Teacher Union Chiefs ‘Obviously Out of Touch With the Country’
In last fall’s nationwide general elections, more than 77 million American voters cast their ballots to return Republican Donald Trump to the White House. Mr. Trump captured the presidency after running on a platform that promised, in many key areas, reductions in the centralized power of the federal government and its bureaucracies and transfers of power to individual Americans as well as to state and local elected officials.
Trump Education Department Downsizing Enrages NEA Bosses
With regard to education policy, for example, Mr. Trump called for the abolition of the U.S. Education Department established by union-label President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
He also campaigned for tax credits designed to make it possible for parents to determine for themselves how the tax dollars allocated for the education of their school-aged children are spent.
“To a greater extent than most recent Presidents,” noted National Right to Work Committee President Mark Mix, “Donald Trump has, so far, sought to advance during his first year in office the same policies on which he campaigned.
“Agree or disagree with him, Mr. Trump’s support for tariffs and deportations is deeply rooted in American tradition. And his substantial downsizing of the U.S. Education Department, which has already gotten a tentative greenlight from the U.S. Supreme Court, can’t accurately be labeled as anything other than a bid to diminish the federal government’s power over how schools across the country are run.
“For these and other reasons, teacher union bigwigs’ recent adoption of a resolution calling for the use of the term ‘facism’ [sic] in union materials to ‘characterize Donald Trump’s program and actions’ is dangerous, even if it seems, and is, absurd.”
As the 2025 annual convention of the 2.8 million-member National Education Association (NEA), America’s largest teacher union, was concluding in July, American Culture Project Senior Fellow and school-choice activist Corey DeAngelis obtained a leaked copy of the resolutions that had come up.
Business Item 60, vowing that the NEA would use the word “facism” whenever communicating about policies favored by the President and his many supporters, was just one of several highly controversial 2025 NEA resolutions.
Government-Promoted Union Monopolies Are Core Problem With U.S. Education
“As a number of observers have pointed out,” said Mr. Mix, “NEA militants are clearly more interested in radical political causes like delegitimizing the state of Israel than they are in helping schoolchildren master English, math, history, science and other core disciplines.
“But the primary focus of NEA bosses is protecting and expanding their monopoly privileges.”
Mr. Mix explained: “The core problem with public education in the U.S. is that the vast majority of states continue to authorize and promote Big Labor monopoly-bargaining control over how teachers and other K-12 employees are compensated and managed.
“State monopoly-bargaining laws, commonly and somewhat euphemistically referred to as ‘exclusive representation,’ effectively grant Big Labor the legal power to prevent K-12 school districts from rewarding educators according to their individual talents, efforts and achievements.
“The Jimmy Carter-created federal Education Department has for decades used federal tax dollars to give teacher union bosses even more leverage over how schools are run, and that’s why NEA bigwigs are furious about President Trump’s program to rein it in.
“Most of the Big Labor zealots who attend the NEA convention are so full of themselves they evidently think it’s smart to decry as ‘fascist’ a decentralization program that is really the opposite of fascism, just because they oppose it.
“NEA and other teacher union chiefs are obviously out of touch with the rest of the country.
“Downsizing the Education Department is a good first step toward curtailing their inordinate power. But state laws prohibiting union monopoly control over K-12 employees are what’s needed most. And the Committee has helped pass such laws in Arkansas and Utah.”
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