Education Secretary Linda McMahon withdrew the department’s appeal in a federal lawsuit that challenged warning schools against efforts to “preference certain racial groups.” 

In April, she asked states to agreeing to the administration’s view of non-discrimination laws or risk losing federal funds. In , Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher, a district judge for the District of Maryland, called both the letter and the certification requirement “substantively improper.” 

“The administration is entitled to express its viewpoints and to promulgate policies aligned with those viewpoints,” she wrote. “But it must do so within the procedural bounds Congress has outlined. And it may not do so at the expense of constitutional rights.”

Other litigation over the letter and the certification is ongoing.

The department’s tough anti-DEI stance drew a broad mix of reactions. Some Republican state education chiefs welcomed the letter, with Ryan Walters, former Oklahoma superintendent, posting a video of himself signing the form. Blue states refused to sign, while at the district level,  the actions largely sparked confusion over whether they could still hold events related to Black History Month or teach about racism. One Georgia school board and then reinstated it when the court blocked the letter.

The lawsuit, led by American Federation of Teachers, is one of four related to the letter or the threat to withhold funds. The National Education Association, 19 Democratic-led states and the NAACP also challenged the department’s actions. But the department didn’t initially fare well in court. On the same day in late April, Gallagher suspended the letter while two other federal judges blocked enforcement of the certification form.

“With the stroke of a pen, the administration tried to take a hatchet to 60 years of civil rights laws that were meant to create educational opportunity for all kids,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “It took a union to stand in the stead of kids and educators who feared retribution from the government.”

The department did not respond to a request for comment, but its decision in the AFT case doesn’t put the issue to rest.

In the NEA case, the judge has not issued a final ruling, but an remains in place.  The department filed a motion to dismiss the NAACP case last summer, but the court has not yet ruled. The , meanwhile, is set for trial in June. 

While the department was unable to pressure schools through a “dear colleague” letter, it has continued to launch civil rights investigations into districts with diversity and equity initiatives, like Black Student Success Plan. 

Even some conservatives criticized the agency’s use of non-binding guidance to implement policy.

“There are good reasons to be concerned about the capricious use of dear colleague letters. Many of us have been warning about the problems for 15 years now, dating back to Obama’s first term,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “Seeing the administration instead rely on the machinery of the Office for Civil Rights is probably a good thing, as that should ensure that this is less about federal diktats than about investigations into specific complaints.”

Last year, the conservative Freedom Foundation made headlines with a high-profile effort to convince Miami-Dade teachers to dump their union. 

Ultimately, it flopped: 83% of members voted to stick with United Teachers of Dade. Still, Brent Urbanik, president of the rival Miami Dade Education Coalition, said he appreciated the Foundation’s “all-hands-on-deck” support, which included funding mailers to teachers’ homes and to knock on doors. Urbanik said he couldn’t have run the campaign without the Foundation’s help. 

But he’s not a fan of the group’s latest move. In late September, it named anti-union firebrand Ryan Walters, °ż°ěąô˛šłó´Çłž˛šâ€™s former state chief, as head of its new Teacher Freedom Alliance.  

“Most teachers just want to go to school. They want to teach their subjects, and they want to know that they’re not going to get fired for saying the wrong thing,” he said. With Walters at the helm, he said, the Teacher Freedom Alliance risks becoming “the right’s version of the left’s problem, which is the politicization of classroom material.” 

To Aaron Withe, the Foundation’s CEO, Walters is a “freedom fighter” who brings passion and new energy to a cause that has seen mixed results since the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in . The court ruled that teachers and other public sector employees can opt out of paying fees to unions they don’t want to join. But Walters is escalating the attack. Since resigning from his state job, he’s criticized for striking over their recent loss of collective bargaining and joined members in Florida, where he said unions have turned schools into “Marxist indoctrination centers.” 

One frequent target of his rhetoric doesn’t see the new Alliance as a threat. In a statement, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called the Foundation’s post-Janus efforts a “dismal failure.”  

Urbanik, who teaches AP Psychology at a magnet school in Miami-Dade, is among those educators who think the AFT and the National Education Association have strayed too far from core bargaining issues like salaries, benefits and working conditions. That’s what Mark Janus, a former child support specialist in Illinois, argued when he challenged AFSCME on First Amendment grounds, that he shouldn’t be forced to financially support a union’s political activities or preferred candidates.

“There was an inherent unfairness in requiring people to join a union and spend money on political activities they disagree with in order to hold a government job,” said Dean McGee, senior counsel and director of educational freedom at the Liberty Justice Center, the conservative law firm that represented Janus. 

Since Janus, some teachers say that unions continue to make it hard to opt out by automatically renewing membership without warning or creating short “escape” windows for canceling membership. But in 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear those concerns.

‘Power comes from money’

Teachers’ conflicts with their unions aren’t always political. Members of the Miami-Dade Education Coalition say United Teachers of Dade didn’t fight for raises and merit pay tied to a 2011 state law after the district said it was an unfunded mandate and they couldn’t afford the bonuses. 

And in Chicago, Liberty Justice Center represents members of the Chicago Teachers Union who are union leaders for a required annual audit for the past four years. 

The Teacher Freedom Alliance, McGee said, takes the Janus ruling a step further. “The power comes from money, and the money comes from member dues,” he said. If unions are losing members, he suggested they focus on “members’ interests and not broader political fights.”

He didn’t mention specific priorities, but the NEA this year that aim to counteract President Donald Trump’s “embrace of fascism” and to support “No Kings” protests. 

Opt-out campaigns have generally seen mixed results, experts say. When they’re combined with legislation to undermine the unions, as when Wisconsin stripped public sector unions of collective bargaining in 2011, membership drops, said Eunice Han, an associate economics professor at the University of Utah who studies unions. 

In 2023, Florida passed a law that requires unions to maintain a 60% dues-paying membership. In January 2024, United Teachers of Dade . Urbanik’s group saw an opening. 

A year after the law passed, over 50 public sector unions in the state had been wiped out because they couldn’t reach the 60% threshold, according to . But only three of those were K-12 unions, all of which represented non-instructional staff. 

of the Florida Education Association “have successfully re-certified,” Han said. The Freedom Foundation has seen small victories in other states where it’s been active, like Oregon, California and Washington. 

Larry Delaney, president of the Washington Education Association, said the Foundation frequently sends mailers with messages encouraging teachers and other school staff to opt out. The cards include a section the member can rip off and mail back to the union’s address. Their campaigns get creative, he said. Around Halloween, one mailer portrayed Delaney as a monster. Another said “Give yourself a Christmas bonus! End your monthly union dues.”

But only a handful of members opt out each year, Delaney said.

Some mailers look like a and include a fake check representing how much money members would save in dues each year if they quit the union. Based on his own experience, it costs about $40,000 to send mail to all 84,000 members of the union statewide, and the Freedom Foundation sends a new mailer almost monthly.

“I don’t know what their direct mailing budget is, but it’s large,” he said. The Foundation didn’t comment on its mailing budget.

The Foundation, a $17 million operation, according to its most , is a nonprofit and doesn’t have to disclose donors. In Florida, the free market-oriented , founded by successful futures trader Bill Dunn, donated $100,000 to support the Miami Dade Education Coalition’s opt-out campaign, according to .

by the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive organization that tracks spending by conservative groups, show the Koch Brothers, the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation in Pittsburgh, are also among the Foundation’s contributors. Those organizations often fund right-leaning causes, like efforts to roll back and PragerU, a media operation that produces conservative videos for kids.

‘We won’t be intimidated’

The Foundation used some of its resources to fight that says union members can sue if someone is trying to impersonate them as an opt-out strategy. 

“They say that we’re pretending to be union officials and going to union members’ homes to convince them to leave,” Withe, the Foundation’s CEO, said in an . “We won’t be intimidated. If anything, we’re more emboldened to go and get more of their members.”

The Foundation wasn’t able to keep the bill from passing. It allows union representatives to bring a civil lawsuit against a group or individual that tries to deceive a union member into opting out. Withe said the unions provided no evidence that the Foundation employed deception. 

But his group did manage to get teachers in the small 126-student along the south coast of Oregon, to create a new independent union in June. When all 13 of their teachers voted unanimously to create the new Cruiser Educators Association, the Oregon Education Association didn’t oppose the move. 

Gabe Shorb, a sixth grade teacher in the district, first heard Walters speak at one of the Foundation’s Teacher Freedom Summits and called his message “refreshing.”

He said several teachers had already opted out on their own and a few had joined the Teacher Freedom Alliance. Those remaining felt the Oregon Education Association wasn’t very helpful when they bargained with the district and asked for contract information from comparable districts. Membership in the new union is free.

“I’m hoping that we’ll make connections and show other small districts that, ‘Hey you don’t have to pay a lot of money for something that’s really not that useful,’ ” he said.

The Freedom Foundation also pushed this year for that would prevent teachers from using paid professional development days to attend the Montana Federation of Public Employees’ annual meeting. The sessions, the Foundation argues, are “oriented toward political activism, radical woke ideology and union marketing.” to panels on topics such as equity training and promoting LGBTQ issues. But the bill died in the session.

The Teacher Freedom Alliance aims to give school staff an alternative to the AFT and the NEA. Its free membership includes liability coverage up to $2 million, which protects teachers if they’re sued or need legal representation for other reasons. The American Association of Educators, with about 32,000 members, charges $19.50 per month for that includes liability coverage as well as other benefits, like shopping discounts.

Walters first promoted the new Alliance in March with a , drawing an ethics complaint from Rep. Ellen Pogemiller, a Democrat, who argued that he was using state resources to endorse an organization. The complaint was dismissed, and the state attorney general said he didn’t break the law.ĚýWalters did not respond to attempts to reach him by phone or text.

When he accepted the new job, Pogemiller filed , suggesting his promotion of the group was for personal gain. The state ethics commission hasn’t issued any findings. 

Walters might have taken the job because he thought it would “give him a larger national profile,” said Julia Koppich, an independent consultant in San Francisco and expert on teachers unions.

He might also have been seeking a higher salary. His paid $124,000. The Foundation did not disclose his salary at Teacher Freedom Alliance, but past show Withe made $525,000 in 2023, and other top executives earned in the $200,000 range. 

Koppich wonders how the new Alliance will benefit teachers. In states where unions have bargaining rights, teachers who drop their membership can’t negotiate their own salaries and working conditions with school districts, Koppich said. They’re bound by the union contract whether they pay dues or not. 

In non-union states, teacher pay is set by a statewide salary schedule.

“Unionism is baked in where it’s baked in and anathema where it’s always been anathema,” Koppich said. “These [opt-out] organizations don’t have a great track record.” 

In Miami, Urbanik blames part of his group’s poor showing in the election on the Miami- Dade district. He said officials “heavily suppressed” his organization’s message. Some teachers didn’t even know the vote was taking place. About two-thirds of the Miami-Dade teachers didn’t vote.

“We were not allowed to have contact with teachers on school grounds,” he said. “I was not allowed to have a mailer placed in mailboxes.”

Under Walters, opt-out drives are likely to go national and his rhetoric about unions funding agendas unrelated to the classroom are expected to intensify, said Han, with the University of Utah. 

“I believe that with Walters’s leadership,” Han said, “we may see a more politically charged and aggressive version of the Freedom Foundation’s strategy.”

The American Federation of Teachers published the findings Sept. 10 after research company Grow Progress 705 members about classroom expenses and federal education policy changes. The union also collected personal insights about student hunger, an issue that have found is prominent at school and could be impacted by impending to food assistance programs.

“Every year, public school educators dig into their own pockets to help their students get the education they deserve,” union President Randi Weingarten said in a . “They pay for books, decorations, paper, pencils and, yes, even food.”

Families that deal with can’t afford enough groceries to meet their needs, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The most recent available shows that nearly 18% of households with children across the nation struggled with food insecurity in 2023.

Research the national nonprofit in March found that 92% of teachers have taken some type of action to address student hunger at school. Nearly half personally provide food in the classroom, while 29% have purchased food for students to eat outside of class.

“Families are struggling to put food on the table for their kids for a variety of reasons, whether that’s the rising cost of food or the worsening job market or limited resources,” said Sara Steely, a No Kid Hungry spokesperson. “The entire education system is stronger when kids are well-fed, and teachers are up against a lot — food shouldn’t be something they have to think about.”

In the AFT survey, a Florida union member said students need food at school because of a lack of it at home, while another teacher in Kentucky said many students “are starving because of lack of food availability.”

Ann Walkup, a Rhode Island physics teacher and AFT member, said she and many educators at her high school buy food like granola bars, crackers and water bottles.

“Most of us keep some sort of stash somewhere,” she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “There are definitely some teachers who have a situation like [food insecurity] with some of their students. We’re supposed to refer them to the office, and there’s a system the school has to support them, but admittedly, it is just easier to be like, ‘Hey, I’ve got an extra granola bar.’ ”

Steely said child hunger is about to become even more complicated with the recent cuts to the , which helps about 42 million people afford groceries each month. In July, the Trump administration approved a tax bill that will from SNAP funding through 2034.

Once the SNAP cuts are fully implemented, roughly 2.4 million people are projected to lose food stamp benefits in an average month, according to estimates from the .

Students automatically qualify for free or reduced-price lunch if their families receive SNAP benefits, Steely said. Parents will have to return to filling out paperwork to get their children free meals at school — something that is an obstacle for people who have language barriers or are embarrassed about their income, she said.

“As we see these SNAP and Medicaid cuts play out and the impacts to free school meals access, I could see that burden falling to the teachers,” Steely said. 

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ that student hunger continues to be a critical issue for members of the nation’s largest teachers union. She said schools already felt the impact of cuts this spring, when the in funding for districts and child care facilities to purchase food from local farms for student meals.

“We’re seeing more kids coming to school hungry,” she said. “We spend money buying snacks, we send things home to families in book bags. We do that because, at least as educators, we can’t look away.”

The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, and CareerWise USA, which runs apprenticeship programs for high-schoolers in five states, announced the Education and Apprenticeship Accelerator late last month.

The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades and the governors of California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania have also joined the coalition.

Its goal is to improve and expand Career Technical Education (CTE) both in high schools and community colleges and create more student internships and apprenticeships where students are paid to both work and go to school. Only about 5% of high school students nationally have a chance at an internship or apprenticeship, estimates available show.

AFT President Randi Weingarten said the union sees a need to shift away from the “college for all” mindset of the last 20 years, and be a part of giving students other ways to prepare for work and life.

“Look how many kids we’ve seen in schools that feel totally at sea,” said Weingarten, who also called for changes in a May 6 New York Times opinion piece

Instead of working independently and sometimes at cross-purposes, which has kept the number of opportunities for students low, CareerWise founder Noel Ginsburg said the new partnership will help government, business and schools work together in support of training efforts.

Challenges include aligning school and work schedules, finding transportation for students between work and school, giving students course credit for work-based learning and making sure students are working in fields that are hiring.

Both Ginsburg and Weingarten said the states can serve as laboratories to find the right formulas to succeed, then the partnership can promote them and find a common plan that covers all states.

“This is intended to truly create…examples for the country in multiple states that can show how this matters,” Ginsburg said. 

“We’ll bring resources to it, both financial, technical and consulting, to enable these states to accelerate faster, to make this happen,” Ginsburg said. “(We’ll) bring these systems together so that our gears aren’t grinding, that they are connected and, in fact, we’re moving forward.”

Governors of the participating states echoed the call for improving training opportunities for students.

Apprenticeships are common in Europe, with more than half of students in countries like Switzerland participating. Apprenticeships In the U.S. usually start after high school, instead of the equivalent of junior year in Europe, and have traditionally been in construction trades.

But apprenticeships across the country have been growing in recent years and in other fields, particularly health care, information technology and advanced manufacturing. New U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has also , and has called for more CTE, apprenticeships and tuition assistance for career training.

President Donald Trump signed an. But the administration also shut down a Department of Labor advisory panel on apprenticeships that Ginsburg had a major role on and , a training program for 25,000 young people a year, a decision that is being

Experts consider a released by the department late Friday to be more in line with how the courts have traditionally viewed illegal discrimination.

“This is such a far cry from what they put out two weeks ago,” said Jackie Wernz, a civil rights attorney and consultant who worked in both the Obama and first Trump administrations. “It’s downright reasonable.”

Part of the Trump administration’s larger effort to root out diversity, equity and inclusion, the called diversity a “nebulous” goal and warned that districts could be subject to investigations for treating “students differently on the basis of race.” It prompted opposition from , and education . And it left some educators wondering topics like Black History Month.

The Q&A, however, asserts that officials would not automatically consider anything labelled DEI to be illegal and would examine as part of its investigations whether a policy actually resulted in discrimination against students. Cultural and historical observances are fine, the document says, as long as all students are welcome to participate, regardless of race.

“They were trying to see how far they could go, and then they got the pushback,” Wernz said, noting the timing of the department’s guidance. “I love that they say you can celebrate Black history at the end of the month.”

In a on the changes, Wernz noted that the department clarified that it would need evidence that a particular racial group was harmed before it decided to launch an investigation. But she still warned districts to avoid lessons that separate students by race or assignments that ask them to identify their race. 

Neeraja Deshpande, a policy analyst at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, said there was no need to walk back any instructions to districts.

“I don’t think the earlier letter needed to be softened,” she said. “But, of course, school districts were going to have questions and this seemed to answer them.”

‘Vagueness, Confusion and Chaos’

The department is still likely to get wide-ranging reports of what members of the public consider “divisive ideologies and indoctrination.” The portal it unveiled last week doesn’t define what the department considers to be illegal discrimination. 

The additional guidance hasn’t prompted the American Federation of Teachers to drop its federal lawsuit over the original letter. In a statement, AFT President Randi Weingarten said that the Q&A “just made things murkier.”

Last week, the union, along with AFT-Maryland and the American Sociological Association, sued, appeared to ban the teaching of “systemic and structural racism” in American history. The lawsuit says the teachers would be afraid to discuss Jim Crow laws, the internment of Japanese Americans and other examples of historical discrimination.

The Q&A doesn’t discuss how teachers should approach lessons on history and only says, “OCR’s assessment of school policies and programs depends on the facts and circumstances of each case.”

“If you are a classroom teacher, you still have no idea what you can or can’t teach when it comes to the history of the United States and the world,” Weingarten  said. “It seems like vagueness, confusion and chaos is the point.”

Washington, D.C.

On Monday, a federal district court judge in Maryland granted a barring the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management from disclosing personally identifiable information to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, filed a federal lawsuit with a coalition of labor unions Feb. 12 alleging that the department illegally gave DOGE access to millions of private and sensitive records.

The court ruled that the AFT would likely succeed in its lawsuit and agreed that the two agencies “likely violated the Privacy Act by disclosing their personal information to DOGE affiliates without their consent.” The restraining order will expire March 10. 

“This is a significant decision that puts a firewall between actors whom we believe lack the legitimacy and authority to access Americans’ personal data and are using it inappropriately, without any safeguards,” union President Randi Weingarten said in a press release.

In other action, the union announced on Feb. 19 that as part of a recently launched campaign called . 

The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, organized a rally outside the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 12 to protest the nomination of Linda McMahon as secretary of education.

In response to administration efforts to downsize federal agencies, the American Federation of Government Employees filed a lawsuit to stop a resignation program that prompted thousands of workers to leave their jobs. The nation’s largest federal employee union — which represents U.S. Department of Education staff — argued that the program was unlawful, .

California

Members of unions in 32 California school districts have banded together to negotiate a shared set of contract demands: improved wages and benefits, smaller class sizes, fully staffed schools and more resources for students.

The locals united as part of the California Teachers Association’s , which launched Feb. 4. The districts employ a total of 77,000 educators and teach 1 million students, and include some of the largest in the state: Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Oakland and Sacramento. 

Many of the unions’ contracts are set to expire this summer. California Teachers Association President David Goldberg said in a Feb. 4 webinar that the campaign is intended to build pressure statewide, .

At one charter school in the San Fernando Valley, teachers staged a four-day after working without a contract since July 1. Educators at El Camino Real Charter High School, who are represented by United Teachers Los Angeles, walked out from Feb. 10 to 14 before reaching an agreement that includes a 19% salary increase over three years, .

The nation’s first charter school strike occurred in 2018, a four-day work stoppage at Acero, one of °äłóžąłŚ˛š˛ľ´Ç’s largest charter school networks. The vast majority of charter schools are not unionized.

Idaho

A bill that would ban taxpayer funds from going toward teachers union operations advanced out of committee to the full House on Feb. 12. The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Judy Boyle, said is intended to cut down on what she called “under-the-table” dealings between school districts and unions, according to the .

HB98 would apply only to teachers unions, not to other public-sector unions that represent occupations like first responders, according to the Idaho Education Association. It would require teachers to use personal leave to do union work, eliminate payroll deductions for dues and ban distribution of union materials on school property. Violators could be fined up to $2,500.

“This wasn’t the outcome we wanted, but we’re not done fighting this bad bill yet,” Chris Parri, the union’s political director, said . “We’ll need all hands on deck to kill it for good in the [state] Senate when the time comes.” 

Illinois

The Chicago Teachers Union rejected a recommendation Feb. 4 from a neutral arbitrator that negotiators return to the bargaining table and reach agreement with Chicago Public Schools on a that includes higher pay for veteran teachers and more librarians. In a letter to the district, the union that the mediator “rightly notes that [Chicago Public Schools] consistently signs … labor contracts despite claiming it lacks the funds to afford them.”

Once the recommendation is rejected, the union has to wait 30 days before it can give the district a 10-day strike notice. The Chicago Teachers Union went on strike during contract negotiations for seven days in 2012, one day in 2016 and 11 days in 2019.

Massachusetts

Lawmakers questioned the state’s largest teachers union at a special hearing Feb. 10 over learning materials that some members believe were antisemitic. 

The Massachusetts Teachers Association, which represents more than 117,000 educators, was about the Israel-Hamas conflict. President Max Page said that the documents were created by request from the union’s board and published in a members-only area of the union website.

Examples included a poster on the Israel-Hamas war reading, “what was taken by force can only be returned by force” and a book about a Palestinian girl who says, “a group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people,” according to .

“The notion that our union is trying to ‘indoctrinate’ our young people is simply not true, and accusations to that effect have led to death threats to me and my staff, and to other attacks on our union,” Page said. “Posting resources does not imply agreement with each and every document. Nor would we ever expect that our members would look at these resources with an uncritical eye.”

An by the Israeli-American Civic Action Network that asks lawmakers and state agencies to halt collaboration with the union on legislation has received more than 17,000 signatures.

Utah

One of the first bills Gov. Spencer Cox signed into law this year bars teachers unions from bargaining collectively and conducting operations on school property.

The governor on Feb. 14, marking the end of a weeks-long debate about how public-sector unions should operate. Lawmakers who favored the bill said it will ensure transparency in unions and protect taxpayer resources, but educators said it will only make a job that’s already full of challenges more difficult.

While it doesn’t prevent employees from joining a union, the law prohibits public agencies — which employ teachers, firefighters, police officers and county workers, among others — from “recognizing a labor organization as a bargaining agent” and “entering into collective bargaining contracts.” 

The Utah Education Association said HB267 will also weaken advocacy because it cuts off access to schools by barring unions from using public property for free. Some opponents of the bill charged it was created to retaliate against the Utah Education Association, which is The association is the state’s largest teachers union, with 18,000 members.

The union’s political action committee began the 2024 cycle with $4 million in cash on hand, raised $12 million and has spent $13 million – leaving it with roughly $2 million to dole out before Election Day, according to the latest data from , the non-partisan organization that tracks money in politics.

The vast majority of its spending this election cycle – roughly $9 million – was donated to super PACs supporting Democrats and to local, state and federal candidates and parties. Among the top receivers: $3 million to the Senate Majority PAC, $1.6 to House Majority PAC, $445,000 to the Harris Victory Fund ($300,000 of which was originally donated to the Biden Victory Fund before the president stepped aside), and $420,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.  

The AFT is traditionally one of the biggest supporters of Democrats, lending both the power of its PAC’s purse for advertising and mailings, and its strength in numbers for boots-on-the-ground get-out-the-vote operations.

Among the top 20 PACs based on contributions to Democratic candidates, total fundraising, total spent, and total spent in independent expenditures and communication costs, the AFT’s PACs place 8th. It’s donated $1.5 million to democratic congressional candidates, including to 196 House Democrats and 19 Senate Democrats.

“Kamala Harris and Tim Walz believe in the promise of America and will spend their time solving problems, not sowing fear, so every American can partake in that promise,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said in a . “But it’s not just what we can gain, it’s also what we will lose with Trump and Vance: our democracy, our freedoms, our public schools, our right to have a union, a vote and a voice. Extending the ladder of opportunity or destroying it.” 

“Union members get this,” she said. “And that’s why we will fight every hour of every day for the next fortnight to get out the vote to elect candidates who proudly stand for freedom, democracy and opportunity.”

Earlier this month, the AFT teamed up with the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees – the nation’s largest public service unions – in a coordinated, multi-state voter outreach initiative across battleground states.

“This joint action represents a significant escalation of labor’s political engagement, with the unions pooling resources and mobilizing their combined membership of several million workers and includes people of all backgrounds working across the public service – as nurses, child care providers, sanitation workers, first responders, teachers, education support professionals and higher education workers, among others,” the of the effort reads.

Notably, labor unions play an outsized role in many of the election’s most crucial swing states: 21% of votes cast in Michigan in the 2020 presidential election were from union households, representing approximately one-fifth of the electorate, according to the union. The same is true for Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where union households accounted for 18% and 13% of votes cast, respectively.

listed the conditions necessary for a bilateral ceasefire, including the release of Israeli hostages and the provision of more humanitarian aid. It excoriated Hamas, both for its Oct. 7 terrorist assault and the brutal repression suffered by Gazans under its control, as well as the Netanyahu government for obstructing the possibility of a two-state solution. Further criticism was reserved for antisemitism, Islamophobia and the attempted censorship of dissenting views.

The document was notable for its timing as well as its substance. By the end of January, a growing number of union affiliates and leaders had already made similar pronouncements, though often voiced in much harsher terms. 

Becky Pringle, speaking for the National Education Association’s three million members, demanded a permanent truce on December 8 — a position by the organization’s board of directors. In mid-November, Israel’s military campaign violated the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, but made no mention of the Oct. 7 attacks or the captivity of over 200 hostages. And in early December, a pro-Palestinian by Oakland Education Association members who developed special lesson plans the local school board.

In an interview with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, AFT president Randi Weingarten said her union’s process moved more slowly in order to build support. Study groups were held to gather the views of internal constituencies, including the organization’s . Partly in order to gain the unanimous backing of its 43-member executive council, she acknowledged, drafting the resolution “took some time.”

“Early on, it was hard to have a real conversation…because it was so fractured,” Weingarten said. 

Four months after the events of Oct. 7, significant political fractures still cleave the labor movement, both within organizations and between unions and their allies in the Democratic Party. Several of the resolutions have been rejected by members as , or even , and while President Biden is now toward a six-week ceasefire, he with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or significantly altered his administration’s stance on the effort to capture or kill Hamas’s leaders. The division threatens to influence the outcome of the 2024 elections, with a faction of NEA members the union’s endorsement of Biden against Donald Trump. 

Those dissenters will almost certainly fail, and Israel’s armed incursion may culminate long before November. But while the war is unlikely to directly unseat Biden, it is a reflection of fissures on the left that very well might. suggests that many Americans favor a ceasefire, but also that Democrats are much more divided than Republicans on whether the U.S. should continue to support its closest ally in the Middle East. That divide is both a product of long-term political trends and a potent short-term threat.

Michael Hartney, a political science professor at Boston College and fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution, said that the decision to take a stance on something as controversial as the Gaza war illustrated how the currents of polarization could determine the course of even formidable political actors: Though distant from the day-to-day priorities of nonprofit and activist groups, hot-button issues like Israel have become central to the political identity of many members and have gradually become boxes that such organizations must check.

“I think it’s due to the changing landscapes of the incentives facing these interest groups,” Hartney said. “For them to fundraise and be influential, they basically have to pick a team.”

Rise in pro-Palestinian sentiment

Teachers unions, and particularly the AFT, have previously been involved in organizing and advocacy in the Middle East. Just two days before Hamas attacked Israel in October, Weingarten — a Jew who has made multiple trips to Israel during her nearly 16-year tenure as the Federation’s president — , a liberal nonprofit that lobbies politicians on American-Israeli relations and security priorities. Her counterpart, the NEA’s Pringle, of schools in Israel and the Palestinian territories last year.

But the posture of some groups within the labor movement as criticisms of Netanyahu’s leadership and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank have grown louder on the left. In 2021, following an outburst of violence in East Jerusalem that left hundreds dead, the United Educators of San Francisco became America’s first teachers’ union supporting the “boycott, divest, and sanction” [BDS] movement, a contentious project Israel. United Teachers Los Angeles, representing 30,000 school employees in America’s second-largest district, debated a similar measure before .

At the same time, perceptions of Israel have become more divided in U.S. politics overall. In public opinion surveys long predating the violence of the last few months, younger Americans have been to directly blame Israel for its periodic clashes with Hamas, and people between the ages of 18 and 29 to Palestinians than Israelis in the wake of Oct. 7. 

Jack Jennings, a former longtime Democratic staffer in the U.S. House, said the emerging generation gap was largely explained by the country’s changing demographics, which have seen in the number of students of Middle Eastern origin. Both Jewish and Muslim Americans have tended to vote Democratic in recent elections, but the mounting salience of Israeli-Palestinian conflict had generated tension that was being felt “first in the classroom,” Jennings said.

“What has caused this change, and caused the local unions to adopt these resolutions, is that the number of Muslims in the country has doubled” , Jennings said. “When the teacher opens her door on Monday morning, she may have five Palestinians in there.”

Weingarten has generally attempted to in the public debate, while also opposing BDS resolutions and as a “progressive Zionist.” The AFT resolution appeared to reflect that nuance, leaving out the invocations of Israeli “genocide” or “settler colonial violence” seen in the rhetoric of some other teachers’ unions.

David Dorn, who headed the AFT’s International Affairs division for decades before retiring 10 years ago, applauded the resolution as one of the best he had seen from an advocacy group. During his time with the union, he remembered, he had found the work of drafting such documents “hard and boring.”

“They mean nothing. It’s a piece of paper that is usually forgotten 24 hours later,” Dorn lamented. “But that was a good resolution, and maybe she can have the union play a good role under the circumstances.”

Dorn represents a tradition of international activism within the labor movement that helped shape geopolitics throughout the 20th century, but isn’t well remembered today.

Under the , who led the AFT from 1974 to 1997, the union energetically worked to bolster democratic movements and labor rights throughout the world. Its maneuverings were sometimes controversial, as when the stridently anticommunist Shanker and his allies Nicaragua’s far-left Sandinista government in the 1980s. But even decades later, the AFT still touts its work to in Poland and challenge apartheid rule in South Africa.

The fall of Soviet Communism — along with the passing from the scene of Shanker and other internationally minded figures at the AFL-CIO — led to a decline in unions’ outreach overseas, Dorn said. Weingarten “wasn’t really steeped in that tradition” to the extent of her predecessors, he added, and many organizational leaders are now more focused on sustaining their membership at home.

“Going to conferences or making statements is one thing, but I don’t see many unions using their own resources and grants” to effect change abroad, Dorn said. “It’s too bad, but life goes on, and the Cold War is over.” 

While acknowledging that the AFT has been “more limited” in the range of its international involvement over the last few years, Weingarten said the union still played a robust role promoting issues of democracy and self-determination on the world stage. After Weingarten made a 2022 visit to Ukraine, for example, the Federation and partnered with a Polish teachers’ union to deliver them to schools affected by Russia’s attacks on the country’s power grid.

“Other unions have really ratcheted down, but we’ve always had an international department,” Weingarten said.

Post-Janus realignment

What the spate of ceasefire resolutions will accomplish — and what they signify for a labor movement that has attained more prominence in recent years even as it has — remains to be seen.

Some have , at a time when schools are faced with expiring COVID relief funds and students experience profound learning challenges, their designated bargaining representatives are staking their credibility on a conflict unfolding thousands of miles away. Others are distressed that their organizations haven’t gone farther to demonstrate opposition to Israel’s actions.

William Galston, a veteran scholar at the Brookings Institution who has previously advised Democratic presidential candidates, observed that unions weren’t the only political players to comment outside of their traditional areas of interest. With the members of America’s ideological camps increasingly converging toward shared preferences — such that the AFT, the Sierra Club, and Planned Parenthood share many of the same donors and preferred candidates on the left, while NRA and Americans for Prosperity do so on the right — groups that previously organized around a relatively narrow slate of issues are under more pressure to demonstrate their adherence to a party line.

“They used to be more narrowly focused on occupational issues, but for purposes of coalition maintenance, unions and other activist organizations are called upon to take positions on a very wide range of issues,” Galston said.

The Hoover Institution’s Hartney offered an additional theory. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME, the case that forbade public sector unions from extracting fees from non-members, those organizations were left with a choice: quiet their political activities to attract more potential members, or tie themselves closer to Democratic politics to further engage their most enthusiastic organizers. While potentially polarizing, he said, the second course might be more workable in the short run.

“It’s possible that they’re doubling down on appealing to their true believers by making them feel extra valued,” Hartney said. “Maybe they can get double the PAC donations from true believers to offset the fact that they’ll get zero support from the marginal person who can leave post-Janus.”

Even so, there is a risk of significant downside in any position that leaves daylight between national entities like AFT and the Biden White House, especially in an election year in which all segments of the Democratic coalition will be called on to help reelect the president. Polling continues to suggest that Biden’s stance on the war is , and a union-led opposition to Israel’s operations in Gaza could highlight that faultline.

Weingarten said she was unconcerned about the possibility of a split between her union and the president, pointing to Biden’s and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s furious efforts to contingent on hostage releases. Notwithstanding the substantive differences between that policy and activists’ hope of a more lasting peace, she added, key officials are “very much involved in attempting to get to a ceasefire.”

“There’s a big difference between what the president of the United States can say publicly and what the president of the United States operationalizes privately.”

This would be a triumph for AFT if it didn’t come with a string of asterisks.

The first is the issue of retired members. AFT members are members for life. When they retire, they are not removed from the rolls, nor are they required to apply for retired membership or pay any dues. A growth in retired members actually constitutes a loss in income for AFT.

In 2023, the union added more than 11,500 retired members, accounting for almost two-fifths of the reported gain in total membership. It now has 471,582 retired members — 27.5% of its total.

The other major event for AFT in the fiscal year was the . The AAUP has 44,000 members. Previously, about 20,000 AAUP members also belonged to AFT. Now, they all do, accounting for a further increase of 24,000 members to AFT’s total this year.

Mergers and new affiliations with existing unions are a fun way to pump up raw membership totals, but they do nothing to increase the share of the overall workforce that is unionized.

The new members from AAUP aren’t really a boon to AFT’s bottom line. A substantial number work part time, which is true of many AFT members as well. AFT reported 1,716,448 total members for 2023, but only 43% of them work full-time.

The effect of all this is illustrated by AFT’s finances. Last year, the union collected close to $212 million in dues. This year, that number fell to $189 million — a strange phenomenon if it had actually recruited tens of thousands of new members.

But there’s no need to fear for the union’s finances. AFT is putting its money to fruitful use. It greatly increased investments in stocks, corporate bonds, mutual funds and U.S. Treasury notes, leading to a net growth of $28.2 million in its portfolio.

AFT spread its wealth around to its allies as well. The largest amounts went to:

— $1.5 million

— $816,000

— $600,000

— $520,000

— $500,000

— $500,000

— $500,000

AFT also donated $250,000 to the Amazon Labor Union, but since it spent more than $292,000 worth of purchases on Amazon, that looks like a wash.

Mostly, AFT spent its money on itself. Its payroll for 342 employees totaled almost $43.1 million, or an average of $126,000 each. The union spent an additional $18.7 million on benefits.

AFT President Randi Weingarten led the way, with a 2023 salary of $443,551, which was a 2% increase over 2022.

The National Education Association’s fiscal year runs from September through August, so its disclosure report won’t be available until the end of November. However, Union Report has already obtained internal union documents that indicate NEA lost 9,800 members during fiscal year 2022-23. Preliminary numbers for September 2023 show a continued decline of about 2,800 members, mostly from the ranks of school support employees.

It would be a strange circumstance if AFT were recruiting so many new members from non-union ranks while NEA was steadily losing unionized members. Both organizations are still powerful and influential, whatever their numbers, but the extent of their power depends upon which direction those numbers are trending. Politicians might be less likely to bind their futures to a sinking ship. This would open up a host of new possibilities for education reform.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

Members of the House’s GOP majority and their witnesses used the education subcommittee gathering to lay blame on the teachers unions for delays in reopening during the 2020-21 school year.

“This whole thing was like a jagged little pill,” said Florida Republican Aaron Bean, using a ‘90s music reference to describe the slow return to in-person learning. 

Democrats, meanwhile, argued that extreme caution was needed to protect both teachers and students.Ěý

“I appreciate all the Monday morning quarterbacking here today, but we don’t need … data to tell us that if kids are not in school they won’t learn,” said Connecticut Democrat Jahana Hayes, the 2016 National Teacher of the Year. “We also know if kids are dead, they don’t learn.”

Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, countered by offering up data showing that schools overall proved and that rates of death among children were . 

While it all sounds familiar, the debate offers a likely preview of the coming standoff over federal funding for 2024 — and a glimpse into the contentious role the education system’s response to the pandemic will play in the election season ahead.

The House has proposed a to the education budget, noting that some districts still have unspent relief money and that parents would be better off using the funds for school choice. But Democrats, including Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon, ranking member on the subcommittee, said Republicans are obsessed with “extremist” culture wars and can’t be serious about learning loss if they’re willing to cut Title I funds for high-poverty schools and eliminate funding for teacher training.

Injecting her own Alanis Morissette title into the record, Mary-Patricia Wray, a Louisiana parent and witness for the Democrats, asked: “Isn’t it ironic that this Congress allocated funding for those programs, recognizing that they were needed, and is now about to take them away at a time when they’re also screaming loudly about learning loss?”

The founder of Top Drawer Strategies, a government relations and political consulting firm, Wray, who previously worked for the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, said it was “intellectually dishonest” for Republicans not to acknowledge achievement gaps that existed before the pandemic. 

Score gaps between Black and white students and Hispanic and white students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress were before the pandemic, data shows. Malkus stressed that closures stretching into the spring of 2021 only made those gaps worse and caused the “largest negative shock to student learning ever in the U.S.”

‘An eye-opener’

While union leaders weren’t called as witnesses Wednesday, the hearing came less than a week after American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten spelled out for pandemic recovery, offering talking points and a roadmap for next year’s elections. 

“Ninety percent of parents send their children to public schools,” she said. “Most parents trust teachers, and they want public schools strengthened, not privatized.”

She announced partnerships with literacy organizations to focus on reading and a campaign to promote community schools, mental health services and other efforts to support students. She blamed social media and “culture warriors who censor honest history” for holding students back.

The AFT, she said, offered a in April 2020, but some critics still point to the slow pace of reopening in cities with , like Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington.

“The unions are surely hurting from being blamed — with some justice — for learning loss,” said Chester Finn, senior fellow and president emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank. “Randi is very smart.” 

The hearing was a departure from issues Republicans have focused on since taking the majority in the House. In April, they passed to bar transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports, and in March, they passed a bill that seeks to increase transparency into books and curriculum in schools. 

The [Republicans] are all over the woke stuff, of course.” said Sandy Kress, a Texas attorney and education consultant who served in the second Bush administration. But he added, “the studies that showed we lost more ground after that unprecedented slug of money — they’re an eye-opener.”

North Carolina state Superintendent Catherine Truitt, who took office in 2021, joined the witness panel to describe her state’s efforts to help educators use the money wisely, especially those in small and rural districts. 

She opened an to track student data and advise districts on how to spend relief funds. Leaders, she said, have spent some on summer “bridge” programs to prepare students for the next grade, math boot camps for middle school students and training on phonics-based instruction. 

“That’s what we sent that money to you in order to do,” Hayes said, “for you to make decisions on the ground that would best support your students and your community,” 

But questions over whether districts have used the money effectively are likely to continue, said Liz Cohen, policy director at FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University.

“If I’m in a district, and I have something that I think is working for kids,” she said, “I would be smart to get as much data as I can for the next six months.”

In the last five years, teachers unions have taken a double hit. The first was the Supreme Court’s Janus ruling in June 2018, which eliminated the practice of charging agency fees to nonmembers. The second was the COVID pandemic that shut down schools in March 2020.

The effects have been detrimental to teachers union membership across the country, but perhaps nowhere more so than in the ranks of the California Teachers Association.

That union’s roster reached its apex at the time of the Janus decision, with more than 326,000 active members working in the state’s public schools. It has been a slow downward slide ever since.

The first big blow was the loss of 19,000 members when the California Faculty Association seceded from the state union and the National Education Association.

The Janus decision did not lead to the mass exodus of members that its supporters had hoped for and unions had feared. CTA internal documents indicate that only 2,631 school employees have dropped their membership in the last four years.

The union hoped to mitigate further losses by successfully lobbying for legislation that requires school districts to allow unions to make a 30-minute membership pitch during new teacher orientations. It is difficult to measure the effectiveness of this measure. In the last 10 months, school districts have hired 3,700 more employees who are eligible to join, but the union has 1,727 fewer members.

Just as the union was coming to terms with the post-Janus world, COVID hit and schools shut down. The union once again won relief from the California legislature, as districts were forbidden to lay off teachers until July 2020.

Nonetheless, membership continued to dwindle to the present day. At the beginning of March 2020, the union had 304,509 members. Internal documents show that figure dropped to 293,444 as of Jan. 13, 2023, a loss of 11,065 members.

Comprehensive numbers for the union’s 995 local affiliates are of less recent vintage, but official as of Aug. 31, 2022. I have constructed a table based on those statistics, culled from internal union documents. I included the comparable membership figures for Aug. 31, 2019, and Aug. 31, 2018. The figure for United Teachers Los Angeles is a best estimate, due to the difficulty of reconciling the numbers of members affiliated with NEA and those affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers Local 1021.

Losses appear to be indiscriminate across all local sizes. Eight of the state union’s 10 largest locals lost members between 2019 and 2022, while overall, 587 locals lost members during that period.

The cure for the union’s ills, once again, lies with the state legislature. The union will work to ensure funding is made available for as much hiring as possible, so membership will grow even if the percentage of new teachers who join isn’t what it used to be.

The health of the California Teachers Association and other large state affiliates is critical to the overall health of the National Education Association. Their membership dues help subsidize the continued existence of sickly state affiliates in the South. If California losses continue, it will have a domino effect across the country.

The News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan national education nonprofit that provides programs and resources to help people of all ages become smart, active news consumers, released a for teachers today to aid in their ongoing battle against disinformation: The framework was unveiled as part of the , an event presented by the Project and the E.W. Scripps Company.  

The effort has five main goals. It was designed to help students distinguish news from other types of information and recognize the importance of the First Amendment in American democracy, including the value of a free press in shaping a well-informed citizenry. 

It also seeks to help children understand the standards of quality journalism, use them to identify credible sources and sharpen their verification skills. Lastly, it aims to help students take responsibility for the information they put out into the world, a campaign called “Care Before You Share” that is being promoted through a public service announcement.

“News and media literacy is a critical skill impacting students’ academic, personal, professional and civic lives,” said Shaelynn Farnsworth, the Project’s director of educator network expansion. “Yet, unfortunately, our students are inheriting the most complicated information landscape in history and are often duped by what they consume online.”

Farnsworth said misinformation threatens not only our democracy, but our very lives, especially as it concerns baseless conspiracy theories around the pandemic. 

“Instead of developing healthy skepticism, students read with a cynical eye instead of a critical one, often not believing any information they consume online,” she said. “To combat this, educators hone skills, so students know what to believe, who to trust and what to share.”

The organization is encouraged by its growing reach: More than 165,000 students used its platform between July 2020 and January 2022, totaling more active young users in 18 months than in the prior four years.

The Project’s recommendations were unveiled during the same week that the American Federation of Teachers announced its new partnership with the anti-misinformation group, , an organization run by Steve Brill, who founded The American Lawyer, Court TV and the Yale Journalism Initiative and Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal. 

According to the AFT, its 1.7 million members — and, by extension, the tens of millions of children they teach plus their families — can now receive a free, online tool that will provide real-time news ratings via a licensed copy of NewsGuard’s browser extension. Educators are invited to sign up  

The need for such tools and programs has only grown in recent years as former President Donald Trump and his supporters ­— — flooded social media with on myriad topics. Trump himself was by the company days after the Jan. 6 insurrection “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”.

At least one social media company, already to reign in false claims, was called out this week by a conservative parents’ group that said it was unfairly targeted for removal from the platform. 

Moms for Liberty, started by two former school board members out of Florida, has grown tremendously since its inception in January 2021. Co-founders Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice attribute much of its success to social media, which allowed members to connect and spread their message without in-person meetings.

But the platform treated them unfairly for ideological reasons, the women told Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg in an open letter dated Jan. 24. In the past few weeks, they said, 22 of their national chapter groups were sent “notifications of community violation” and were disabled for posting what they called “basic information about local government operations such as school board meeting times, or questions about student textbooks.”

“Our groups have been shut down repeatedly,” they wrote, adding their administrative accounts had been suspended and their national page restricted from posting for “security reasons”, though they are unclear as to why. “This severely impacts our ability to pursue our core mission of helping American parents organize to participate in the education of their children. One Moms for Liberty group page, from Fort Bend, Texas, was disabled the same day it launched! It did not even have the opportunity to violate whatever vague standards are being enforced against our moms.”

Facebook, now run by a company called Meta, objected to the characterization late Tuesday night. 

“Meta doesn’t target any group because of their politics,” a company spokeswoman said. “After reviewing the content associated with this organization, we determined that some was removed correctly for violating our misinformation policies.”

Other content was removed by mistake and has since been restored, the spokeswoman said. Descovich said Wednesday afternoon that her administrative privileges had been reinstated and that many chapter’s Facebook pages are back up and running. 

The dispute between Moms for Liberty and Facebook over misinformation charges and freedom of speech claims might be one students could dissect using the Project’s new tool. 

Pamela Brunskill, the Project’s senior manager of education and content, said the new framework will help teachers manage what feels like unlimited information.

“The idea of educating the next generation to be news-literate is daunting, particularly because we’re faced with the most dynamic and complex information environment in history,” she said. “For many educators, it’s hard to know what to teach and where to begin.”

The Project’s new tool will make that Herculean task much easier, Brunskill said, and pay long-term dividends.

“Imagine if our entire society could distinguish news from other types of information, could recognize the role a free press plays to an informed citizenry, could understand the standards of quality journalism, could detect misinformation and faulty evidence, and could express a sense of responsibility for the information they share!,” she said in an email. “What kind of democracy would that look like?”

Disclosure: Campbell Brown is the head of news partnerships at Facebook. Brown co-founded ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ and sits on its board of directors. She plays no role in the reporting or editing of ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s content.

When Education Secretary Miguel Cardona toured South Bend, Indiana’s Madison STEAM Academy in September, he made a quick impression on the district’s superintendent, C. Todd Cummings. 

Cummings remembers the secretary’s interest in COVID protocols, the facility’s STEM makerspace, and that he spoke Spanish to students at the bilingual school. By the time the visit ended, he came away feeling like he could pick up the phone and call Cardona if needed. 

“He’s done a lot to make the department more approachable,” Cummings said. “He understands running a district, but he also understands teachers in the classroom.”

Having one of their own helming the U.S. Department of Education has gone a long way toward mending the fractured relationship between district leaders and the agency that existed under Cardona’s predecessor. Betsy DeVos was the consummate outsider. She warred with unions, made comments that many teachers found , and attempted to direct relief funds meant for the public system to private schools. In contrast, when the former Connecticut state chief meets with superintendents and school leaders, “he’s talking shop” on everything from bell schedules to graduation rates, said Ronn Nozoe, head of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

But almost a year into Cardona’s tenure, and with the pandemic showing no signs of abating, his department has sometimes struggled to keep up. COVID-19 has thrust the agency into the public eye almost as much as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and, like the CDC, it has often come under fire for being slow to respond to a fast-changing virus. To some, Cardona’s camaraderie with educators helps explain why he has sometimes appeared reluctant to embrace another constituency, whose power and visibility has grown with the pandemic: parents. 

Sarah Carpenter, executive director of The Memphis Lift, a nonprofit that trains parents to advocate for their children’s educational needs, said she hasn’t forgotten that parent leaders weren’t asked to speak at Cardona’s first virtual summit on reopening almost a year ago. 

“They know we’re here, and we’re just not accounted for,” she said, adding that parents “in those communities where this pandemic hit the hardest” should have had a voice. A June event focusing on equity didn’t feature parents either.

Cardona hasn’t ignored parents, and often reminds the public that his two teenage children, still attending public school in Meriden, Connecticut, have endured their own disruptions in learning. His first act as secretary was to write to parents and students acknowledging the hardships caused by the pandemic, and he has urged schools to rebuild trust with families.

More recently, when schools began to shift to remote learning because of the Omicron variant, Cardona told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, “Our parents have done enough.” That same week, the announcement of another round of grants to state came with Cardona’s statement that, “Meaningful parent engagement … has never been more important.”

But observers say his messages tend to emphasize over student recovery. When the department last month to use federal relief funds for teacher pay raises and hiring bonuses, Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, said “the balance feels a little off.”

The pandemic has mobilized many parents to take a more central role in their children’s education, and their frustration over extended school closures likely tipped the Virginia governor’s race in favor of Republican Glenn Youngkin. 

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, has tried to drive that point home. She regularly participates in “stakeholder” meetings with the department, and shares monthly parent survey data with Christian Rhodes, chief of staff for the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. But she described the department’s parent engagement efforts as a “box-checking exercise.”

“That’s not what this moment calls for. It calls for listening to people’s pain,” she said. “Parents expect to be engaged on a whole new level because we had to hold it down for [schools] while they weren’t there.”

‘Not a slow-moving moment’

Leaders in education said Cardona has shown skill in managing the mountain of challenges he faced when he entered the job: more than half of schools still not fully open, expectations that he quickly reverse the previous administration’s stance on students’ civil rights, and low morale among what Nozoe called the department’s “beat-down career staff.” Cardona, he added, is trying to rebuild an agency that DeVos shouldn’t even exist.

Cardona said his top priority has been helping schools reopen and stay that way. Others credit him with steering billions in federal aid to states and districts on a short timeline.

“They’ve made a huge amount of progress in a very, very difficult time,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the California State Board of Education and president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, a think tank. She led President Joe Biden’s transition team for education and as the nominee.

She specifically noted his team’s work to get the American Rescue Plan funding for schools “out the door with guidance and support for how to spend it” and early efforts to make the CDC’s “wonky and mysterious” school reopening guidelines more accessible to educators. Recent confusion over whether the agency’s updated quarantine guidance applied to schools, however, drew fresh .

Some noted that communication from the department often hasn’t matched the urgency state and district leaders have experienced during the pandemic. 

In November, the department said it was OK to use relief funds to pay for alternate forms of for students in the face of a bus driver shortage. But that was a month after New York , a Democrat, asked for the guidance, and two months after Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker called in the to drive students to school. 

In mid-December, the department issued a on jumpstarting school accountability systems, but state officials started calling for that in September. 

“They are slow moving,” said Roza, “and it’s not a slow-moving moment in public education.”

In an interview with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, Cardona said the department responds with guidance when “we hear from the field.” He noted the staff’s efforts to host multiple webinars and respond to questions from educators, but acknowledged that guidance from the department has sometimes lagged. He vowed to do better. “We have to stay ahead of things, and we’re going to continue to improve communications.”

‘More influence’

As he nears his first year as a cabinet member, Cardona reflected on what the department has accomplished under his leadership. 

While Omicron has led to short-term closures of as many as 5,400 schools, according to a frequently updated , Cardona noted that in-person learning had hit of schools by early December. And he takes pride that the department is addressing problems with Public Service Loan Forgiveness — a federal program meant to encourage students to go into nonprofit and public sector jobs, like teaching, in exchange for debt relief. Under DeVos, the department denied most requests for relief, and borrowers complained that loan servicers gave on how to meet the program’s strict criteria. The department’s management of the program prompted the American Federation of Teachers . Since Cardona started, the department has wiped out roughly $12.7 billion in college debt, including almost $2 billion for the public service program.

“Not only are we providing some loan forgiveness, but we’re fixing the systems that led to the problems that we have now,” he said, adding that he wants to continue to “make higher education more accessible to more students without having to be tethered in debt for the rest of their lives.”

Before Cardona was confirmed, there was speculation he’d be overshadowed by Biden’s White House advisers, who included two former high-level education officials from the Obama administration. More recently, Rodrigues quipped that , president of the National Education Association, likely has more pull with the administration than Cardona.

Conservative pundits have sized him up as Rick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, described him as “under-the-radar, except when he’s been waving the flag for partisan administration objectives.”

But those who support those objectives say Cardona has clout with the president. 

“I think with every passing day, he has more and more influence with the White House,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who first met Cardona when he was a teacher and now has a friendly competition with him over who has visited more states and schools over the past year. By late December, she’d hit 28 states; he’d made it to 25.

She said he advocated with the White House for changes to the loan forgiveness program and for putting teachers second in line to receive the first wave of COVID-19 vaccines, after health care workers.

Interestingly, given the coziness many of his critics assume Cardona enjoys with the unions, he has had trouble with the one representing employees in his own department. 

‘The huge political divide’

In early December, the Federal Labor Relations Authority found the department guilty of 14 violations of labor law — actions that date back to 2018 when the employee union’s collective bargaining rights. A of federal employees showed that morale within the department had declined far more than in any other agency. Those grievances have continued under Cardona, according to Cathie McQuiston, deputy general counsel with the American Federation of Government Employees.

The complaints involve inconsistent policies for working remotely, employee evaluation procedures and denying staff union representation when they have a dispute.

Under DeVos, the department was “paraded out as an example to other agencies of the kinds of things they should be doing in the Trump administration,” McQuiston said. “There has to be a political will to come in and say, ‘We’re not doing that anymore.’ At education, we struggle to get that commitment.”

According to a department spokesperson, efforts to resolve the complaints are ongoing and the agency is “committed to making sure it is a great place to work.” Both sides are scheduled to meet Thursday.

While addressing internal issues, Cardona was hit with a summer storm of public controversy over mask mandates and school equity initiatives. Superintendents were targeted with death threats, brawls broke out at school board meetings and school leaders tried to make sense of contradictory court rulings and mandates over masks.

“I wonder whether he anticipated the huge political divide over masks or no masks,” said Deborah Delisle, who served as assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education in the Obama administration and is now president and CEO of ALL4Ed, a nonprofit education policy organization. 

In August, Cardona departed from his usual cordial tone to take a against states banning local districts from mandating masks. 

“Don’t be the reason why schools are interrupted,” he said at a , indirectly challenging the governors of Florida and Texas.

But unless Republicans pressed him during Congressional hearings, he avoided the fray over critical race theory — a legal argument that racism lies at the core of U.S. institutions to intentionally advantage white people — and even to the controversial 1619 Project and the work of author Ibram X. Kendi from a civics grant program.

“We don’t get involved in curriculum issues,” he said during a June budget hearing, but stressed his support for culturally relevant teaching. “When students see themselves in the curriculum, they are more likely to be engaged.”

Some observers suggest he could have done more. 

Hess, at the American Enterprise Institute, said Cardona could “perhaps carve out room for the serious center” by defending “a progressive vision” but denouncing some of the examples that critics have found so , such as asking students to label themselves as “oppressed” or “oppressor.”

But Julia Martin, legislative director at Brustein and Manasevit, a law firm specializing in education, said there was no political upside for Cardona to wade any deeper into those waters.

“These issues, by their nature, are local issues,” she said. “There’s no way in many of these instances to come out and make a principled statement that doesn’t bother some people.”

The typically controversy-averse Cardona is a departure from the activist chiefs who have occupied the department since the No Child Left Behind era. Unlike many of his predecessors, Cardona doesn’t have a presidential mandate to implement bold reforms. 

“We’re still in a crisis, versus coming out of a crisis back in 2009,” said John Bailey, a senior fellow at AEI. That’s when Arne Duncan became secretary under President Obama, with a far-reaching mission to incentivize states to embrace controversial reforms such as overhauling teacher evaluations and adopting Common Core standards.

Even if Cardona had such a mandate, Bailey said, the pandemic leaves him in the position of trying to provide a “rapid response during an unfolding crisis that continues to play out.”

If the pandemic doesn’t continue to steal most of Cardona’s focus, he said he hopes to shift attention in 2022 toward issues a little closer to his heart: “teaching and learning.”

As someone who attended a technical high school in his hometown of Meriden, Cardona wants to see “better pathways” for students to two- and four-year schools and the workforce, especially with the jobs that will be created as a result of the $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure bill passed in November.

“There’s funding … unlike we’ve seen in the 20 years that I’ve been in education,” he said. “We have an opportunity here to really lift our field … and to give our students opportunities that they’ve never had.”

Lead Image: Education Secretary Miguel Cardona testified during a Sept. 30 Senate education committee hearing on school reopening. (Greg Nash / Getty Images)

AFT President Randi Weingarten said the union’s current effort — to bolster the science of reading, strengthen the school-family connection and give kids “free books to read, love and keep” — pre-dates the backlash, but stands in contrast to it.

“We have [long] been trying to increase the titles that are available for children,” Weingarten told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. Still, “this [campaign] does counter … all those who are trying to either burn books, or to censor books,” she added. 

The nation’s second-largest teachers union has nurtured a years-long partnership, Weingarten said, with , a marketplace that provides affordable children’s books to educators of high-needs students. The “Reading Opens the World” campaign’s 1 million books will be sourced from their site and distributed at events beginning this holiday season and running through 2022.

“In the aftermath of this [pandemic,]” Weingarten said, “we thought we would step in and do something muscular and fun.”

The $2 million, multi-year campaign kicked off Tuesday in the cafeteria of Malcolm X Elementary School in Washington, D.C., a majority-Black school where a hand-drawn banner reading “My Black is Beautiful” hung above the lectern. After the event, which concluded with read-aloud groups, students were sent home with books by Black authors or that featured Black main characters, including and . 

The AFT’s ambitious effort drops as controversies over what students learn — and read — roil to fever pitch. In late November, the American Library Association said that schools had seen than at any previous point in recent decades.

“What we’re observing, really in the last year, is a real effort to remove books dealing with the LGBTQ person’s experience, or the experiences of persons who are Black, Indigenous or persons of color,” ALA Director Deborah Caldwell-Stone told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. 

Many of those challenges have come from parents and community members who have received materials from conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education and No Left Turn in Education, Caldwell-Stone said. Social media frequently accelerates complaints, she added, noting that the ALA often sees parents from disparate locations object to the same titles in the days after a video or post goes viral online.

In mid-November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to look into “criminal activity in our public schools involving the availability of pornography” — as legislators also passed legislation tamping down how teachers can approach conversations related to race and gender in the classroom. Amid the fervor, state GOP Rep. Matt Krause reached out directly to superintendents asking whether books on an list could be found on their shelves.

None of the works that the AFT specified it will give to students are on that list, but many do address race and racial identity.

“The titles that we’re distributing today are ensuring that kids have diversity in the books that they’re reading,” Weingarten said. 

Rep. Krause did not respond to requests for comment on the union’s new initiative.

Numerous studies document persistent racial and gender gaps in representation within the youth literature genre. In 2018, , while Black, Asian, Hispanic and Indigenous people led 10 percent, 7 percent, 5 percent and 1 percent of titles, respectively, according to numbers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center.

Throughout the rest of December, 20 local AFT affiliates from Puerto Rico to Houston to Indiana will hold literacy events similar to Tuesday’s kick-off in the nation’s capital. In the new year, book-laden buses will distribute volumes to students in harder-to-reach areas.

Books will be reflective of those students’ linguistic and racial background, AFT communications director Leslie Getzinger wrote in an email to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

In addition to distributing books, the 1.7 million-member union also intends to equip teachers and parents with tips for boosting literacy, including providing instructors with information on the science of reading. The approach, long backed by research, emphasizes phonics and decoding words over text recognition through exposure and context. While more and more teacher training programs have adopted the science of reading, there is still dissension at the district and classroom level over how best to teach reading and confront a national epidemic of illiteracy.

Collaboration between schools and families will also be a lynchpin of the new efforts, the AFT said in a .

The union hopes that its campaign will help students catch up on learning they may have missed during the pandemic. The latest research on academic achievement finds that, overall, students are three months behind in reading, and that students at majority-Black schools may be as many as 12 months behind their peers at majority-white schools.

But in addition to making up for academic losses, some officials involved in the literacy effort know that the possibilities extend far beyond the classroom. In the AFT’s release, Weingarten refers to reading as “key to life, to joy—to our very existence,”

From the Malcolm X Elementary School cafeteria, D.C. union President Jacqueline Pogue-Lyons read the young students a quote from their building’s namesake:

“People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.”

During a press call Thursday, leaders with Everytown for Gun Safety, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association bemoaned a return to campus gun violence after a year without mass school shootings. There were 30 reported instances of gunfire on school grounds between Aug. 1 and Sept. 15, resulting in five deaths and 23 injuries, according to a tally by Everytown, a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes gun control measures. That’s the largest count during that back-to-school period since the group started keeping track in 2013 and comes amid a larger surge in violence outside of schools.

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“For the past 18 months, we’ve been focused on keeping our students and educators safe, getting them back together in classrooms,” NEA President Becky Pringle told reporters. “Now, as students across the nation are returning to school buildings, we not only face the threat of an ongoing pandemic, we face record levels of gun violence on our school campuses.” 

The most recent high-profile incident unfolded Wednesday at Timberview High School in Arlington, Texas, where four people were injured and an 18-year-old student was arrested and charged with carrying out the attack after a reported fight with another student. The suspect’s family . Mansfield Independent School District spokesman Donald Williams said the school system is investigating the incident and its potential motives.Ěý

Earlier this month, on Oct. 1, charter school in Houston was injured after getting shot in the back on campus. A 25-year-old man who reportedly graduated from the school in 2017 was charged in the shooting.Ěý

Even before the pandemic swept the nation, America faced a gun violence epidemic, Pringle said. Yet, time and again, she said policymakers have failed to reach tangible solutions. She promoted gun control measures like expanding firearm background check systems and improving youth access to mental health care, but argued that other responses like arming teachers, active-shooter drills and school-based police could further traumatize kids.Ěý

The latest tragedies confirm the fears of criminologists and school safety experts who warned about the potential for heightened violence in schools as students repopulated classrooms after a year of isolation, economic hardship and social unrest during the pandemic. The carnage follows a year without a single mass school shooting, according to data from The Violence Project, a nonprofit research center focused on reducing such tragedies.Ěý

“As the mom of a teacher in Indiana, I was worrying a lot about what back-to-school would look like,” said Shannon Watts, the founder of the gun safety group, . “Sadly, back-to-school has meant back-to-school shootings for too many communities across the country.” 

Though mass shootings happen elsewhere, the U.S. is a clear outlier. School shootings remain statistically rare and federal data suggest that schools have grown markedly safer in recent years, but there has been an uptick in campus gun violence leading to injury and death in the last several years. During the 2019-20 school year, there were 27 campus shootings that resulted in death and 48 in injuries, .Ěý

During the press call Thursday, advocates and union leaders said a comprehensive strategy is required to prevent gun violence in schools, 

President Joe Biden to back new gun control measures and for an increase in funding for police officers. Yet many of the proposed solutions highlighted Thursday — gun control, in particular — have long faced fierce opposition. Congress is already juggling several high-stakes, contentious issues including a potential budget impasse, an infrastructure bill and a long-term resolution of the debt ceiling.Ěý

AFT President Randi Weingarten specifically called for moderate lawmakers, including Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, to support measures like red flag laws, firearm storage rules and background checks for all gun sales.Ěý

“It shouldn’t be controversial,” she said. “There’s huge bipartisan support [among voters] for these common-sense safety measures.” 

Vaccinated students and school staff don’t have to wear masks and schools shouldn’t maintain hybrid attendance plans just to implement social distancing, according to from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Friday.

While the update recommends schools maintain 3 feet of distance between students, that strategy shouldn’t come at the expense of fully reopening, the CDC said. The agency is recommending that schools continue to enforce masks indoors for unvaccinated students and adults, and to continue implementing other practices including COVID-19 testing, handwashing and proper ventilation.

“Promoting vaccination can help schools safely return to in-person learning as well as extracurricular activities and sports,” according to the guidance.

With some schools opening in early August, the guidance provides districts time to plan reopening procedures, communicate policies regarding masks and encourage more families to vaccinate their children. Meanwhile, some districts, such as the Chicago Public Schools, are facing demands from their unions to hit of at least 80 percent of students over 12. And between the Los Angeles district and its union includes mask requirements for all students and staff, regardless of vaccination status. Each school would also have a COVID-19 compliance task force.

In a statement, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the new CDC guidance is “grounded in both science and common sense.”

“The guidance confirms two truths: that students learn better in the classroom, and that vaccines remain our best bet to stop the spread of this virus and get our kids and educators fully back to those classrooms for in-person learning,” according to the statement.

But she said the union remains concerned about the Delta variant of the disease. Cities such as Los Angeles are beginning to see in cases due to the strain, and Pfizer and BioNTech have announced they are developing a specifically for that variant. At this time, the CDC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are a booster for those who are fully vaccinated.

Weingarten added that AFT affiliates are holding vaccination clinics in their communities to get more adults and children vaccinated before the return of school. President Joe Biden and first lady have also been visiting communities to promote vaccination. The president has called for a to encourage those who are hesitant to get shots, but conservatives about government intrusion.

The new CDC guidance recommends district leaders monitor local transmission rates when deciding whether to relax any prevention strategies.

Read the full guidance document .

Three years ago, teachers in Kentucky joined the burgeoning #RedforEd movement by staging a protest against a pension reform bill that legislators rammed through in less than 24 hours. They followed up with a sickout that shut down some two dozen school districts.

Those labor actions were not organized by the Kentucky Education Association, the state National Education Association affiliate that represents about 27,500 working K-12 public school employees. A Facebook group calling itself KY 120 United was responsible.

The state Supreme Court later struck down the bill, but KY 120 United continued its activism, organizing protests in 2019 and lobbying the legislature. It sometimes acted in concert with the state union, and other times alone. This unstable relationship came to an abrupt end last week, when the leaders of KY 120 United announced that the group would become an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers.

The move was prompted by the passage of a different pension reform bill, one that is supposed to save the state $3.57 billion over the next 30 years. . The unions remained neutral on the final version, which was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear but overridden by the Republican-controlled legislature.

KY 120 United strongly opposed the bill and viewed the unions’ position as a failure of courage. They hooked up with AFT, which previously had no teacher presence in Kentucky.

“We’re not trying to hurt KEA, but what we’re saying is we just want something a little more substantial, ,” said KY 120 United co-founder Nema Brewer.

“Associations are full of words, and ,” Jeni Bolander, one of the group’s leaders, told the Courier Journal.

The group has been emphasizing that it will be a union, while the state union is merely an association. This is because it is designated by the IRS as a business league or trade association, similar to a chamber of commerce. But it’s a distinction without a difference. Every member of KEA belongs to NEA, which is a labor union. Its members pay dues to a labor union, and receive benefits and services from a labor union. They elect representatives to a labor union, who vote on a labor union’s positions and policies.

The state union has remained low key about its new competitor, that cautioned teachers to “beware of people who take credit for things they had no part in. There’s no telling what else they might say that isn’t true.”

It should also be mentioned that there is no money in running a Facebook group, but the potential for quite a bit as a union affiliate. . KEA’s total dues are $618 a year.

There may be confusion among Kentucky’s teachers about which group is doing what, something we got a glimpse of during a series of walkouts in 2019. At one point, KEA opposed a walkout and KY 120 United supported it, but when KY 120 United agreed to return to work, .

This led to an unprecedented press conference by the leaders of Kentucky’s unions, in which they denounced the wildcat actions, sent cease-and-desist letters to various Facebook groups and characterized them as “a rogue group from the outside that has their own agenda.”

The situation in Kentucky may lead to tensions between the two national teachers unions. Public school employees have the right to join, or not join, either union. Both unions will have to compete for members. Additionally, it would be strange if AFT had no aspirations to become the exclusive bargaining agent in at least some of the state’s 171 school districts.

Interunion representation battles between NEA and AFT have become a rarity. If problems should arise in Kentucky, it could lead to a wave of there and elsewhere. I suspect NEA is unhappy with the creation of KY 120 United AFT but will try to avoid a wider conflict.

Here’s the memo from our pollster—Hart Research, one of top firms in US—on their findings of our member poll

— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten)

But the AFT’s online following was not completely satisfied. Consider these comments from its Facebook page, slamming the endorsement:

Similarly, a stream of frustrated reactions from educators started circulating on Twitter:

. Hillary needs to say where she stands on testing, evaluating teachers by test scores, charters & Common Core.

— Carol Burris (@carolburris)

Hillary Clinton lost my support when she said “helps you organize your whole education system”

— Anthony Cody (@AnthonyCody)

Did Hillary give a specific education platform? What is her position on testing, evals, charters, CC?

— Chris Cerrone (@Stoptesting15)

Shame on AFT. If you support anybody, it should be

— Tim Farley (@tfarley1969)

“Long campaigns allows us to fully vet candidates, consider all options, engage allies & opponents…oh, whatever!”

— Andy Smarick (@smarick)

Exactly who did the poll before endorsing Hillary? The Kardashians?

— lacetothetop (@lacetothetop)

Don’t hold your breath. That obviously wasn’t a prerequisite.Another AFT backstab.

— Elizabeth Lynch (@AJMGrandma)

. can stand with . I’m standing with the kids.

— Jeb Bush (@JebBush)

Meanwhile, on , here’s a Monday morning shapshot of where the petition stands: 

Photo: Change.org screenshot

Hillary Clinton photo by Getty Images