Union Turns Education Into Big Political Business

The National Education Association’s annual convention fascinates on several levels, as the concourse displays a championing of whatever’s the newest thing in woke-ism. But Old Reliable is the group’s New Business Initiatives (NBIs), which tell you what the NEA power structure is thinking.

Spoiler alert: Union leaders aren’t spending a lot of time or effort worrying about poor scores in reading and math.

This year in Portland, Ore., the kiosks along the concourse sported quite a few political posters, and you can guess which way those leaned. NEA posters were also helpfully planted along the corridor that list, by year, the issues the union thought were important then.

The 2023 poster, to take a recent year, listed 11 issues, only one or two of which even hinted at student classroom performance. Among them:

• The NEA “launches” a program to defend schools

• The NEA “expands” its race-class narrative

• The NEA “partners” with two federal departments to round up taxpayer money for favored programs

• The NEA “creates” a new institute to push “equity-centered, union-led teacher induction” (essentially, brainwashing), and;

• The NEA “releases” a new campaign titled “We will not erase history…”

You get the idea.

The big concern now, with President Trump in office, is that the money is going to dry up. Or, more particularly, that taxpayer money used to push one political view will dry up. That’s got the union screaming.

Through DOGE (the Department of Governmental Efficiency) we’ve learned of enormous outflows of taxpayer money, some of it for plainly partisan purposes.

The partisan spending is nowhere more evident than in the field of education. The last year of the Autopen administration, fiscal year 2024, the department sent out a tad more than $268 billion.

Much of it was in block grants to the states. Many of the leftist-dominated states used the money to pay union members better or hire nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to help them run favored programs – like, say, to an abortion provider. Those NGOs rely heavily on taxpayers for money.

The NGOs and unions that support the woke agenda had already done enormous damage with their views on history, class warfare and racism; now they pushed such things as gender dysphoria, LGBTQ priorities and a sex-for-little-kids curriculum that has infected large proportions of American schools.

So while the leftists were screaming to “defund the police” during much of the previous administration, the NGOs were the entities that really merited defunding.

For the union’s part, funding is less of a problem than losing power. So at this year’s convention, the union trumpeted its interest in a wide range of issues, perhaps to demonstrate its political relevancy.

The NEA is considering or enacting several dozen “New Business Items” – virtually all of them polemical or openly partisan initiatives. A couple help give a hint.

One, Item 39, announces the NEA will “not use, endorse or publicize any materials from the Anti-Defamation League … “

The union doesn’t say what the ADL did wrong to earn this ostracization. But the sweep of leftist thought these days, in political circles as well as academia, is markedly anti-Semitic. Possibly the NEA just doesn’t want to get left behind in the race to bigotry.

Another, Item 63, says “NEA opposes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) kidnapping of student leaders …”

That one plays off a common leftist trope that accuses ICE of “kidnapping” people. Recently, one such accusation was revealed to be a hoax and the perpetrator has been charged.

But the damage is done. Blistering denunciations of ICE and calls to action by leftist politicians have led to an incredible increase in attacks against officers. And outright lies are regularly being repeated by politicians and their media supporters – and, pointedly, by the so-called teachers union.

That reprehensible conduct, unfortunately, has become the business model of the union and its political and academic allies. Oh, it has been profitable, spawning taxpayer-fed millionaires of hatred-spewing union and NGO leaders. If Trump really can dry up some of the funding for this travesty, may he succeed completely.

But beyond that, no, very few items were proposed to address the dreadful and worsening academic profile of schoolchildren in the United States.