Has the NEA Lost the Plot?
By Mitch Siegler, Founder

A newly filed bias complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the National Education Association (NEA) raises serious concerns about the direction of one of the country’s most influential educational organizations – and about whether America’s schools are remaining true to their core mission.

The complaint, filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, alleges that the NEA – the country’s largest labor union, representing more than three million educational professionals – created an environment in which Jewish educators faced discrimination, intimidation, and exclusion.

The allegations are serious and disturbing: Jewish delegates reportedly shouted down and harassed at union gatherings, Holocaust education materials that removed Jews as the primary victims of Nazi genocide, and educational resources circulated after Hamas’s vicious October 7, 2023 attacks that erased Israel entirely from maps of the Middle East.

This is not about politics. Rather, it is about whether educational institutions are willing to uphold consistent standards of fairness and historical truth. How you do anything is how you do everything; if the NEA isn’t truthful about one subject, the teachers’ union simply doesn’t have credibility to be honest about anything.

Americans rightly celebrated National Teacher Appreciation Week earlier this month – and the dedication, sacrifice, and irreplaceable role of individual teachers deserve that recognition. Honoring teachers, however, is not the same as exempting the NEA from accountability when it strays from its core educational mission. And that is precisely what is at stake here.

Over the years, the NEA has increasingly embraced overt political activism as a pillar of its identity. Public reporting on its financial disclosures indicates that in 2025 the union spent approximately $175 million on political activities, including lobbying and support for progressive advocacy organizations, out of roughly $450 million in total expenditures. By comparison, only about 10% of NEA spending reportedly went toward “representational activities,” the organization’s core mission of supporting educators.

Parents have noticed this shift in priorities. THINC Foundation’s recent national survey of more than 2,200 parents found that three in five believe it is inappropriate for teachers to share their personal political beliefs with students. Families want schools focused on education, civic understanding, and intellectual development, not ideological activism.

The allegations outlined in the Brandeis Center complaint also expose the weaknesses of rigid identity-based worldviews that divide people into simplistic racial and political categories. According to the complaint, the NEA’s leadership structures rely heavily on racial preferences and classifications while often treating Jews as categorically “white” and therefore outside the framework of protected or vulnerable communities. That approach collapses under even minimal scrutiny at a time of historic levels of antisemitism.

Our survey likewise found that 82% of parents believe children should be taught the value of a colorblind society – the idea that individuals should be judged based on character and conduct, not reduced to racial categories or ideological labels. Needless to say, this clashes directly with the NEA’s approach.

The old saying about reputations – they take a lifetime to build and a second to destroy – holds here. When Jewish educators are intimidated, when the Holocaust is reframed in ways that obscure the central targeting of Jews, and when legitimate concerns about antisemitism are repeatedly minimized rather than addressed, public trust is eroded.

Parents have common sense, even when the nation’s largest teachers’ union seems to have lost the thread. THINC’s survey found that only 31% of parents trust teachers’ unions to be unbiased. It is easy to see why that is and common sense tells us that if the union treats its Jewish members in this contemptible way, we shudder to think about how their actions negatively impact Jewish – and other - students.

The broader issue here extends beyond any single union or controversy. America’s educational institutions must unite teachers and students of all backgrounds around shared civic values, mutual respect, historical literacy, and equal dignity for all people – out of many, one. They should encourage students to think critically and independently, not pressure them into ideological conformity.

That is not a partisan stance. It is one that honors and prizes our precious democratic republic.