POLITICS: Teachers warm themselves beside partisan cash bonfire

America’s largest labor union, the The National Education Association, funnels hundreds of millions of taxpayer-sourced dollars into leftwing advocacy every year, making its 3 million members more like a social-justice army and itself a European-style political party.

Unions are supposed to advocate for their members, and the NEA certainly does its fair share of that, contributing (along with the American Federation of Teachers) close to $1 billion in every election cycle to local, state and federal candidates as well as to ballot measures regarding logically-related issues such as charter schools or tax hikes.

But a review of other big targets for NEA giving makes you wonder what the union’s mission really is: It donates millions to causes that have little to do with teaching, teachers or children and a lot to do with promoting a hard-left “social justice” agenda.

For example, in 2024 (the last year with sufficient records now public) the union gave $300,000 to the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a Democrat dark-money hub that spends hundreds of millions of dollars supporting gun control, the green agenda and “racial justice.”

It also contributed hundreds of thousands to another lefty clearinghouse, the Tides Foundation and its related entities; Tides funding has been connected to the “No Kings” movement and anti-Israel protests.

The NEA gave $30,000 to Win Without War, a “movement for progressive foreign policy” whose new campaign is “Defund ICE,” on the ground that its agents “are inflicting incredible violence in our communities, including murder, with impunity.”

Millions of bucks have gone for policy briefings for black pastors as well as to oppose standardized testing in Massachusetts and promote racial equity training and anti-gerrymandering measures in Ohio.

And this cash flows to the NEA from dues subtracted from teachers’ paychecks, and so from the taxpayers.

Public-sector unionization is problematic in and of itself, for a host of reasons we can discuss another time.

But when the union gets taken over by a faction whose radical agenda has nothing to do with its members needs, the arrangement is positively perverse.