NEA Votes to Fight Bork Nomination

The nation’s largest teachers union voted Sunday to fight the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork and to challenge efforts to make English the official language of the United States.

“Judge Bork is a compulsory pregnancy man . . . too conservative on race, women’s rights and reproductive freedom,” teacher Jane Stern of Rockville, Md., told the 8,000 National Education Assn. delegates meeting in Los Angeles before they voted overwhelmingly to oppose him.

The delegates, winding up their 125th annual convention, also rejected a resolution to support U.S. economic reconstruction aid for the Marxist government of Nicaragua.

The teachers left it to the union’s nine-member Executive Committee to decide whether to endorse a gay rights march on Washington. They voted to oppose laws requiring school buses to have seat belts.

Before calling the convention to order for a fourth day Sunday, NEA President Mary Hatwood Futrell angrily accused Education Secretary William J. Bennett of being “anti-children, anti-public education and anti-quality.”

The delegates of the 1.86-million-member union also declared that “efforts to make English the official language of the United States are detrimental to our existing cultural pluralism and must be challenged.”

Ed A. Foglia, president of the California Teachers Assn., said proposals to make English the official language were “a right-wing political ploy” and a racist plot against minorities.