Obama’s obviously aware of the situation and has made his decision, basing my observation on Obama’s, and Duncan’s approving remarks about vouchers and charters as well as Obama’s fight to hang onto the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. He’s also not the only Dem to make the switch as shown by Feinstein’s and Durbin’s swapping of tart remarks over the same program. Then there’s Democrats for Education Reform and the Citizen’s Committee on Civil Rights both of which are populated by lefties with impeccable credentials but have chimed in to support education alternatives.

The key problem for the NEA is that they’re specifically dependent on the district model to hold down organization costs and cost of organization is something they’ll have to consider if the number of charters continues to go up. Especially when, making a magisterial prediction, school districts start to collapse as I believe is inevitable given the continuing pressure for more charters. Worse still, the most vulnerable districts are the big, municipal districts which are home to a lot of NEA members.

It’s that dependency on the institution of the school district that differentiates the NEA from some of the other organizations Greg mentions. The NEA depends on the school district to aggregate teachers into conveniently concentrated groupings. Charters splinter that convenient aggregation and at some point, when the superfluity of the district for educational purposes becomes unignorable, the institution of the school district itself will become a target of attack.

Now what does the NEA do? Expend political resources to try to defend the existence of school districts? I’m sure that’ll go over real well with the membership. I’d be interested to hear the justifications for the spending of dues dollars to defend the six-figure salary of district superintendents.