Unlike the typical labor union, which focuses mainly on boosting members' salaries and benefits, the NEA has long backed a left-wing political agenda. Many of its proposals seem far removed from improving teachers' working conditions. And at its most recent national convention in July, the NEA passed a series of resolutions that continue this labor union's long march to the left.

The NEA has 2.3 million members. Although most work in elementary and secondary schools, others work in preschools and universities. There are NEA branches in every state and in more than 13,000 communities. (The NEA's main rival, the American Federation of Teachers, claims 900,000 members.)

The NEA's political action committee spent $6 million in the 1998 election cycle at all levels to push its agenda. More than $2 million of that went to races for the U.S. House of Representatives.

In the 1996 election cycle, 99% of its political action committee donations to candidates went to Democrats.

Not every NEA member operates in lock step with union leaders, however. Some 40% of NEA members oppose their union's political agenda, according to the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. The Eagle Forum's Education Reporter newsletter says 22% of NEA members send their kids to private schools.

As an organization, the NEA does take positions on educational issues: It opposes free-market reforms without exception.

At the 1998 convention, for example, delegates passed a resolution against school vouchers, calling them "deleterious."

Another resolution decried home schooling, urging states to force all home schools (and all parents who teach their kids at home) to obey state and federal school regulations. On these issues, the NEA acts more like a traditional union that wants to stifle potential rivals.

"Anything to do with school choice or (increasing) accountability would threaten the clout (the NEA has) now," said Danielle Bujnak, vice president of the Arlington, Va.-based Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, a free-market think tank. If government schools get fewer tax dollars, public school teachers and their unions won't get as much money.

But why would the NEA take stands on nuclear weapons, energy policy or health-care reform?

NEA spokeswoman Kathleen Lyons would not comment on individual resolutions, but said, "The NEA has always been vitally interested in issues that affect children, and many of those issues go beyond children."

Consider these resolutions that passed during the NEA's July convention:
I-19. Housing and Health Care for All. The NEA claims that all people have a right to housing and health insurance at taxpayer expense.

H-6. National Health-Care Policy. The NEA wants a "single-payer health-care plan for all residents of the U.S., its territories, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico." It also backs any laws that would move the U.S. toward a single-payer, i.e. nationalized, system.

F-2. Pay Equity/Comparable Worth. The NEA claims that some workers are "undervalued" and that "market value" of payment "cannot be the final determinant of pay scales since it too frequently reflects the race and sex bias in our society."

B-14. Equal Opportunities Through Mathematics and Science Education. The NEA supports "gender-free and culturally unbiased mathematics and science programs" for women and minorities.

B-40. Environmental Education. The NEA believes environmental education should encourage "protection of the Earth's finite resources" and raise awareness of overpopulation, "global warming, ozone depletion and acid precipitation."

H-8. Energy Programs. The NEA "believes that a national energy policy should stress rapid development of renewable energy sources."

I-6. Nuclear Freeze/Cessation. The NEA believes the U.S. "should adopt a verifiable freeze on the testing, development (and) production" of nuclear weapons.

I-1. Peace and International Relations. The NEA wants new disarmament agreements and opposes an anti-ballistic missile defense system, a.k.a. "Star Wars."

A-14. Public Education/National Defense. Whenever the Pentagon's budget drops, the NEA doesn't call for tax cuts. Instead, it wants that money spent on "alternative civilian uses, including education."

The NEA also passed resolutions calling on statehood for the District of Columbia, a national holiday to honor farmworker organizer Cesar Chavez, mandatory teaching about organized labor, community service for students and encouraging consumers to buy union-made products and services.

NEA leaders are "courting votes" with those resolutions, said Myron Lieberman, director of the Education Policy Institute and author of "The Teacher Unions: How the NEA and AFT Sabotage Reform and Hold Students, Parents, Teachers, and Taxpayers Hostage to Bureaucracy."

"It doesn't matter how irrelevant the resolution is," he said. "They don't want to alienate any (delegates) at the convention."

Union leaders may risk alienating individual teachers, though, says Nina Shokraii-Rees, an education policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. "These resolutions have nothing to do with the well-being of the NEA's members," she said. Bujnak of the Tocqueville Institution says NEA member teachers have written her group complaining about the union's positions.

The NEA's agenda also carries a price tag. If it were fully implemented, federal spending would rise more than $700 billion a year, the Tocqueville Institution reports. "It seems unfair that they spend so much time on these other issues and don't address the ones that teachers -especially in the inner cities - are actually asking for help on," like getting textbooks and school supplies, Bujnak said.

Taking left-wing positions isn't a new practice for the NEA.
In 1934, the union urged schools to help students in "the transition to a new social order."

In 1942, the NEA Journal advocated "a world system of money and credit" and "a world police force."

In 1946, the NEA Journal stated: "In the struggle to establish an adequate world government, the teacher has many parts to play. . . . He can do much to prepare the hearts and minds of children for global understanding and cooperation."

It continued: "At the very top of all the agencies which will assure the coming of world government must stand the school, the teacher and the organized profession."

That globalist vision hasn't changed over the years, said Samuel Blumenfeld, author of "NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education." In 1976, as the U.S. celebrated the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, the NEA issued a Declaration of Interdependence.

The NEA is most active at the state level, Blumenfeld said. "It wants to control those who control the tax money, its source of power."