American voluntary association of teachers, administrators, and other educators associated with elementary and secondary schools and colleges and universities. It is the world's largest professional organization. Its headquarters are in Washington, D.C.
The association originated in 1857 as the National Teachers Association, which merged in 1870 with the National Association of School Superintendents and the American Normal School Association to form the National Education Association. Its membership exceeded 2.5 million in the early 21st century.
The NEA has a complex organizational structure. First, it is a general-purpose, individual-membership organization that advances the cause of public education and the welfare of its members. It has a large professional staff and establishes committees and commissions, which provide numerous services, such as research, publications, liaison with federal-government agencies, promotion of federal legislation, and defense of professional rights.
Second, the NEA comprises many national bodies that are based on specialized, professional, and vocational interests. These are simultaneously departments in the NEA and autonomous organizations with their own dues-paying members, officers, and staffs and in many cases with state and local affiliates or branches. Examples are the successors to two of the founding organizations, now the American Association of School Administrators and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. There are departments of elementary-school principals, of secondary-school principals, and of classroom teachers; departments of teachers of various subjects, such as art, music, mathematics, science, and social studies; and departments of specialists in such fields as educational research, curriculum development, audiovisual instruction, rural education, and elementary, kindergarten, and preschool education.
Third, the NEA may be viewed as a confederation of affiliated local and state education associations. The representative assembly of the NEA, which establishes its policies and elects its officers, is composed of delegates sent by these affiliated associations, which are represented according to the number of their members who belong to the national body. The rapid growth of membership in the NEA dates from the creation of the representative assembly in 1921.
It is by forming local and state associations that teachers and school administrators have chiefly sought to improve the schools and their own working conditions, because local school boards set salary scales and conditions of employment and because overall educational authority for the public-schools system and its financing is vested in the governments of the several states. In some states, members of the local and the state associations must join the National Education Association; in others, membership in one is independent of membership in the other.
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