"MAD AND MOBILIZED"

At a rally in Chicago last week for the nation's two teachers' unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, the scene appeared straight out of one of those old melodramas with vocal audience participation. The guest speaker, Vice President Al Gore, had only to mention the villains--Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich, "the Ginsu gang," who "tried to chop, slice and dice all those things that are important to us"--and hisses filled the air. The heroes, too, were just as easy to identify. "We love all our teachers," Gore told the pumped-up, cheering crowd. "We don't bash them."

Long before last week, of course, the Clinton-Gore campaign had known it could count on the votes of the majority of members of the N.E.A. and the smaller A.F.T., a politically active bloc some 2.5 million strong that traditionally backs Democratic candidates. (Since it was established in 1972, the N.E.A. political-action committee has never endorsed a Republican for President.) But in July, Dole began attacking these organizations by name, railing against the evil influence of "the teachers' unions" much as George Bush used to invoke the A.C.L.U. During his speech to the Republican Convention in San Diego, Dole fulminated, "I say this not to the teachers, but to their unions: If education were a war, you would be losing it. If it were a business, you would be driving it into bankruptcy. If it were a patient, it would be dying." Now, as some new N.E.A. posters are proclaiming, America's teachers (90% of whom belong to a union) are MAD AND MOBILIZED.

Dole's attack on the teachers' unions is "the single most mystifying thing we've seen,'' says White House press secretary Mike McCurry. Notes Joe Lockhart, press secretary for the Clinton-Gore campaign: "People don't see the teachers as Big Labor, like the Steelworkers." But they do see an education system in terrible disarray, and last week's back-to-school headlines brought fresh evidence: 91,000 students without classroom space in New York City, a bankrupt board closing schools in the District of Columbia, buildings crumbling, test scores falling. Voters are looking for someone to blame, and the Dole campaign is trying to capitalize on the perception--and sometime reality--that the unions, rich, powerful and self-protective, are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Certainly, the N.E.A. and the A.F.T. have a history of resisting changes, from curriculum reform to teacher certification to merit pay. But as unionized teachers see it, the fierce struggles to protect their jobs, their raises and their work rules are part of a bigger war to save the very institution of public education in a climate of budget cutbacks and ideological polarization. "Blaming teachers for problems in education is like blaming doctors for aids,'' says Susan Moore Johnson, a dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "The problem with public education in this country has to do with poverty, immigration, dissolution of the family and community."