American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten has written Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy, a book she claims will empower us and give us hope. The problem is that every word coming from the union boss’s mouth is nonfactual lefty claptrap.
You don’t need to buy the book to understand what I mean. In an interview with a sycophant at The Progressive, a far-left magazine that covers politics and culture, Weingarten claims that “the undermining of public education is an intentional strategy of the right; they favor school privatization.”
Wrong. The reason most conservatives, and yes, increasing numbers of Democrats, favor parental choice is because the government school/union industrial complex is failing at its mission. On the most recent NAEP, a record-high percentage of high school seniors scored at “below basic” levels in math and reading compared to all previous assessments. So it’s not surprising that, in a recent poll, 63% of Hispanics and 68% of Blacks—typically Democrats—voiced support for a private option.
Weingarten nonsensically avers that people on the right, whom she pointedly refers to as fascists, support book bans and don’t want young people to think for themselves, and she maintains that “unions are at the forefront of expanding economic prosperity and strengthening democracy.”
It’s worth noting that there’s really nothing new here. Over the years, she has made equally fallacious comments. During a brief rant to a newsman in 2018, she bizarrely asserted that unions “actually make communities safer and…the right-wing is threatened by that.” She also said, “(School) privatization and disinvestment are only slightly more polite cousins of segregation.”
In reality, many Americans have come to mistrust teachers’ unions whose leadership is blatantly leftist, even though teachers are mixed politically. In July, National Education Association president Becky Pringle acknowledged that the NEA’s membership is nearly evenly split between Democrats, Republicans, and independents.
You might then assume that teacher union spending would be proportional, but you’d be wrong. Very wrong. As Open Secrets discloses, in 2024, NEA spent $22,744,023 on politics, with 98.24% going to Democrats and a paltry 1.76% going to Republicans.
The AFT is even more one-sided. In “Total Contributions by Party of Recipient,” Weingarten’s organization in 2024 gave $3,069,063 (99.89%) to Democrats and a scant $3,323 (0.11%) to Republicans.
Most recently, a report by Defending Ed, a parents’ rights group, revealed multiple details about teacher union political spending, stating that left-wing philanthropic giants like the Tides Network, New Venture Fund, Sixteen-Thirty Fund, and Future Forward—the latter being the leading Super PAC supporting Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign after former President Joe Biden dropped out—received nearly $1.5 million combined from teachers’ unions.
The unions also contributed large sums of money to groups that support left-wing candidates for public office, such as the Democratic Governors Association, Democrats’ House Majority, and Senate Majority PACs.
Other recipients of their largesse include major left-wing think tanks like the Center for American Progress, which has received nearly a million dollars since 2022 from both national unions.
The state-level unions are no different. The Colorado Education Association has adopted a resolution opposing capitalism. This NEA affiliate, which represents about 40,000 educators and staff, has issued a statement saying it believes “capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources.”
Additionally, the teachers’ unions are not allies of Jews.
The AFT is raising funds for a Gaza aid organization that has partnered with Hamas-controlled agencies like the Ministry of Social Development, which is led by Hamas leader and U.S.-designated terrorist Ghazi Hamad.
Likewise, in its latest handbook, the NEA states that there were “12 million victims of the Holocaust from different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics.”
The union never addressed the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jewish people. But at the same time, the NEA handbook states it would teach students about the Nakba, which is described as the “forced, violent displacement and dispossession of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 during the establishment of the state of Israel.”
On the local level, the United Teachers of Los Angeles is egregiously antisemitic. Their leadership is pro-Palestinian, and the union was sued in 2024 by teachers who don’t want to be represented by them because it backs calls for the destruction of the plaintiff’s religious homeland and “promotes animosity and violence towards people of Jewish descent.”
The teachers’ unions also support racial quotas. The NEA-affiliated California Teachers Association restricts certain elected representative positions within the organization to individuals who identify as “BIPOC,” an acronym for “black, indigenous, people of color.” Those running for the organization’s at-large position “must be BIPOC,” the group’s election manual states.
NEA policy requires that each state “include BIPOC delegates in numbers proportional to the state’s population.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association, another NEA affiliate, similarly disqualifies white people from holding certain elected positions because of their race. The organization’s board of directors reserves a position for an “At-Large Director for Ethnic Minority Membership,” noting that the term refers to those who are “American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, Black, Hispanic, and Cape Verdean.”
Then there’s the Michigan Education Association, which states that the governing board of its political action council must include “two members who identify as Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Color (BIPOC).”
In summary, the teachers’ unions are power-hungry. They support wealth redistribution and race-based policies, exhibit anti-Jewish sentiment, and, until the Supreme Court’s Janus decision in 2018, compelled all public school teachers to pay dues.
In addition to pushing a radical agenda, teacher union leaders are responsible for laws that prevent firing underperforming teachers and require layoffs to be based on seniority. They also insisted on the unnecessary and very harmful COVID-related shutdowns, along with other actions that have been especially damaging to minorities and the poor.
So, there is indeed extremism—or what Weingarten calls fascism—in our country. But instead of blaming those of us who support school choice and capitalism, Randi Weingarten needs to look in her own backyard.
Larry Sand, a retired 28-year classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network—a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views expressed here are entirely his own.