The largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association, held its annual convention over the July 4th weekend. Once again, its resolutions provide a horrifying glimpse of the leftist ideology that controls our public schools (and quite a few private schools, too).
Fifty delegates to this teachers’ convention submitted New Business Item 10: “The National Education Association will call for the impeachment, conviction, and removal of Donald Trump from the US Presidency.” This resolution seeks a “National March on Washington D.C. to remove Trump before the November 2026 midterm election.”
At a time when fewer than a third of fourth-graders can read at their grade level in public schools nationwide, teachers should focus more on education than on politics. Instead, they proposed spending $5 million in teachers’ dues on a highly publicized demonstration against President Trump just before voters head to the polls.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has presidential aspirations, so let’s look at how well his state schools are doing. A generation ago, when Ronald Reagan was governor, the sprawling University of California system was widely considered a crown jewel of public education.
But under Gov. Newsom’s tenure the University of California stopped using the standardized SAT and ACT scores in its admission process, and the result has been catastrophic. The Obama Administration’s Janet Napolitano, who was the high-salaried president of that system after serving as Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security, admits that what she still insists was a “worthwhile experiment” to drop standardized admissions testing needs to be “revisited.”
Even the New York Times is appalled, devoting its entire editorial column on July 6th to explaining how that formerly great university betrayed its mission by adopting test-blind admissions in 2020. More than half the students who enter Cal Berkeley, its most prestigious campus, cannot solve elementary equations, such as finding the values of x for which x-squared is greater than 4, and its English Prof. Janet Sorensen observed that she “got students who could not write a sentence.”
The NEA spreads these errors nationwide. It is the largest labor union in the United States, having approximately 3 million members, which is more than enough to swing the outcome of a national election.
Its annual budget is based mostly on public employee dues, which are mandatory in many states, totaling about $400 million. It has a large staff of hundreds in its headquarters, which of course are located in Washington, D.C.
NEA members typically have summers off and thus lots of time to attend liberal conventions and campaign for Democrat candidates. Many teachers retire early with substantial pensions.
Roughly 10% of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention are public school teachers, so its platform as adopted every four years largely reflects the views of the NEA and its smaller rival, Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers. Both groups oppose laws that protect girls’ school sports against intrusion by biological boys who seek to compete with girls.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently rejected the NEA’s effort to force West Virginia to allow boys to compete as transgender girls in girls’ school sports. The NEA also wants to require schools to use opposite-sex pronouns demanded by transgender students.
Many Americans have been abandoning public schools in favor of alternatives, and the declining birth rate
has contributed further to a drop in public school enrollment. Since 2020 there has been a decrease of 1.4 million public school students, creating pressure to close many schools and thereby requiring longer commutes by the students who remain.
But rather than becoming more mainstream to attract more students, the teachers’ unions continue to veer leftward and demand more funding. Dumping more money into the system has not improved it.
Liberal ideology in education has infested the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, at federal
taxpayer expense. A new 162-page report by the White House Domestic Policy Council demonstrated for our Independence Day how far afield our treasured national museum system has strayed from our proud heritage.
Spearheaded by Vince Haley, this report observes that the Smithsonian Institute “has not met its obligations to the American people.” Entitled “Saving America’s Story” and subtitled “How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” the report condemns the shift “from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”
Examples provided in this report of the distortions of our history are indeed shocking. An 1840 statue of George Washington is depicted as merely “the perceived courage of the American people,” rather than the “exceptional courage of the American people” as often proven.
There is “no major exhibit dedicated to America’s founding era” at the Smithsonian Museum. Instead, many founders are disparaged for having some connection to slavery, despite how most worked to end the slave trade and to put slavery on a path to extinction.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.