Rival Teacher Organizations to Discuss Merger

The National Education Assn. voted Friday to open merger talks with its sometime rival, the American Federation of Teachers.

The NEA convention’s 9,000 delegates approved the proposal on a voice vote, beating back a series of amendments designed to add preconditions to the talks.

The only amendment, adopted over the objections of the union’s leadership, was a requirement that voting next year on any proposal coming out of the talks be by secret ballot.

The four-day convention also is likely to map strategy for fighting state-level proposals to allow parents to pay private school tuition for their children with taxpayer-financed vouchers. Such a measure will be on California’s ballot in November, and the NEA plans to spend $1 million to fight it.

The Bush Administration had pushed for a voucher plan on a national scale, but President Clinton, like the NEA, opposes the idea.

Clinton will speak to the convention Monday, the first President to address the NEA since Jimmy Carter more than a dozen years ago.

The vote on the merger possibility allows NEA leaders only to open merger talks with the 800,000-member American Federation of Teachers, not consummate any deal. The NEA is more than twice as large as the AFT, with about 2 million members.

A merger would join two of the most influential lobbying groups on education issues at all levels of government.

The NEA has considered itself a professional association and forbidden its local affiliates from joining the AFL-CIO. The AFT is one of about 90 unions with AFL-CIO affiliation.