Parents Don’t Trust Teachers’ Unions
Could Their Political Activism Be Why?
By Mitch Siegler, Founder

Teachers’ unions were founded to protect the salaries and working conditions of our nation’s educators. Unfortunately, many such unions have since strayed into political activism that has nothing to do with the treatment of teachers as employees.

Nowhere is the political activism of teachers’ unions more apparent than in Liberated Ethnic Studies (LES), which teachers’ unions across the country have embraced wholeheartedly. From Massachusetts to California, unions have allied with activist groups to defend extreme curricula, smear opponents, and politicize parental oversight of K-12 education.

The problem goes all the way to the top, where LES ideology – which sorts children into “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups based on their skin color and ethnicity – has infected one of our nation’s largest unions: the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

In 2021, AFT President Randi Weingarten parroted a classic LES talking point when discussing those opposed to the AFT’s stance on keeping schools closed amid COVID.

“American Jews are now part of the ownership class,” she said. “…those who are in the ownership class now want to take that ladder of opportunity away from those who do not have it.”

She was wrong twice; besides the fact that keeping schools closed actually removed a ladder of opportunity for our most vulnerable students, classifying Jews as “part of the ownership class” fed directly into antisemitic tropes of Jewish control and affirmed LES’s categorization of Jews as “oppressors.”

On Weingarten’s watch, AFT also equated Israeli hostages with convicted Palestinian terrorists, condemned Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, and called for new elections in Israel. Seems rather far afield from the stated mission of the union: championing “fairness; democracy; economic opportunity; and high-quality public education, healthcare and public services for our students, their families and our communities.”

Local unions have taken even more specific and extreme positions.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) provided its members with openly antisemitic “Resources on Israel and Occupied Palestine,” including images of money folded into the shape of a Star of David, a children’s book that asserts that Palestinian children “are having their homes taken by Zionist bullies,” and calls to support the Boycott, Divest & Sanctions (BDS) movement. The MTA promised to remove the offending materials after being castigated by a State committee – then kept “98% of the original resources” according to the Anti-Defamation League.

In Palo Alto, California, the teachers’ union led the charge against an elected School Board Trustee, Rowena Chiu, who advocated for moderation, transparency and parental involvement in the rollout of the District’s ethnic studies curriculum. The union pressured Chiu to resign after she shared a post affirming that a District employee had invalidated Chiu’s concern for her personal safety based on race, lecturing her that as an Asian woman she had less right to feel unsafe than if she were Black.

The San Mateo Union High School District Teachers Association, also in California, was even more aggressive toward a Trustee, Jennifer Jacobson. Her sin? During a community forum regarding the District’s ethnic studies program, she reminded parents how they could provide feedback through official channels. The union characterized her comments as an “overtly subversive and destructive act,” and sought to have her formally censured.

These examples stand among many that show just how far teachers’ unions have departed from their mission. Their embrace of LES, vilification of opposing views, and hostility to transparency reveals a focus not on teacher welfare and student performance, but on protecting their self-appointed role as activists who train more activists.

As our nationwide survey of nearly 1,500 parents showed, parents don’t want politics in the classroom and have extraordinarily low levels of trust in teachers’ unions (just 30%). Our teachers deserve better advocates, and so do our kids and parents.