America’s Largest Teachers’ Union Prizes Activism Over Education

Members of America’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association (NEA), were back in training in February, this time for a confidential webinar entitled “Advocacy and Free Speech Rights for K-12 Educators.” The leaked slide deck, posted by the w atchdog group Defending Education, reveals that the NEA is less focused on American students’ stagnant test scores than on training its members to become activists, while using misinterpretations of the First Amendment as a shield.

The February session complements the union’s December 2025 in-person training on “Advancing LGBTQ+ Justice.” That event counseled attendees to “develop a toolset of tactics for dismantling systems of privilege and oppression.”

No longer content with vague generalities about identity and advocacy, the February webinar devoted an entire section to “Tools and practical considerations for educator-activists.” That includes tactics and model legislative language to shield left-leaning activism in the classroom.

“Teachers” barely rate a mention in the webinar, surfacing only when “teacher tenure” is mentioned near the halfway mark. The higher designation of “educators,” including the even loftier “educator-activists,” instead takes pride of place, featuring prominently on the fourth slide—preceded by the title slide, speakers’ slide, and the all-important confidentiality warning. That warning threatens legal action if the deck is shared—an ironic touch for a presentation on “Free Speech Rights for K-12 Educators.”

The training’s first agenda item is “Understanding current threats to educator voice and academic freedom, as well as the risks of [sic] educators face when speaking out.” Clunky “educatorese” seems to be the NEA’s preferred idiom to promote its partisan agenda, which apparently includes support for Palestine, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, racialism, transgender ideology, and DEI. It also includes opposition to the Department of Education (accused of being “actively committed to violating civil rights”), the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (mentioned in nine slides), “Red State governments,” and the Trump administration.

The slides portray the risks to educator-activists in apocalyptic terms. “Democracy itself is at stake,” they claim, with an “unprecedented push to criminalize speech and political opposition.” Educator-activists allegedly face termination, arrest, harassment, doxxing, and even violence—not just from Washington and red state governments but also from “reactionary online mobs.”

A union representing millions of public school teachers might have paused to consider viewpoint diversity. Roughly 30 states are politically red; millions of parents voted for Trump in 2024. Yet the NEA offers no sensitivity training for members disparaging red state students or families rejecting its orthodoxy. Inclusivity, apparently, runs only one way.

Clarifying the rights of teachers to speak as citizens on their own time is a legitimate union function, but the NEA is not content with ensuring that off-duty speech remains free. It insists on an “educator voice” that has special authority inside the classroom. And the tools that the NEA supplies—wrapped in legalese about collective bargaining and “culturally responsive” practices—seek to insulate from criticism woke activism, preferred pronouns, Pride posters, Black Lives Matter flags, and teacher participation in student-led walkouts.

In reality, of course, public school teachers are government employees, paid by taxpayers. Their classrooms are not private soap boxes.

The Supreme Court has drawn a consistent line: while teachers retain First Amendment rights as citizens, those rights are limited in the classroom. Schools may regulate school-sponsored speech to serve pedagogical goals. Lower courts have repeatedly applied these principles to hold that teachers may not inject personal political or ideological views into classroom instruction.

Schools must insist on political neutrality, especially when it comes to the shaping of young minds. The NEA’s training does the opposite. The union likely knows this, which is why it marked the webinar “confidential.”

The NEA should stop priming “educator-activists” who promote ideology at the expense of our children. It should restore confidence in schools by working to improve math and language skills and by abandoning partisanship and ideology. That would serve both its membership and the public trust far better than more slides on how to smuggle activist politics into classrooms.

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