PRESS RELEASE: New Defense of Freedom Institute Report Exposes How Unions Train Educators to Indoctrinate Students

WASHINGTON– A new report from the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies (DFI) reveals how America’s two largest teacher unions used their summer conferences and publications to teach their members how to force radical progressive politics into public schools.

The report, titled “Summer of Woke, The Sequel,” exposes the contents of sessions at the American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) TEACH Conference and the National Education Association’s (NEA) recent publications. Instruction at the AFT conference included teaching members that “cisnormativity can be limiting” for students and how to inject climate change “in every subject area.” Other sessions taught members how to engage kindergarteners in civic activism and how to affirm a student’s gender identity and sexual orientation. 

The NEA also pushed an anti-parent agenda on its members by deliberately mischaracterizing parental rights legislation as “extremist” rather than as reasonable guardrails to allow parents to decide when and how it is appropriate to discuss sex and gender with their young children. Likewise, the unions trained their members to push “restorative justice” policies in schools, rather than effective disciplinary policies that actually keep classrooms safe so that students can learn and teachers can teach.

“Despite their efforts at secrecy, the AFT and the NEA have once again shown the world that they care more for ideological indoctrination than reversing the learning loss that resulted from the school closure policies demanded by them during the pandemic,” DFI President and Co-Founder Bob Eitel said. “Rather than focusing on academic matters like how to teach grammar, rhetoric, and literature or the dramatic narrative of American history, union activists gave tutorials on made-up pronouns like ‘ze, zim, and zir’ and told their members that they are inherently racist because of their ‘unconscious biases.’”

Due to the negative publicity created by DFI’s original “Summer of Woke” report in 2022 and other media coverage, this year’s NEA annual assembly in July considered its new business away from public view.

“Summer of Woke, The Sequel” was written by DFI Spokeswoman Angela Morabito and Policy Counsel Paul Zimmerman. The report is the latest publication of DFI’s Teacher Union Accountability Project, launched in 2021 to expose the dangers of the teacher unions and their plans to substitute progressive dogma over learning and academic rigor in the classroom.   

To read DFI’s “Summer of Woke, The Sequel,” click here.