For me, it was my 10-year old’s lesson on “pansexuality” — a topic that I, a late millennial mother, couldn’t define.
I was sitting at my kitchen counter building Defending Education, an organization I founded to expose the politicization of education and improve learning outcomes. I launched it in part because my intelligent, curious children were inexplicably falling behind basic educational benchmarks — for example, only reading graphic novels.
That evening, I realized the very politicization I was fighting had already reached my own children in an ostensibly rigorous private school. It was the same battles that countless parents across the country were also fighting in their schools — private, public, and even parochial.
We’re constantly asked, “Where is this coming from?”
The answer, unfortunately, is straight out of a horror movie: The call is coming from inside the house. Teachers’ unions are the misinformation superhighways of the education-industrial complex, disseminating big bucks on political spending while promoting radical curriculum like the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Learning for Justice” program.
This past weekend, the National Education Association’s representative assembly is being held in Denver, Colorado. In years past, delegates have voted on issues completely irrelevant to the teaching profession, such as replacing terms like “mother” and “father” with “birthing parent” and “non-birthing parent”; using official NEA branding to call President Donald Trump a “fascist,” support for the “No Kings” movement, and a since-rescinded ban on using Anti-Defamation League materials.
This year, delegates voted on such hot-button topics as: Recognizing ethical veganism as a protected philosophical belief; glyphosate has no place on student food and beverages; opposing merging U.S. military operations, intelligence, and/or defense technology with those of any foreign military; comprehensive immigration reform; banning the use of artificial intelligence in the decision-making process for the use of nuclear weapons; investigating fires for evidence of microwave energy attacks through the use of “direct energy weapons”; prohibiting weather modification to be injected into the stratosphere; calling for the impeachment of Trump before the November election, at a campaign cost of $5.2 million; and ending the war in Iran.
For an entity that cloaks itself in sanctimony for defending the rights of teachers, it seems very much that the welfare of average union members might not be the C-suite’s top priority.
Consider also how unions spend their members’ dues; a report from Defending Education found that teachers’ unions at the state and national level spent over $1 billion on left-wing political spending across the country since 2015.
They’ve donated exclusively to left-wing political causes, including over $106 million through California Teachers Association PACs and over $57 million by the NYC teachers’ union — two organizations that infamously insisted on prolonging COVID-19 era school closures and have continued to promote radical politics in the classroom.
Teachers’ unions also spent over $85 million on House and Senate Majority PACs seeking to achieve Democratic majorities — as well as over $16 million opposing school choice nationwide. The unions gave over $60 million to the State Engagement Fund, which funnels money to far-left groups and causes, in addition to $44 million to For Our Future, an organization that perpetuates racial, socioeconomic, and climate-related propaganda.
Disturbingly, the report revealed that teachers’ unions’ economic contributions propped up radical leftist groups like the National Center for Transgender Equality, Planned Parenthood, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. People spend their money on what they value — and the teachers’ unions’ financial contributions reveal disturbing obsessions with abortions and gender ideology.
This massive investment in far-left political causes implicates teachers’ unions in the rise of destabilizing, far-left ideas across the country. Motivated by dreams of fomenting “political revolution,” teachers’ unions even coalesced to organize massive, nationwide “May Day” protests that they claimed would benefit “victimized workers and students.” As if they haven’t failed students enough, some school districts around the country gave schools the day off to enable teachers and students to attend the protests, which resulted in numerous arrests and altercations with law enforcement.
Indeed, the ultimate irony of these protests was the contrast between unions’ aggressive political activism and the plummeting national education scores that show how deeply such activism and unions have failed American education.
The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores are a dead giveaway. American students’ scores hit historic lows, with eighth-grade science scores falling 4 points and 12th-grade math and reading scores dropping 3 points since 2019. This marks the lowest 12th-grade reading and math scores in over 20 years.
WHY TEACHERS UNIONS JUST SAID NO TO $6.5 BILLION FOR AMERICA’S FAILING STUDENTS
In case any doubt remained about how little union elites care for America’s students, both the NEA and AFT have demanded that blue state governors refuse to participate in the new Federal Scholarship Tax Credit program — in effect, this denies children trapped in failing schools the opportunity to find an education that best suits their family’s needs.
It’s time for teachers around the country to wake up to the fact that these hyper-political entities aren’t on their side, but that union leadership’s only concerns are money and power. And it’s time for policymakers to take concrete steps to rein in union authority — following the lead of states like Florida, which now requires unions to be supported by a majority of employees to remain certified. Because at the end of the day, the fewer the activists behind the schoolhouse gates, the better.
Nicole Neily is the president of Defending Education.