Robert Chase
President of the National Education Association
Live Web cast November 16, 2001, 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT

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Robert F. Chase is the second-term president of the National Education Association in Washington, D.C. A former middle school social studies teacher from Danbury, Conn., Chase leads the nation’s largest professional employee organization. The NEA represents 2.6 million teachers, higher education faculty and administrators.

Chase represents educators on key education issues such as class size, quality teaching, and the modernization of the nation's schools. He has also focused attention on the needs of special education students, and put a special emphasis on retaining good teachers as well as recruiting new ones. He has testified on many of these issues before Congress, and regularly written about them in bylined columns in The Washington Post newspaper and Education Week magazine.

Early in his first term, Chase began to champion a "new unionism," which he describes as a mix of collaboration, cooperation, risk-taking and personal responsibility for school quality. "Chase has taken on some of the toughest issues of any NEA leader in recent history," said a June 1999 Education Week profile. "And he has done it in his characteristic style: by listening to people, reasoning with them, and then pushing on with what he believes is right."

Chase became an NEA activist decades ago, beginning with his local Danbury affiliate. In 1979, he moved on to serve the Connecticut Education Association as vice president and later president. Chase was NEA vice president from 1989 to 1996, when he was elected to head the association. He also serves on several national and international education organizations, among them the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

Born on December 28, 1942, the Wellfleet, Mass. native earned his bachelor's degree from Providence College in Rhode Island and his master's from Western Connecticut State College. A U.S. Army veteran, Chase served a tour of duty in Germany between 1968 and 1970.

Related Links:
The National Education Association Web site