Report > Teacher Unions
The Fall of Woke? The Teacher Unions Create a Safe Space for a Beleaguered Ideology
By Paul Zimmerman and Angela Morabito | November 19, 2025
Key findings
- Teacher unions remain enclaves of radical progressivism, despite the rising tide of anti-woke sentiment. Even as public opinion shifts against their radical agenda, union activists have doubled down on their efforts to indoctrinate students, often without their parents’ knowledge or consent, in critical race and gender theory.
- The NEA and AFT mobilized their teacher members to participate in the “No Kings Day” protests in June. The AFT leveraged the antiTrump rally to advocate for expanding government control over education and other major sectors of the economy while decrying the so-called “militarization” of major U.S. cities.
- In her “Journal of Joy, Justice, and Excellence,” Pringle featured a photo of herself marching with May Day protesters wearing shirts from CASA (formerly the Central American Solidarity Association of Maryland), a group that supports abolishing ICE and making it harder for officials to deport illegal immigrants.
- The teacher unions realize they are losing public opinion, making them even more desperate to control the media narrative about education. Because federally funded media has been a reliable vehicle for spreading union propaganda, recent efforts to defund so-called public media have drawn the special ire of union leaders.
- On October 8, 2025, the union sent its 3 million members an email that linked its “Resources for Teaching about Indigenous Peoples” page to a map that erased Israel and labeled its land as Palestine.
- Despite broad public opposition to preserving single-sex spaces, particularly girls’ sports and intimate facilities, the teacher unions have only strengthened their efforts to weaken Title IX protections and indoctrinate their classrooms with “transgender” propaganda, often in secret and away from parental observation.
Introduction
“Woke” is under siege. Activists who once gleefully discriminated in schools and the workplace in the name of racial equity and social justice; promoted gender theory over sex equality in sports, locker rooms, and bathrooms; and soaked young minds in an anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and race-obsessed mindset have collided with unfavorable public opinion and a hostile legal and policy environment. The “shock and awe” tactics of the second Trump administration in aggressively implementing antidiscrimination law have stemmed the tide of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies, gender theory exercises, and other hallmarks of woke infrastructure, which only recently were considered to be irresistible forces in corporations, schools, colleges, and universities.
Despite these obstacles, Randi Weingarten and Becky Pringle—the heads of the nation’s two largest teacher unions, respectively the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA)—soldier on in their pursuit of radical policies that are increasingly anathema to the public. Egged on by the Mamdani wing of the Left, these union leaders continue to offer a vision of society that stymies educational opportunities, abandons women’s equality in sports and education programs, and divvies up opportunities and benefits on the basis of race rather than merit.
This report examines how the leaders of the NEA, the AFT, and their affiliates, at the peril of their rank-and-file member teachers, keep peddling discriminatory policies and behaviors within educational institutions despite the growing unpopularity of “woke” policies and practices. The unions are cannily playing the long game, betting that activist zeal can outlast public opinion and the aggressive enforcement efforts of the current administration. Their strategy is to bide their time and weather the siege. They may yet indoctrinate the young into dismantling “structurally racist,” “white supremacist,” and “patriarchal” Western institutions. Although “woke” is on the run, the movement is not defeated, and the teacher unions maintain the well-financed infrastructure to sustain it. The fight is not over.
