For those paying attention, it comes as no surprise that one of the nation’s most prominent teachers unions steers millions of dollars to far-left activist groups, ballot initiatives and social justice organizations in FY2024.
That’s according to Fox News, which cites federal labor filings from the National Education Association (NEA) filed in November, which were obtained by the North American Values Institute (NAVI).
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The NEA, which boasts more than 3 million members, sent $300,000 to the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a liberal dark money group Fox News Digital has reported on extensively, and tens of thousands of dollars to the Tides Foundation network, which Fox News Digital previously reported has ties to anti-Israel protests and a variety of far left causes.
Among the largest expenditures was more than $3.5 million sent to Education International, a global teachers federation where NEA President Becky Pringle serves as a vice president. The filing also details hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing to organizations backing ballot initiatives aimed at reshaping education policy and election laws in states, including Ohio, Massachusetts, Arizona and Wisconsin.
Among the payouts included in the story, $500,000 went toward ending standardized testing in Massachusetts, another $500,000 was given in support of an anti-gerrymandering amendment in Ohio and nearly $500,000 to a progressive political consulting firm specializing in ballot initiatives and canvassing, according to the network.
The teachers union paid “more than $166,000 to Imagine Us LLC, a consulting firm focused on racial equity training, and tens of thousands more to groups promoting what they describe as ‘social justice education,’ including curriculum materials centered on race, gender identity, and activism in K-12 classrooms,” Fox News added.
NAVI Director of Research Mika Hackner called the funding “the upshot of social justice unionism.”
“Instead of focusing on member’s working conditions, unions spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on pet political projects completely divorced from the needs and wants of most teachers but perfectly in line with the political agenda the union has been co-opted to serve,” she told Fox News.
NEA President Becky Pringle, billed as a “fierce social justice warrior” on the union’s website, vowed to transform the nation’s largest teachers union into a vehicle for social justice when she first took office in 2023.
“When I became NEA president, what I articulated as a strategic vision was, we would reclaim public education as a common good, as the foundation of our democracy, but we couldn’t stop there” Pringle said at the time. “We couldn’t stop there. We had to transform it into something it was never designed to be, a racially and socially just system that prepares every student everywhere to succeed.”
Erika Sanzi, senior director of communications for Defending Education, questioned why the union still has a federal charter.
“Their federal charter was granted because they promised to ‘elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching; and to promote the cause of education in the United States,'” Sanzi told Fox News. “Seeing as their leadership — and by extension, the organization itself — has morphed into a far-left insane asylum that is actively destroying the cause of education, that charter is no longer defensible.”
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Tom Tillison grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills. Tillison also contributes to BizPac Review.
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