Lest anyone doubt that the national education unions are a major cause of the current crisis of learning, a new report from the Defense of Freedom Institute removes all uncertainty.
Written by DFI President Bob Eitel, a former senior counselor to the secretary of education, and DFI Policy Counsel Paul Zimmerman, the report is aptly called The AFT’s and the NEA’s Summer of Woke. (The acronyms stand for the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association.) Referring to the two unions, the DFI report indicates that “the policy statements and resolutions adopted by their leadership at national meetings last month demonstrate how little they care for the average student or teacher and classroom learning.”
Instead, both unions have become advocacy organizations pushing leftist policy far beyond the realm of education while obsessively pushing radical racial and gender ideology into the schools.
To read the brief report is to become quickly aghast. NEA adopted policy statements opposing school metal detectors (which are portrayed as racist!) and specifically rejecting policing of schools even to monitor gang activity (which could lead, gasp, to the deportation of gang-involved illegal immigrants, as if that’s a bad thing). Eitel and Zimmerman, citing specific NEA reports and resolutions, write that the NEA is “calling for public school teachers to view every decision they make through the lens of how it can ‘help counteract dominant patterns of white supremacy’” while also “denigrat[ing] ‘colorblind’ decision-making at school.”
Because, as everyone knows, to be colorblind is actually to be racist. Or something. Which is also why, according to the DFI, the NEA is “promoting the concept that ‘systemic racism’ is the primary driver of wealth gaps across races in America.”
Meanwhile, both unions voted to support efforts to support transgender ideology, with the NEA opposing efforts to stop schools from teaching gender-bending nostrums to children younger than 8 years old and the AFT supporting forced inclusion of biological males in girls’ athletic events.
The unions can’t contain themselves to school issues, though. The AFT committed itself to lobbying federal and state governments to overturn the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that allowed states to restrict abortion. Combining gender bending with pro-abortion advocacy, the AFT wants to ensure that “all women, girls and others who can become pregnant” can obtain an abortion.
That last phrase shows that teachers may need to learn some basic lessons about biology.
The NEA, write Eitel and Zimmerman, also “calls for court packing as a strategy to overturn the Supreme Court decisions they don’t like.”
On and on go the politicized, leftist agendas of the two unions, including blacklisting opponents: One NEA resolution approves “$140,000 in member dues to fund the creation of a list of 25 organization ‘actively working to diminish a student’s right to honesty in education, freedom of sexual and gender identity, and teacher autonomy’ and providing for the compilation of opposition research on these groups.”
All of which leaves one wondering why these so-called educators aren’t actually focused on the subject-matter tools of classroom education. Rather than concentrate on how, for example, to actually teach mathematics better, the NEA itself fixates on what it calls its own “belief that intersectionality — the understanding of how a person’s identities combine and compound to create unique discriminatory experiences — must be recognized within leadership, schools, and communities to advance the Association’s racial and social justice work.”
Enough already.
DFI’s conclusion is apt: “Teachers who care more about the success of their students than the success of union ideological priorities have a decision to make: Continue to allow radical union bosses to use teacher union dues for their extreme agendas and pet projects or exercise the constitutional right to resign from the union and turn off the money flow.”
Exactly.
