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When the nation's largest teachers' union convenes in Los Angeles in a week and a half for its annual meeting, the membership news will ring happier than in 2004.
Then, the National Education Association's count of active-teacher members was down for the first time in 18 years, according to union officials. But over the past year, that number has grown by about 20,000, according to Carmen Quesada, who guides membership strategy for the 2.8 million-member union.
The upturn is no accident. After relying heavily on the growth produced by more teachers coming into the profession, the national organization has hatched new plans in the past few years for building membership.
Union leaders see increasing the base as crucial, particularly in the current political climate, in which many of the NEA's allies have lost power and its enemies have seized on the opportunity to strike deeper at the union's clout.
"Any sort of decline-and I don't see this as a fall-off-the-cliff decline-makes the unions feel vulnerable," said Charles Kerchner, a teachers' union expert at Claremont Graduate Center in California. "The NEA's opponents have smelled blood and are emboldened to say things like, 'We want to roll back collective bargaining.'"
Teachers in the classroom are the union's backbone, though the NEA includes retired instructors, education students, and thousands of others playing supporting roles in schools. Unlike the other membership categories, working teachers pay top-dollar dues to the NEA and its 50 state affiliates. They also carry the most weight in public opinion.
Lately, though, membership growth has flattened and, in important measure, been sustained by nonteachers. Mergers with American Federation of Teachers affiliates have also brought new members into the NEA fold, but without raising the total unionization of the teacher workforce.
The NEA gained about 38,000 active members this year over last, almost half of them support workers such as teachers' aides, bus drivers, and cafeteria workers, according to Ms. Quesada.
Overall growth, which includes retired teachers and education students, dropped from more than 3 percent in 2001 to just over 1 percent in 2004, the last year for which the union provides figures.
"We did not have a membership loss overall," Ms. Quesada pointed out. "And even among the active professional members, it was a...