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1) Remembering NEA's Last "War" - The
Kamber Report. While writing last week's
communiqué about NEA declaring
"We are at war" and its plans for building a new external narrative, it
occurred to me that this was not the first time the union had used such
language or made such plans.
It seems ages ago now, but back in 1996
Bob Chase had just been elected as NEA president, and the union was taken
aback by Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole's attacks during his
acceptance speech. Dole lost, and the criticisms had
little effect one way or the other, but Chase was worried that the union
had lost control of the external narrative.
He brought in The Kamber Group to
analyze NEA's public communications and offer recommendations to improve its
image. The firm was the creation of Victor Kamber, who had a
long and colorful career with labor unions and the Democratic Party. At
the time, The Kamber Group was one of the top PR firms in the nation. Kamber
is still around and
still offers commentary in his field.
Kamber spent three months going over NEA
press releases and ads, newspaper stories and television broadcasts about
the union. His staff conducted confidential interviews with NEA officers and
employees, as well as those who worked for state affiliates.
On January 14, 1997, Kamber presented
his final product, called An Institution at Risk: An External
Communications Review of the National Education Association. The title
was selected as a reminder of A Nation at Risk, the seminal 1983
report on American education, but it became popularly known as the Kamber
Report.
The Kamber Report was noteworthy for a
couple of reasons. First was its tone. In the first line, Kamber compared
the state of NEA and public education to the Battle of Britain. He called
NEA's future into question. "To survive, much less to prevail over its
critics, the NEA must shift to a crisis mode of operations," he wrote,
adding, "There is a war going on over public education and NEA is still in a
business-as-usual mode."
Second, Kamber offered a very specific
suggestion about what to do. He recommended a new public relations campaign
based on the message "better teachers, better students, better public
schools" and wrote:
The campaign should be launched in a speech by President
Chase in which he acknowledges the crisis, says some things for their shock
value to open up the audience's minds (e.g., there are bad teachers and our
job is to make them good or show the way to another career), and then
details the Association's substantive programs to improve public schools -
those already in existence and those that will be expanded or launched in
the months ahead.
Four weeks later, Chase gave a speech
before the National Press Club in which he said, "There are indeed some bad
teachers in America's schools. And it is our job as a union to improve those
teachers or - that failing - to get them out of the classroom."
Observers found the two events a little
too coincidental when the report was leaked. (I was one of the culprits, but
it appears to have been leaked by multiple NEA sources to multiple outlets.)
The report offered a rare peek into
NEA's view of itself and the events of the last few months imply a continued
relevance now, 14 years later. But when I thought to mention it in last
week's communiqué, I found the report was unavailable on the Internet. This
was surprising, but understandable. It was leaked as hard copies, and the
very few people who had an electronic copy had no motivation to share it.
While it's far from a momentous
historical document, the Kamber Report is certainly deserving of
preservation, and I prefer not to trust in the discretion of the
$2.5 million NEA Archives at George Washington University.
Rather than scan the hard copy, which
would have made the online file bulky and non-searchable by keyword, I
retyped the entire document, taking care to faithfully reproduce the page
breaks, page numbers and headings. I've included warts and all - to the
level of not correcting the study's occasional lapses in grammar and syntax.
I've posted the
entire 49-page report as an Adobe Acrobat file on
EIA's Declassified page.
While some of the content will be of
interest only to NEA and/or PR junkies, there is still some pretty
entertaining stuff. At one point, Kamber claims NEA's position on charter
schools "has been misunderstood by less-informed mainstream reporters and
mischaracterized by critics, even though NEA plans on spending $1.5 million
on charter schools in the next five years."
When those next five years were over, we
learned
who really had been misunderstood and mischaracterized.
More irony was on display when Kamber
criticized ABC reporter Forrest Sawyer because he "went on to characterize
the American public's largely indifferent or negative reaction to Senator
Dole's attacks on teachers' unions as a function more of how the message was
crafted than because the Senator was wrong."
This is the major limitation of PR
analysis. Kamber's business - and indeed his personal view - fails to
entertain the notion that perhaps the reason NEA is seen as obstructionist
is because it is obstructionist. His job was to change the public
perception of NEA, not its reality. Yet he saw no contradiction between his
analysis of NEA's message and that of Dole's message.
NEA's image problems - as true today as
in 1997 - aren't due to its message. When an oil company airs an ad showing
how well it cares for wildlife, it might be completely true, and it might
even be laudable, but the viewer still knows that the purpose of the oil
company is not to care for wildlife. It's to drill for oil. While the union
may see itself as "dedicated to improvement of the profession, student
success and social justice," and may even make some compelling arguments to
support its view, we know that isn't what pays the bills.
2) Last Week's Intercepts.
EIA's blog,
Intercepts, covered these topics from March 22-28:
*
NEA Sides With Big Banks on Debit Card Fees. Rational or simply
rationale?
* Dispatches
From the Propaganda Front. Education is for the classroom, not for the
soapbox.
*
NEArmageddon: The State of States You Haven’t Read About. It's not just
Wisconsin.
*
Evil Governor Drives Wedge Between Unions. Solidarity forever.
*
Hold the Phone. Hello?
3)
Quote of the Week.
"That's
what you're deciding on today - about whether or not you want to inject
yourself into the individual, private decisions that employees make about
their money."
-
Kevin Watson, a lobbyist for the Florida Education
Association, on a bill in the state legislature that would require unions to
get written authorization from members in order to use dues for political
purposes.
(March 21
Florida Times-Union) |
