One can easily question the effectiveness of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers in maintaining their declining influence over education policy, and most-definitely find their declarations that they represent all teachers quite questionable. But when it comes to disregard for their members — especially in covering up incidents of fraud and embezzlement by staffers and leadership at the expense of its rank-and-file — the two unions have proven unquestionably good at it.As your editor noted more than a year ago in RealClearPolitics, the NEA discovered that it lost $227,626 over a five-year period “due to the actions of two former employees.” Although the nation’s largest teachers’ union managed to recover the funds, the fact that it buried the news in its annual filing with the U.S. Department of Labor shows it was more concerned with keeping the embezzlement under wraps (and avoiding questions about its financial controls) than with informing members about what happened to the cash. The American Federation of Teachers found itself in a slightly more public situation over the past year as it had to put its Broward County, Fla., affiliate under receivership after its president, Pat Santeramo, had allegedly run up $128,600 in unexplained credit card bills, had reimbursed staffers for $19,500 in exchange for them making campaign donations, and ran up $3.8 million in budget shortfalls over the last three years. As it turns out, the AFT ended up paying Santeramo $255,000 in unused sick leave and vacation time — essentially in exchange for his resignation — which it shouldn’t have paid because the document Santeramo used to justify getting the payout was allegedly forged. The union hasn’t gone after those dollars even though prosecutors are charging Santeramo with embezzlement and fraud related to the payout and other alleged crimes.
So it isn’t shocking to Dropout Nation that the NEA’s Maryland affiliate took pains to cover up alleged theft of $433,000 in rank-and-file funds by Denise Inez Owens, the now-former treasurer of the NEA’s Worcester County local. Four years ago, the Maryland State Education Association discovered that Owens, a longtime NEA activist, siphoned off $433,000 in Worcester local funds — including issuing herself checks of as much as $6,000 a pop — in order to finance her out-of-control gambling habit. But instead of reporting the embezzlement to law enforcement (which would have then alerted Owens’ employers at the Worcester County district as well as her fellow teachers) the Maryland NEA affiliate forced Owens to resign her post, confess to the crime, and agree to pay restitution. Why? Because the Maryland affiliate feared that rank-and-file members in Worcester County and the rest of the Old Line State would have left the union. The Maryland affiliate did make sure to file an insurance claim (after all, it is concerned about money even as it is less concerned about full disclosure to its members), and the Worcester local did report it by 2012 to the Internal Revenue Service as part of an effort to seek relief from the federal tax agency. Only the intrepid work of the Daily Times, which noticed the IRS filing (and how it failed to mention Owens by name in its report) would lead to the theft being reported to rank-and-file members and the public. [Last month, Owens was sentenced to two years in prison.]
Owens is certainly guilty of her crimes; hopefully she will repent and seek God’s forgiveness for her misdeeds. But she isn’t the only one who broke the trust of the rank-and-file. Certainly embezzlement can happen even with the most-stringent financial controls; after all, organizations are run by rather imperfect people. But the Maryland NEA waited eight months to find out about the funny business even after a string of issues – including the failure of the Worcester local to turn over the share of dues it owed to the NEA unit, and the receipt of a bum check for $99,627 – should have made them more-vigilant about fiscal issues. The fact that the Worcester local’s own financial controls were lax, with only one signature required for checks drawn from its account, made it way too easy for Owens to get away with financial mischief. Add in the lack of disclosure to the rank-and-file, who deserve better than to find out about the theft on the pages of the local newspaper, and one can easily say that the Maryland NEA and its Worcester unit are as guilty as Owens of committing an unacceptable betrayal — especially in light of the affiliate’s effort to convince state legislators to pass a law allowing it to compel non-members to pay union dues into its coffers.
But as I said before, the unwillingness of the Maryland NEA to inform its members about the Owens affairs is just another example of the callous disregard the NEA and its affiliates (along with the AFT) show for their rank-and-file. Two years ago, when the NEA seized control of its South Carolina affiliate, it only gave official word of the takeover to its members in a column inside Emphasis, the union’s in-house publication. A year before that, when the NEA and took over its Indiana affiliate, the unit and the NEA waited until the day of the takeover to disclose to members that the affiliate mismanaged its insolvent health insurance fund (including investing as much as 87 percent of its portfolio in hedge funds), and that members would have to pay an additional $40 annually in dues in order to cover the $67 million deficit. And as shown in a since-dismissed lawsuit filed six years ago against the NEA by two members, the union has managed to do a really good job of making money off of its members; the union collected as much as $2 million from two firms in exchange for peddling an annuity program, NEA ValueBuilder, whose fees were higher than those charged by other annuity peddlers.
The disregard isn’t just financial. From the move by the AFT’s New York City local to allow retirees who support the current leadership a greater share of the votes in union elections (at the expense of working teachers in the rank-and-file), to the efforts of the AFT and the NEA to defend quality-blind seniority-based policies such as Last In-First Out layoff rules, which protect longtime veterans at the expense of younger teachers in the ranks, to attempts by the NEA’s Michigan affiliate to strike eight-to-ten year collective bargaining agreements with districts that force teachers to pay dues regardless of whether they want to be members or not (and thus circumvent the state’s ban on forced dues payments), the two unions merely care more about maintaining their influence and keeping the dollars that are at the heart of that power than about the women and men who support them. The fact that three NEA rank-and-file members working for the Taylor district in Michigan have to sue their own affiliate just to stop the forced dues payments is also a reminder that the NEA and AFT care more about money than about teachers they proclaim to represent.
For those teachers, especially younger, more reform-minded instructors, who are more-concerned with elevating the profession than with the continued existence of either union, the Owens affair is one more reason why they should do all they can to embrace a professional association model that is a better fit for themselves and for the children they serve.
Ed Jones