PRESS RELEASE: New DFI Report Shows Despite Cratering Public Support, Teacher Unions Fight to Keep DEI and Gender Ideology Alive

WASHINGTON—The Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies (DFI) today released The Fall of Woke?, a comprehensive report examining how the nation’s largest teacher unions, despite overwhelming public backlash, continue to serve as a safe harbor for an ideology rapidly losing favor with the American public.

The new report is the latest in DFI’s ongoing series that began with its widely cited Summer of Woke trilogy, which exposed the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) for promoting radical education policies at their annual meetings while ignoring plummeting student achievement and chronic absenteeism. The Fall of Woke? expands on this work, illustrating how these unions remain determined to push discriminatory DEI bureaucracies and concepts, gender ideology, and fringe political activism in schools and workplaces even as public opinion and federal enforcement turn decisively against them.

The report details sweeping actions taken by the Trump administration to enforce anti-discrimination laws that have halted unlawful DEI programs and gender ideology mandates in school districts, colleges, and universities across the country.

As the report notes, “Surveys show that the administration enjoys increasing support from the public,” with young Americans in particular turning away from progressive orthodoxies. From declining rates of transgender identification to increased religious engagement, Americans are signaling a decisive shift.

But while public skepticism about “woke” in education continues to rise in light of federal enforcement efforts, the NEA and AFT still “remain enclaves of radical progressivism.”

The Fall of Woke? documents multiple areas where the NEA and the AFT have served as sanctuaries for “woke” causes:

• Attacking the administration’s enforcement of civil rights and immigration laws.
   
• Tolerating anti-Semitism in education, including promoting resources that erase Israel from maps and replace it with “Palestine” and removing Jews as the primary victims of the Holocaust in union-sponsored materials.
   
• Advancing gender ideology by supporting policies that violate Title IX, encourage sex-rejecting interventions for minors, and provide cover for educators to hide gender transitions from parents.
   
• Opposing education freedom, including spreading misinformation about the recently enacted Federal Scholarship Tax Credit.

As the report explains, union leaders have “made the cynical calculation that they can afford to disregard the views of their rank-and-file members,” leaning instead into the priorities of the “Mamdani wing of the Left” while ordinary teachers and parents suffer the consequences.

“Parents, students, and many teachers have moved on from the failed experiments of DEI and gender ideology—but the unions refuse to let go,” said Angela Morabito, co-author of the report and DFI spokesperson. “They are clinging to an agenda the public has rejected because their leadership is driven by politics and power, not by what’s best for children and parents.”

Paul Zimmerman, DFI Senior Counsel and report co-author, added, “This report shows that no matter how unpopular ‘woke’ ideology becomes, the NEA and AFT remain committed to preserving it—often to the detriment of their own members and at the expense of students’ civil rights. The unions have the money and the machinery to keep pushing these ideas, but they cannot withstand sustained pressure from teachers who refuse to subsidize union extremism and leave their ranks.”

The report notes that teachers “should take a simple but highly impactful step: resign their union memberships, take their dues with them, and starve the union radicals of their money, members, and organizational support.”

“As more teachers realize that their dues are going to fund the pet projects of union leadership—DEI, gender ideology, anti-Israel propaganda, open borders—while ignoring the academic needs of students,” the report states, meaningful reform can take hold.

To read the full report, click here.