PRESS RELEASE: New Defense of Freedom Institute Report Exposes Teacher Unions’ Radical Work to Undermine Democracy, Push Political Ideology into the Classroom

WASHINGTON—Today, the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies (DFI) released its latest report exposing how the nation’s largest teacher unions use their summer conferences and election-year political activity to push progressive ideology onto their membership and into the classroom.

In “Summer of Woke III: The Empire Strikes Back,” DFI reveals the contents of sessions at the American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) and National Education Association’s (NEA) annual conferences. These summer convenings completely ignored the chronic problems facing education and focused instead on criticizing Israel over the war in Gaza, supporting Kamala Harris for president, undermining the Supreme Court, and indoctrinating students and teachers in radical environmentalism, Critical Race Theory, and gender ideology. In their keynote addresses, neither AFT President Randi Weingarten nor NEA President Becky Pringle mentioned the chronic absenteeism or plummeting student achievement they accelerated with union-led school closures during the pandemic. The resolutions adopted at these meetings made no mention of them either.

For example, the NEA—whose staff union went on strike, cutting short its annual assembly—still managed to adopt the following two resolutions:

• committing the NEA to help local affiliates prepare for strikes, though strikes by school staff harm students and are even illegal in many states; and
   
• requiring the NEA to include on its website information about “State Anti-Trans Laws,” a label that activists derisively use to identify state laws protecting women’s and girls’ sports and prohibiting the teaching of gender ideology to young children.

Other items for consideration on the NEA agenda included:

• requiring the NEA to use its resources to distinguish between “anti-Zionism” and anti-Semitism, downplaying the overlap between bias against and hatred of the Jewish people and opposition to the existence of the nation of Israel;
   
• extolling the virtues of the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and its connections to the NEA and organized labor;
   
• creating a task force to commit the NEA to policies furthering “Climate and Ecology Justice”;
   
• advancing “racial and social justice” in schools by infusing Critical Race Theory and DEI policies into every classroom; and
   
• opposing state laws criminalizing illegal immigration.

The AFT adopted a smattering of resolutions similarly unrelated to improving student achievement, and in some instances actively undermining it, including:

• opposing public financial support to assist children in accessing any educational option other than a traditional, one-size-fits-all public school model;
   
• attacking the legitimacy of the Supreme Court by accusing it of pushing a “conservative political agenda” and “undermining and eliminating” fundamental rights and affirming that “we know from recent decisions that the judiciary no longer operates independently of the executive branch offering no guarantee of impartiality”;
   
• requiring the AFT to help local affiliates prepare for strikes that bar students and teachers from the classroom;
   
• opposing standardized tests used to determine whether learning is actually occurring in schools without proposing any reasonable alternatives;
   
• supporting the weaponization of public pension funds in support of the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) agenda, thus putting at risk the retirement of millions of teachers and other public workers;
   
• aimed at indoctrinating young people in leftist environmental ideology using “robust, meaningful, interdisciplinary climate-change and climate-justice curricula with the goal of preparing students to participate productively and responsibly in a rapidly changing world, and in emerging green, sustainable professions”; and
   
• calling for local union affiliates to coordinate their contract expirations for May 1, 2028, for the purpose of orchestrating a devastating mass strike on that date and holding students (and many others) hostage to advance a radical cause of “racial, economic and social justice,” a strategy and ultimate goal emanating directly from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.

As the report notes, “The troubling disconnect between the resolutions and the classroom highlights that the AFT is not merely a K–12 teacher union, as its name misleadingly implies, but rather a conglomerate of unions, including healthcare workers, Planned Parenthood staff, college and university employees, and many other government bureaucrats who have nothing to do with schools. In fact, the AFT’s Public Education unit is only one of its six divisions. This explains why the focus of the AFT and its summer meetings goes far beyond any interests of its teacher members—to the extent it addresses those interests at all—and instead focuses on growing and consolidating union power and using its political heft and dues-funded financial resources to influence policy at the highest levels of government.”

To read “Summer of Woke III: The Empire Strikes Back,” click here. 

Additional Information

“Summer of Woke III” is the latest product of DFI’s Teacher Union Accountability Project, launched in 2021 to shed light on how union leaders and their allies have used their political power to push aside parents, families, and classroom teachers to dominate public education in ways that harm students and limit their opportunities. DFI believes the unions’ embrace of ideological approaches to teaching, like Critical Race Theory and other extreme ideological pedagogy, ignores the needs of classroom teachers, undercuts sound academics, and distracts the public from the pressing need to fix an education system that too often fails to prepare students for careers and higher education.

Click here to read DFI’s first report on the union’s annual summer meetings, “The AFT’s and the NEA’s Summer of Woke.”  Click here to read the second installment, “Summer of Woke, the Sequel.”