” quarreling with the key recommendations, including the concept of lead teachers.

But Futrell did persuade her union delegates to endorse the national standards board last summer. She sits on the new Carnegie board that hopes to start awarding certificates in the early 1990s that will give teachers something akin to the recognition that board certification affords physicians.

‘On the Inside’

She still sounds lukewarm about the Carnegie blueprint, but said: “I believe very strongly that we should be on the inside fighting these battles, rather than on the outside casting stones.

“This summer I will really be pushing the concept of a single union for teachers in America.” But she means “through growth, state mergers, assimilation and absorption”--not through marriage with Shanker’s union, which belongs to the AFL-CIO.

Merger talks between the NEA and AFT collapsed in the early 1970s.

“We are probably further apart in 1987 than we have been in the last 15 years, primarily because of Al Shanker,” Futrell said. “I do not see any possibility of us sitting down to talk about merger at the national level.

“I’ve had a chance to see Shanker in operation and I don’t trust him. I don’t think he stops to think about the people he represents. He advocates what he wants.”

Shanker, AFT president since 1974, advocates radical changes in how teachers are paid and evaluated. He calls the current structure of schools “an outmoded factory model.”

AFT Smaller

His vigorous advocacy of change has given the AFT a role in the school-reform movement out of proportion to its size. It claims 640,000 members, including 436,000 teachers. The NEA’s membership has climbed by 170,000 in the last two years to 1.86 million, including 1.5 million teachers. About 300,000 teachers, or 15%, do not belong to either union.

The image of Shanker as a symbol of school reform clearly rankles Futrell.

“Everybody’s looking at him like he’s a visionary,” she said. “Why are things so lousy in Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago? If he is such a mover of mountains, such a visionary, why didn’t he bring about changes in those schools?”

Shanker calls Futrell’s remarks “one big smear.” He said urban schools are in no better shape in San Francisco, Denver, Memphis and other big cities where teachers are represented by the NEA.

But even Shanker acknowledges: “Compared to all her predecessors, Mary Futrell is the best public spokesperson that they have had.”

Willis D. Hawley, dean of Peabody College at Vanderbilt University, said that as an organization, the NEA is far more powerful than the AFT.

‘Influence in Washington’

“They’re much better organized politically. They’re staffed better. . . . The NEA has a capability to influence grass-roots political outcomes that exceeds that of AFT, and that translates into influence in Washington,” Hawley said.

The NEA’s budget for the year ahead is $118 million. It has a full-time national staff of 565. Altogether, the union and its 52 affiliates spend more than $400 million a year and employ 3,500 people.

Linda Darling-Hammond, a Rand Corp. researcher, said the NEA is “incredibly democratic and bureaucratic in the way it must make policy. . . . It’s a gargantuan organization that can move only very slowly because of its size and structure and diversity.”

But, she said, NEA is “on the move,” at least in part because of Futrell’s efforts to focus on professional issues. And despite widely publicized differences with the AFT, Darling-Hammond says: “The two organizations, by and large, end up in very similar stances on important issues.”