The Teachers’ Unions Are More Radical and Duplicitous Than Ever

In a memorable April 1995 video, Apple founder Steve Jobs declared, “The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened….Nobody can be fired. It’s terrible….”

Sadly, Jobs’ words remain deadly accurate. The National Education Association, the largest union in the country, has not only perverted the education system but has evolved into an organization whose primary concern is its radical agenda.

Defending Education, a watchdog group, recently obtained materials for an NEA training session titled “Advancing LGBTQ+ Justice,” which was held in early December. The materials reveal the NEA’s fixation on identity politics.

For example, in its “Campaign Lab,” the union tells educators that they must emphasize “race, class, and gender justice.” This is political organizing packaged as “professional development” for its employees.

Handouts for the event accuse conservatives of using an “arsenal of racist dog whistles” and “transphobic tropes” to “whip up fear” and cause harm. The materials coach teachers on how to indoctrinate children into progressive dogmas, including gender ideology and pronoun use, along with other au courant claptrap. The 56-page brochure includes instructions on pronoun use, using terms such as “agender, bigender, genderfluid, genderqueer, transgender, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and two-spirit.”

The LGBTQ+ training session is just one part of the NEA’s 2025–2026 program. Most of the union’s other efforts focus on political organizing. Academic subjects, by contrast, are ignored. The document refers to “organizer math”—but that’s about understanding campaign numbers, not suggesting ways to improve math instruction.

Throughout the document, the union employs typical woke jargon such as “implicit bias, micro-aggressions, white fragility, interpersonal oppressions, systemic racism, and white supremacy.” It counsels members to “develop counter narratives of inclusion and equity” and “develop a toolset of tactics for dismantling systems of privilege and oppression.”

The NEA further encourages participants to “name the villains who violate our values” and accuse certain politicians of “pushing laws that restrict our freedoms because of the color of our skin, what’s in our wallets, or because we are transgender. They exploit divisions and fears among us so they can get and hold onto power, denying us the basic rights, resources, and respect all people deserve.”

The union also urges teachers to vilify opponents of men playing in women’s sports by reframing their criticisms as discrimination against women. “Our best-testing way to accomplish this was through a message that positioned supporting transgender women athletes as part of the broader fight for equality in girls’ and women’s sports. By connecting attacks on trans women athletes to the long legacy of discrimination against all women athletes, this message both shifted our audiences from an individual to a collective mindset and disrupted transphobic conceptions of transgender girls and women as actually male.”

NEA leadership is racially obsessed. Racial quotas are enshrined in its constitution and bylaws, further evidence of how far it has fallen. The union’s constitution requires that ethnic minorities comprise at least 20% of the board, and the “Representative Assembly shall elect additional directors as appropriate to assure such ethnic-minority representation.”

Furthermore, the organization’s constitution stipulates that, if the NEA has had white presidents for eleven consecutive years, “the Association shall take such steps as may be legally permissible to elect a member of an ethnic-minority group.”

Not surprisingly, the NEA picks and chooses which minorities it favors, and the union doesn’t like Jews.

A 48-page report released in September exposes the depth of the teachers’ unions’ hostility toward all things Jewish. “Breaking Solidarity: How Anti-Semitic Activists Turned Teacher Unions Against Israel,” published by the Defense of Freedom Institute, details how unions have embedded anti-Semitism in K–12 education.

For instance, the DFI report discloses that while the NEA handbook fails to mention the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, it manages to criticize Israel and Jews by promoting “Palestinian Nakba Education,” which explains that “the Nakba, meaning catastrophe in Arabic, refers to the forced, violent displacement and dispossession of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 during the establishment of the state of Israel.”

Additionally, Jews were harassed and intimidated at the NEA Representative Assembly in July. Jewish educators who spoke out against a resolution to sever ties with the Anti-Defamation League were shouted down during the proceedings. Just over a week after the assembly’s conclusion, the executive committee of the NEA’s Jewish Affairs Caucus published a chilling letter to NEA President Becky Pringle, reporting that Jewish delegates attending the gathering “were vocally mocked, harassed, and threatened in ways that dishonor our union.”

The other national teachers’ union, the American Federation of Teachers, is no better. Most recently, a San Diego rabbi was disinvited from delivering a benediction at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration sponsored by the AFT because of his support for Israel, according to the rabbi, his synagogue, and the host organization.

When it comes to political spending, the NEA shows its true colors. In 2024, Pringle acknowledged that NEA membership is nearly evenly split among Democrats, Republicans, and independents. As such, one might assume that teacher union spending would be proportional, but that is hardly the case. As Open Secrets reveals, in 2024 the NEA spent $22,744,023 on politics, with 98.24% going to Democrats and a paltry 1.76% to Republicans.

The American Federation of Teachers is even more one-sided. In 2024, the AFT gave $3,069,063 (99.89%) to Democrats and a scant $3,323 (0.11%) to Republicans. The union also endorsed socialist Zohran Mamdani for mayor of NYC.

Since 2015, Defending Education has found that the NEA and AFT have combined to spend $228,471,484 on left-wing groups. Some of the organizations receiving funding include MoveOn.org, PEN America, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the State Engagement Fund, the State Victory Fund, the Trevor Project, and various political action committees.

The ugly mess is summed up by an NEA employee who remains anonymous due to fears of retribution, telling Fox News Digital, “It’s crazy. They’ll send out this weekly newsletter of ‘Trump’s a fascist’ and blast it to all the states…They don’t care about the students; they care about pushing these leftist, liberal Democrat people [politicians] so that they can get more money and just fund all these stupid initiatives….It’s a cult. It’s 100% a cult, and if you don’t have their mindset, you’re the enemy.”

(Editor’s Note: Larry Sand is a retired 28-year classroom teacher who also served as the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network from 2006 to 2025. He now focuses on raising awareness about our failing education system.)

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