Free Republic

The National Education Association (NEA) appears to be playing clean-up after a tweet Saturday drew harsh criticism for claiming that educators "know better than anyone" what students need. The NEA, one of the largest teachers unions in the United States, later turned off replies to the tweet, but not before 5,000 people responded, including former education secretary Betsy DeVos, who simply stated "You misspelled parents." The National Education Association took issue with DeVos’ tweet, and noted the role of parents in shaping their children’s education. "Together, families and educators are an essential team for advocating for the resources and opportunities...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Breitbart News senior contributor and Government Accountability Institute president Peter Schweizer discussed a report by the Government Accountability Institute on spending by the National Education Association (NEA) and argued that “The IRS ought to be all over” the organization and examining their nonprofit tax-exempt status. Schweizer said, “I mean, look, we’ve known for a long time, for decades, that the teachers’ unions tend to be left of center. But what’s happened is they’ve become more and more political and less interested in actually doing what their stated purpose is,...

In 2021, the two largest teachers’ unions in the country collected over half a billion dollars from their members, and almost all of their political spending went to leftist causes. While 57 percent of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) membership is either Republican or independent, nearly 100 percent of political spending of the $575 million in dues was funneled into far-left politics.

Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that government employees could not be forced to pay a union to keep their job. The top four public labor unions in the U.S. lost more than 200,000 members since the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that government employees could not be forced to pay a union to keep their job, a new report shows that. The Commonwealth Foundation released the report, which found that the top four public labor unions – AFT, AFSCME, NEA, and SEIU – lost nearly 219,000 members altogether since the Janus v. AFSCME ruling. “The Janus decision to end forced...

President Joe Biden’s claim that AR-15s fire bullets at a velocity that is five times higher than that of other guns is being shot down by people who know guns. Biden repeated the claim Friday in a speech to the National Education Association teachers union, even though it has been repeatedly debunked. Several rifles and even some handguns fire bullets at a higher velocity than the 2,700-3,100 feet per second of AR-15s. “The speed of the bullet is five times that that comes out of the muzzle of most weapons,” Biden said, describing the popular hunting rifle as a “weapon...

President Biden shocked viewers of his Friday speech to teachers when he recognized an audience member and told the crowd, “She was 12, I was 30.” Biden lit up social media with the confounding and seemingly inappropriate aside. He did not say what he did when he was 30 and the woman was a preteen. “You gotta say hi to me,” Biden said mid-speech at the National Education Association headquarters in DC. “We go back a long way. She was 12, I was 30. But anyway, this woman helped me get an awful lot done.” The audience of teachers and...

The National Education Association is reportedly equipping teachers in Ohio with QR-code badges that direct students to how-to guides promoting “non-binary” gender identities, “queer sex,” and the idea that “transgender men” can become pregnant, among other things. Conservative writer Christopher Rufo shared the findings on Wednesday. He noted that local news outlet ABC 6 reported that the National Education Association and the Hilliard Education Association in Ohio have been equipping staff in the school district with QR code badges that direct people to the NEA’s LGBTQ+ Caucus website. They are provided with resources from “gender activist” organizations, including The Trevor...

FIRST ON FOX: Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, a Democrat, told teachers’ unions that they would be his "first" call for education policy should he get elected. While taking questions during a January speaking gig at a Pennsylvania State Education Association Political Institute event, Fetterman said that, if elected, he would be a staunch ally of teachers’ unions. His comments had not been reported previously. "I’m not going to sit up here and pretend that I know exactly what’s needed, I’m going to turn to you," Fetterman said. "If you send me to Washington, D.C., you’ll be the first people...

The New Jersey branch of the National Education Association is running an advertisement condemning concerned mothers and fathers as 'extremists.'(LifeSiteNews) — One of the strange and unintended effects of the Covid lockdowns was that for the first time many parents were exposed to what educators were teaching their kids. Many were shocked, and the resulting backlash torqued an already-growing parental rights movement rooted in opposition to LGBT indoctrination and Critical Race Theory (CRT). At first, progressives insisted that parents, if not lying, were simply following for the fevered conspiracy theories of raving right-wing pundits. Then along came activists like Christopher...

Public schools even for the youngest children are becoming playgrounds for the woke, featuring drag queens, transgender closets, Critical Race Theory and more, but if you say a word about it, the National Education Association (NEA) will destroy you. That is the message of a new YouTube ad from the NEA’s New Jersey chapter. According to Fox News Thursday, “the ad flips back and forth between colorful photos of teachers with students and black-and-white photos of parents, arguing that the latter are trying to fuse politics with education.” Which, of course, the hard-Left, thoroughly politicized NEA itself would never ever...

Potemkin villages” refer to the magnificent facades that Crimean governor Grigory Potemkin supposedly built in front of decrepit villages to impress Catherine the Great on her grand tour of the region. Today, there’s no better term than “Potemkin schools” to describe how educrats run public education in New York City. ... teachers at William Cullen Bryant High School in Queens complained that administrators forced them to pass failing students. Last year, a long-stalled investigation revealed that Maspeth High School in Queens repeatedly faked passing grades. In 2020, at Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill High School where more than 70% of the students...

As a teacher, I attended the National Education Association convention last week, and my worst fears were confirmed. Public schools are no longer a safe place for families who hold traditional values or for families who believe gender (as in male/female binary) is biologically determined. It was also evident that the teachers union is a lobbying arm of the Democratic Party.

The National Education Association is seeking to change the word “mother” to be more inclusive to the LGBTQIA+ community. Fox News reported the resolution would change the word to “birthing parent.” The proposed resolution stated, “Using this contract language, members need not worry about how a Board of Education/solicitor defines ‘maternity leave,’ ‘mother,’ and/or ‘father’; the language is an inclusive reflection of how LGBTQIA+ members build families.” The outlet noted the resolution, NBI 63, was not brought to a vote. The news of the resolution sparked criticism on Twitter. Nicole Neily of Parents Defending Education told Fox News that “normal...

A volley of policy proposals has been put up for debate at the annual conference of the nation’s largest teacher’s union, including one that called for the organization to support making masks and COVID-19 vaccines mandatory in public schools. About 6,000 delegates of the National Education Association (NEA), who collectively represent more than 3 million employees in public education, convened in Chicago from July 3–6. It’s the first time they’ve assembled in person to debate on issues and set policy agenda since the start of the pandemic. Prior to 2022, anyone could use the NEA website to track the status...

The National Education Association passed a resolution during their annual Representative Assembly in Chicago that would allocate thousands of dollars to conduct opposition research on 25 organizations that are supposedly attacking gender identity and sexual orientation freedoms in public schools. "NEA shall compile research to create fact sheets about the largest 25 organizations that are actively working to diminish a students' right to honesty in education, freedom of sexual and gender identify, and teacher autonomy," the resolution said. NEA's resolutions are called new business items (NBI) and represent the teachers' union's opinions and beliefs. They also open the door to...

Biden tells teachers that students are ‘like your’ children, not ‘somebody else’s,’ in the classroom‘They’re not somebody else’s children, they’re like yours when you’re in the classroom,’ said Joe Biden. WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – During a Teachers of the Year event at the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden told teachers that their students effectively belong to them and not “somebody” else when they are in their classrooms. “And you’ve heard me say it many times, about our children, but it’s true, they’re all our children,” Biden said in his address to the teachers on Wednesday. “And the reason you’re...

The high wages of teachers in Boston, where nearly 3,000 are paid six-figure salaries, reflects the strength of their union and suggests that a district plagued by “chronic underperformance” may be more geared toward the adults running it than the children it serves, watchdogs say. A Herald analysis of payroll data found that 2,905 teachers earn more than $100,000 annually, compared to the average per capita income of $44,690 in Boston in 2019, the most recent year for which the U.S. Census Bureau has statistics. Those teachers earned six figures in a city where 18.9% of the population – about...

It seems like every single day we see a new example of government schools, particularly in Virginia, being run by people who are totally obsessed with exercising their power to force terrible Covid regulations that prevent kids from learning.This latest example is from a teachers' union boss in Fairfax, Virginia who is celebrating higher rates of Covid because it means that they can continue to keep kids masked:Her air quotes aside, she is still celebrating HIGHER Covid rates because it means that the teachers will be able to continue exercising their power to muzzle kids in schools.Most sane people would...

On Thursday, schools in Douglas County, Colorado closed after hundreds of teachers called in sick to protest against several actions carried out by the newly-elected school board, which became majority conservative in November. According to local outlet CPR News, by mid-day Wednesday, there were around 1,500 unfilled teacher absences for the following day. In total, there are about 3,300 licensed teachers in the school district. The district then canceled preschool through high school classes because “the number of absences has impacted our ability to provide a safe and supervised learning environment for students,” according to a tweet posted by the...

We’ve seen this coming for a while now, like a slow-motion train wreck. After the National School Board Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the Biden administration comparing parents to domestic terrorists and even suggesting the PATRIOT Act might be used to reign them in. That turned out to be the last straw for a lot of parents and maybe also for the NSBA. The group apologized for the letter in late October but by that point the damage was done. Within days, five state associations canceled their membership in the national group. By early December the number of associations...