Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, cofounders of Moms for Liberty, said on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow that a recently published Government Accountability Institute (GAI) investigation of teachers’ unions spending on political campaigns and lobbying reflects a growing disconnect between teachers and labor unions ostensibly representing their professional interests.
The GAI report examined the spending of the two largest teachers unions — the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — across the 2021 fiscal year. The two unions collected a total of $575 million dollars in dues from their members in the previous fiscal year and spent more on political activities and lobbying that representational activities.
Descovich said, “What this report is showing is that the national teachers unions — the AFT and the NEA — are well-funded powerhouses. They are promoting radical progressive ideology in this country. They are so far away from their core issue of public education that it’s astonishing.”
Justice contrasted surveys quantifying more than half of teachers describing themselves as Republicans or independents with the NEA’s and AFT’s partisan Democrat positioning. “Almost 100 percent of the unions’ spending supports Democrats,” she noted.
The GAI summarized a listing of its report’s highlights, noting in 2021, the NEA spent $66 million on “political activities and lobbying” and $32 million on “representational activities.” The NEA’s and AFT’s beneficiaries include the political campaigns of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rep., Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Hillary Clinton.
The NEA and AFT spent approximately $30 million on leftist advocacy organizations in 2021.
Descovich said the increasingly left-wing and partisan Democrat politicking of teachers’ unions over time is creating a politically insular educational establishment as teachers flee “woke ideology.”
“Unfortunately, what’s happening right now is a lot of … wonderful teachers are leaving the profession, because they’re tired of the woke ideology,” she stated. “They don’t feel represented.”
She added, “We have all these new people coming in to work in some of these schools who are younger and more progressive, and I think we really have to stop and take a look at this. We need to reclaim public education.”
Critics of the status quo of public education, Descovich emphasized, must realize that homeschooling and private schooling are inaccessible options for most parents seeking to protect their children from corrupt political indoctrination. “We’re still going to have a majority of children in public schools in America,” she remarked.
Teachers unions “have made public education a jobs program,” Justice lamented while noting teachers’ unions’ support for growing numbers of ostensibly educational administrators and bureaucrats.
Descovich compared increasing graduation rates with declining reading capacities among students.
“We have declining student engagement, declining attendance, declining achievement scores, and yet graduation rates have never been higher,” she remarked. “That just shows you this is a system that’s very intent on protecting itself. The union is very invested in protecting the system, and they want you to focus on what I like to call the alphabet soup: the CRT, SEL, DEI, ‘if only children felt safe and valued, if only this, if only that, then they could learn,’ but the truth is that 95 percent of children have the ability to learn to read, and it’s going take the unions and everyone in the country taking a hard look at why kids aren’t learning to read.”
Justice emphasized the impact of the political battle over public education.
She concluded, “The final line in the sand is when parents lose the right to direct the upbringing of their children.”
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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