This month educators and others who support teacher choice are celebrating the 20^th anniversary of the Association of American Educators (AAE).  For two decades, AAE has valiantly provided educators a refuge for career protection and professional support as teachers have discovered that teacher union politics, tactics and priorities are not in line with what they believe to be in their students’ or their profession’s best interests.  Northwest Professional Educators takes this opportunity to express our sincere gratitude to Gary and Piete Beckner and their band of nationally recognized teachers who launched the organization with vision, courage, and tenacity 20 years ago.

As we celebrate AAE, this might be a suitable time to also look back on the history and founding of Northwest Professional Educators (NWPE), AAE’s state partner serving Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.  NWPE was founded to give educators a choice and voice in the Northwest, much of which is oppressed by compulsory, monopoly unionism, a practice not compatible with freedom of association.

My journey to the professional educator movement is a personal one.  As a public school speech pathologist, I myself lived through union bullying and was, thus, primed to experience the need for an alternative organization that respected all teachers’ points of view.   I was once a union member and served as a union representative, but the more involved I became and the more teacher union literature I read, the more distressed I became with how my dues were spent.  Millions of teacher union dues were being funneled into political organizing and political organizations sharing NEA values with which I had major disagreements and which, frankly, had nothing to do with education or teacher representation.

Engaging in the democratic process, I spoke out in my union about its practices and viewpoints that I considered destructive to students and our profession.  The result?   My local union leaders misled me with false information and sought to distance me from my fellow union representatives.  In 1992, Barb Amidon, a high school counselor in Olympia,WA, contacted me after reading my editorial  in WEA Action, our union publication.  She explained my union opt out rights and that I didn’t have to pay for union politics with my forced union dues.  She asked me to join her in informing other teachers and organizing a statewide federal class action lawsuit exercising our nonunion teacher’s right to a legitimate refund of mandatory dues not being spent on representation activities.  Shocked that no one in the school district or union had ever explained my rights, I agreed with her that teachers had a right to know.

We formed the “WEA Challenger Network,” educated our colleagues about their union opt out rights, and invited them to join us in a class action lawsuit challenging the dues refund amount for which nonunion teachers were eligible.  In 1994, one hundred twenty one nonunion teachers threatened Washington Education Association (WEA) with a lawsuit.  We settled out of court for a 50% reduction in dues for two years.  The amount of the rebate was not surprising since in 1989, a group of ten nonunion teachers had received a 90% reduction in dues.   NEA General Counsel Robert Chanin even admitted in Education Week, "So you tell me how I can possibly separate NEA's collective bargaining efforts from politics -- you just can't. It's all politics."

Because the settlement was only for two years, we continued to research and expose union spending.  We published the information in our WEA Challenger Network News with the intent of filing a class action suit when the settlement ran out.  More and more teachers joined us.  We filed the suit in 1996 with nearly 300 teachers and the help of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTWLDF).   WEA responded by suing Barb and me in a blatant attempt to intimidate us into silence and to send a harrowing message to other potential dissenters.  After a year and a half struggle, the union offered to drop the suit if we agreed to never criticize the union again.  We agonized but declined.  With help from the NRTWLDF, the union’s heavy handed tactics were finally defeated with our free speech rights intact.  This paved the way for our eventual organization as a state partner of the AAE.  During the lawsuit, the AAE was instrumental in offering union challengers the support and legal protection we needed to free ourselves from the union’s grip.

For years, teachers have tried to raise accountability and professionalism in the union by working both within the union as union members and outside the union as nonunion agency fee payers — all to no effect.  So when AAE offered to partner with our group of Washington union challengers to provide a Northwest based professional educators option, we jumped at the chance.  AAE’s vision and belief in educators and Gary and Piete’s personal and professional support made launching NWPE a reality in 2001.

On this auspicious occasion of the 20^th anniversary of theAAE, NWPE congratulates and thanks Gary and Piete Beckner, AAE’s courageous founders, and all those who have believed in and supported their mission.   They have slugged it out through so many challenges in order to get to this laudable accomplishment.  We couldn’t be prouder to partner with them to provide educators with a professional, nonunion organization that advances educators as true professionals.

At the same time, we offer our gratitude to the forward thinking, fiercely independent teachers who founded Northwest Professional Educators, including Barb Amidon, Jeff Leer, Ed Dawson, Grant Pelesky, Lowell Johnson, Carrie Riplinger, Jim Johnson, Paul Lecoq, Beryl and Dan Griner, Bill Proser and so many more.  They thought it was more important to fight for principles than to settle for “labor peace.”  Because of their determination and AAE's support, teachers in the Northwest have a choice.

We look forward to our own 20^th anniversary partnering with the AAE as well as the day when the flawed architecture of forced union fees that has oppressed our “public schools” under a private organization’s ideology is dismantled and teachers are truly set free.

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