thumb|262x262px|General meeting, National Education Association on July 3, 1916, at Madison Square Garden, New York City

The National Education Association (NEA) is the largest labor union in the United States. It represents public school teachers and other support personnel, faculty and staffers at colleges and universities, retired educators, and college students preparing to become teachers. The NEA has 2.8 million members and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. The NEA had a budget of $399 million in 2023 along with an endowment of $428 million. Becky Pringle is the NEA's current president.

During the early 20th century, the National Education Association was among the leading progressive advocates of establishing a United States Department of Education.

Driven by pressure from teacher organizing, by the 1970s the NEA transformed from an education advocacy organization to a rank-and-file union. In the decades since, the association has continued to represent organized teachers and other school workers in collective bargaining and to lobby for progressive education policy. The NEA's political agenda frequently brings it into conflict with conservative interest groups. State affiliates of the NEA regularly lobby state legislators for funding, seek to influence education policy, and file legal actions.

At the national level, the NEA lobbies the United States Congress and federal agencies and is active in the nominating process for Democratic candidates. The NEA is a major supporter of the Democratic Party.

History

Founding

The NEA was founded in Philadelphia in 1857 as the National Teachers Association (NTA). Zalmon Richards was elected the NTA's first president and presided over the organization's first annual meeting in 1858. At the beginning and for its first century of history, it had the character of a professional association rather than a labor union. The union was chartered by Congress in 1906.

The NEA was never on good terms with the New Deal. Its main goal was for Congress to pass a multipurpose public finance bill that would supplement local property taxes in funding public schools. Some relief money was used to build schools, but the New Deal avoided channeling any of it through the Office of Education. Legislation never succeeded, because it would condone segregated schools in the South and because President Franklin D. Roosevelt rejected any across-the-board program. He believed that federal money should only go to the poorest schools, and none to rich states. Only a small portion of American public school teachers were unionized before the 1960s. That began to change in 1959, when Wisconsin became the first state to pass a collective bargaining law for public employees. Over the next 20 years, most other states adopted similar laws.

The NEA merged with the American Teachers Association, the historically Black teachers association founded as the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools, in 1966. The NEA's merger with the ATA, its transformation into a true labor union, and other factors were to greatly change the organization's demographics. In 1967, the NEA elected its first Hispanic president, Braulio Alonso. In 1968, NEA elected its first black president, Elizabeth Duncan Koontz.

After 1957, the NEA began a process that would transform it into an organization representing the teachers in its districts, rather than just the administrators. It came to resemble the rival American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which was a labor union for teachers in larger cities. The success of the AFT in raising wages through strike activity encouraged the NEA to undertake similar activities. However, six NEA state affiliates have since merged with their AFT counterparts. Mergers occurred in Florida (the Florida Education Association formed in 2000); Minnesota (Education Minnesota formed in 1998), Montana (MEA-MFT formed in 2000), New York (New York State United Teachers formed in 2006), North Dakota (North Dakota United formed in 2013), and West Virginia (Education West Virginia formed in 2025).

In 2006, the NEA and the AFL–CIO also announced that, for the first time, stand-alone NEA locals as well as those that had merged with the AFT would be allowed to join state and local labor federations affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

2024 NEASO lockout

The National Education Association Staff Organization (NEASO) is the staff union representing employees who work for the NEA. In July 2024, NEASO staff members went on a three-day strike protesting what it charged were NEA's unfair labor practices. This resulted in the halting of the National Education Association's (NEA) annual representative assembly in Philadelphia. The event, which was scheduled to run for four days over the Fourth of July weekend, brings together thousands of educators to vote on the union's priorities, budget, and strategic plan. President Joe Biden, who was expected to address the delegates, canceled his appearance, citing his refusal to cross the picket line.

Following the strike, the NEA locked out nearly 300 staff members working at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. These staff members were not paid or allowed to work until August 15, 2024, when NEA and NEASO reached agreement on a new contract.

Composition

According to NEA's Department of Labor records since 2005, when membership classifications were first reported, the majority of the union's membership are "active professional" members, having fallen only slightly from 74% to the current 71%. The second largest category have been "active education support professional" members, with about 15%. The third largest category are "retired" members, which have grown from 8% to 10%. Two other categories, "active life" and "student" members, have both remained with around 2%, falling slightly. These categories are eligible to vote in the union, though the union lists some comparatively marginal categories which are not eligible to vote: "staff", "substitute" and "reserve" members, each with less than 1% of the union's membership. NEA contracts also cover some non-members, known as agency fee payers, which since 2006 have numbered comparatively about 3% of the size of the union's membership.

As of 2014 these categories account for about: 2.1 million "active professionals", 457,000 "active education support professionals", 300,000 "retirees", 52,000 "students", 42,000 "active life" members, and just under nine thousand others, plus about 90,000 non-members paying agency fees.

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