NEA Same Ol’ Same Ol’

The latest annual National Education Association convention, as usual, focused on the union’s radical political and social agenda.

Photo Credit: whea.massteacher.org

Earlier this month, the National Education Association, the country’s largest union, held its annual meeting in Denver.

This year’s conference saw the teachers’ union elect Princess Moss as president after Becky Pringle was termed out. The Who once sang, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” and it certainly applies here. While the leaders’ names may be different, their priorities remain the same.

Pringle, in her final speech—or, more accurately, screech—as president, said the delegates are the “defenders of public education and the heartbeat of democracy.”

Then, in her opening talk, Moss said that teachers must “organize, organize, organize.” Notably, she went off on the new national tax-credit scholarship program, which is set to go into effect next year. She attacked the program, incoherently spouting, “First of all, it’s important our members understand what’s happening. I don’t know if they know there is an intentional plan to destroy public education—and if public education is destroyed, then we have a population whose critical thinking skills are diminished, and it’s easier for an authoritarian government to have influence.”

Moss also said that the NEA “can be and must be the most powerful force in America.”

On another note about leadership, Cecily Myart-Cruz, the president of United Teachers Los Angeles, was elected by her union colleagues to serve on the organization’s highest governing body, the NEA Executive Committee.

This is the union boss who, when asked about the learning loss students incurred during the COVID shutdown, replied, “There is no such thing as learning loss. Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their timetables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.” She even bizarrely suggested that “learning loss” is a fake crisis marketed by “shadowy purveyors of clinical and classroom assessments.”

Then came the usual slew of New Business Items, which are messages of concern from the hoi polloi to the NEA aristocracy, and some were outrageous. NBI 10 stated that the union “will call for the impeachment, conviction, and removal of Donald Trump. ‘We, the NEA, will call for a National March on Washington, D.C., to remove Trump before the November 2026 midterm elections and call on unions and other progressive organizations to join us in taking action to protect democracy and defend public education.’”

NBI 24 states, “The NEA President will write a letter to the United States Congressional Black Caucus introducing NEA Resolutions I-62, Educational Reparations, and discussing the enormous impact it would have on Black/African Americans.”

NBI 42 wants the NEA to “develop and publish an updated Culturally Responsive Teaching Resource Library—including lesson frameworks, differentiation strategies, gender equity considerations, and professional learning modules—and make it freely available to all members and locals via the NEA digital platform.”

And just for good measure, some delegates proposed that schools should “commit to purchasing cruelty-free teaching materials and vegan when possible.”

While not all of these ideas will move forward, they give you a sense of the priorities the union activists deem essential. Indeed, the NEA is all about its radical political and social agenda. The education of children in the three Rs was nowhere to be found at the convention. No one expressed concern that the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed that reading scores are declining nationwide among 4th- and 8th-grade students. No state recorded gains in reading for either grade compared with 2022.

Additionally, 33% of 8th-graders are not even reading at the NAEP Basic level—the highest percentage on record. This means that a third cannot identify basic literary elements in a text, such as the sequence of events, character traits, and the main idea.

So what can be done about teacher-union misdeeds?

The best way to curb the excessive power of teacher unions is for teachers to stop funding them. When teachers join a union, they become part of three organizations: the local union, the state affiliate, and the national organization, with most of their dues going to the latter two.

Dues are costly. In California, for example, educators pay over $1,000 per year to their union, and the vast majority of that money goes to political activity. Only 9% of NEA’s spending goes to teacher representation.

While about 58% of public K-12 teachers lean Democratic and 35% lean Republican, NEA political spending hardly reflects that. As OpenSecrets reports, in 2024, the NEA spent $22,744,023 on political activities, with 98.24% going to Democrats and a paltry 1.76% to Republicans.

But there is some good news on this front. According to a new report from the Fordham Institute, which used 59 metrics—including budgets, membership, political wins and losses, and their perceived strength in surveys—unions are losing influence nationwide.

The report details several striking examples of declining power: the percentage of K–12 teachers who were union members fell in 45 states and in D.C. over the past decade.

State legislators can play an important role in this process. In Wisconsin, teachers’ union membership declined sharply from 98% to 45% after the passage of a 2011 law that restricted collective bargaining. A similar pattern unfolded in North Carolina, where membership fell from 49% to 21% in 2012 after the enactment of laws that limited union organizing and collective bargaining.

Also, teachers’ unions’ share of contributions to state-level political parties has declined in 34 states, and 69% of survey participants did not identify a teachers’ union as the most influential group in their state’s education politics.

In a memorable April 1995 video, Apple founder Steve Jobs declared, “The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened… Nobody can be fired. It’s terrible...”

Jobs was right, and no teacher who is truly concerned about children should belong to such a disreputable, agenda-driven organization.

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Larry Sand is a retired classroom teacher with 28 years of experience and served as president of the nonprofit California Teachers Empowerment Network from 2006 to 2025. He currently works to raise awareness of the shortcomings of our education system.

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