National Education Association of the United States of America

Abstract

This essay profiles the history of the National Education Association of the United States of America. Founded in 1857, the association functioned as a national debating society for a small group of educational leaders for the rest of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, it experienced a wave of feminist opposition to the male leaders, the influence of progressive education, a surge of local emphasis, the challenge of trade unionism in the form of the American Federation of Teachers - AFT -, its own racial desegregation, and participation in the creation of the United States Department of Education. Recently, it has been attacked from the political right, as a facilitator of an intellectually deficient public education system.