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Education Secretary Arne Duncan is under fire even as delegates from the National Education Association or NEA blasted him. President of the NEA was ordered to communicate with President Obama in a forceful and aggressive manner regarding the way Duncan has been criticizing teachers in a number of ways in the name of school reform. The essence of the message is how appalled teacher’ union is about these developments.

A list of Duncan’s statements and actions are included in the NEA’s resolution. NEA incidentally is one of the largest unions in our country. These are the resolutions that NEA strongly disagrees with and this includes the reform policies that govern the standardized tests.

The strong animosity towards Duncan’s Education Department amidst public school teachers is clearly underlined by the resolution. It is however interesting to see how the NEA refrains from blaming the President even though everything they are fighting against have his imprimatur. NEA obviously has its calculation right.

A 2012 presidential race endorsement of President Obama was asked by the union leadership to the legislative body to be approved in spite of the evident reform policy disagreement. In May, Dennis Van Roekel, President of NEA said that any conflict of the union with the Obama administration will be worsened with present or potential future Republicans.

Recently a lot of significant attacks have been launched by many Republican governors on public sector workers and teacher’s collective bargaining rights. These GOP actions have been strongly opposed by the Obama administration.

It is evident that the union is in an unenviable position. It is stuck between a rock and a hard place. They have strong fundamental policy disagreements with our President but are forced to continue offering support to him. This is a very small space where they have to maneuver the resolution along with the endorsement.

NEA has been careful in this front. However, with the attack on Duncan, things may change. Our President is not likely to take this attack lying down. He is very close to our education secretary, having known him for years. Obama has always been evidently supportive of Duncan in whatever he does.

Even as early as in the 2008 election, there was great disappointment and disagreement among Obama’s supporters with regard to his education policies. They strongly expected our President to bring about a turnaround in the test dominated, high stake education system initiated by the No Child Left Behind. In fact, they expected him to axe the program and provide reprieve.

This however did not happen. The Race to the Top initiative replacing the No Child Left Behind only strengthened the existing trend and business driven reforms are now being escalated much to the consternation of critics.

All we can do is to wait patiently and see what prevails – our teacher’s dissatisfaction and discontentment or our administration’s determined efforts towards the direction they think is best. Ultimately, what remains to be seen is if the students are going to be benefited at all in the longer run.