Presidential Results Are A Rebuke To NEA’s Politicized Agenda

Issue Brief

Tuesday’s election results were devastating to the politicized leadership of the nation’s two national teacher unions. The leaders of the 2.7-million-member National Education Association (NEA) and the smaller American Federation of Teachers (AFT) went all out in an attempt to elect Senator John Kerry. They pinned their hopes, and their members’ hefty dues money, on President Kerry derailing the burgeoning movement toward school accountability and parental choice.

The NEA’s Political Action Committee alone contributed over $2 million to candidates and PACs (nearly all to Democrats) in the 2004 election cycle. In addition, it spent over $600,000 in independent direct mail and advertising expenditures to defeat President Bush. NEA and AFT delegates to the Democratic National Convention numbered over 400, more than any state besides California, according to teacher union observer the Education Intelligence Agency.

George W. Bush has been the most pro-school-choice President ever. His signature No Child Left Behind (NCLB) initiatives combine unprecedented accountability with new options for parents of children stuck in chronically failing schools. The teacher unions have attacked NCLB with a vengeance, seeking to scuttle both accountability for results and parental choice.

The NEA was particularly blatant about aligning itself with extreme anti-Bush organizations such as MoveOn.org. Then there is the NEA’s partnership with the most radical proponents of mandatory multiculturalism in K-12 education, the National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME).

At a NAME gathering in Kansas City of public educators from all 50 states the week before the election, a member of the NEA Executive Committee delivered a fiery speech targeting Bush and suggesting that NCLB was part of a broader scheme under his “ownership society” to privatize public services. The tirade by Rebecca Pringle asserted that NCLB’s “unfair, unworkable” accountability system “threatens the very existence of public education.”

In co-sponsoring the NAME conference, NEA officials revealed their allegiance to a radical agenda at odds with the morality and values of most Americans. The conference featured workshops on such topics as sensitizing prospective teachers to what were called Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) issues, and addressing them as early as the elementary school.

As Tuesday’s results indicate, many Americans will cast a decisive vote when they can against NEA-style radical educators seeking to promote values among children that defy the teachings of home and church. The NEA and AFT urged Kerry to block expansion of all forms of choice, from the private vouchers for needy children in the District of Columbia to the expansion of public charter schools.

Not only have the teacher unions lost their base in the Congress, but Republicans now hold a majority of Governors and state legislatures . Thanks to the devastating loss the teacher unions suffered last Tuesday, the door is now open to liberate more and more families from schools politicized by the multiculturalists and other radical education interests.