Conditions in the state’s school buildings were likewise dismal. An 1853 survey of the state’s 1,730 schoolhouses found that 600 had no blackboards. The vast majority of the school buildings were valued below $150, with many below $50 and one officially listed as worth three cents. The state superintendent filed a report that reflected the WTA’s concerns:

Nearly 99 out of every hundred of our school houses should be torn down or greatly improved, and given a different location. As they now are they are stinted in the ground they occupy, stinted in room, stinted in God’s free air and in short destitute of almost every thing that ought to be regarded prerequisite in a place of education.

In the association’s first 20 years, while building its membership and weathering the hardships of the Civil War, it formulated and advocated for such forward-thinking measures as the need for primary schools, free education, school libraries, compulsory school attendance, teachers’ colleges, teacher certification, and a state board of education.

In 1921, the association reorganized at the behest of the National Education Association, electing delegates and officers. The first Representative Assembly became legal in 1923, the same year the association hired its first executive secretary and full-time staff and established its first headquarters in Madison.

Another important precedent was set in 1921: the first successful teachers association suit against a school board. The Fort Atkinson Teachers Association sued the Fort Atkinson School Board for trying to change the grades of a prominent citizen’s child. The teachers won and the grades remained unchanged.

When the Great Depression hit, business owners who had always opposed public investments in education prevailed upon panicked lawmakers to enact a series of draconian anti-education and anti-teacher measures. Conservative organizations opposed to education seemed to appear overnight, and their lobbying led to drastic decreases in teacher salaries, school spending, course offerings, and teacher freedom, and drastic increases in class size and teacher workloads. Some towns threw out teacher contracts while others simply stopped paying teachers or paid them only in scrip.

Despite financial hardships of its own during this time, the WTA devoted $25,000 to a public relations campaign that emphasized the economic shortsightedness of divesting in education. The association’s message was one that reminded voters and lawmakers that it would make the economic downturn permanent if it failed to educate the next generation of workers, leaders and taxpayers.

By 1937, public outcry over the deterioration in education was sufficient to convince legislators to restore virtually everything that had been taken away at the onset of the crash, and to invest in gains for disabled students, higher education and school transportation.

These 19th and early 20th century debates would be staged again and again as the organization evolved into a union in the 1960s and continued to advocate for public education and public school employees in the 21st century.

The first WTA president, J.G. McMynn of Racine, gave an address at the association’s first annual meeting in August 1854, articulating his vision for the association’s mission and reason for existing. Putting aside changes in the conventions of speech and punctuation in the intervening years, President McMynn could have just as easily written his speech in August 2001:

The object of our organization is declared to be, our own improvement, and the advancement of public instruction throughout the State—an object that one would think must rouse like “a bugle blast,” the most indifferent, and urge forward to greater effort, the most zealous.

Much has been said and much remains to be said on the subject of education. Truths are evolved by discussion. Thoughts, that are now the richest heritage of mankind, “had never been born,” but by discussion. It is only in view of principles well settled, that the people can act efficiently. Especially is this true of educational truths. That there are a large number in our state that understand the relation of education to our general, as well as individual prosperity, none will deny; but, that the majority, even of those who mold public opinion, fully comprehend this subject in its details, none will affirm.

There are certain truths of vast importance, which the people of this state have nobly, solemnly and fully recognized. Among these is the great truth, that education should be secured to all. Our constitution declares that the public schools of this state shall be free. Of course, dependent upon this, is the principle that “the property of the state should educate the children of the state. We have here the foundation laid broad and deep, and it is our duty to raise upon it a superstructure, that shall be worthy such a support."

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