Memo Reveals How Teachers Union Worked on Bill to Keep Sexually Explicit Books in Schools

Democratic lawmakers privately negotiated with the nation’s largest teachers union to craft a bill intended to combat bans of sexually explicit books in schools, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Right To Read Act was reintroduced by Democratic Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva and Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed in April 2023, and is intended to rebuff efforts by parents and Republican lawmakers to remove sexually explicit content from school libraries, according to a press release from the lawmakers. The bill also authorized $500 million in funding for school libraries and provides liability protections to school librarians and educators providing sexually explicit books to students.

Read More

Teachers Union Conference Encouraged Educators to Lobby for Gun Control

A teachers union conference in July encouraged educators to lobby for gun control, according to a conference agenda revealed by the Defense of Freedom Institute.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second-largest teachers union, held a “Together Educating America’s Children” (TEACH) Conference July 21-23 featuring professional development workshops to teach educators tools and strategies to “help kids and communities succeed,” according to the teachers union’s website. One professional development session offered, “Speaking of Gun Violence: How Do We Ensure Educator Voices Matter?” was taught by “Teachers Unify To End Gun Violence,” an organization that works to help pass gun control legislation, and encouraged educators to “collectively raise [their] voices for change,” according to the conference agenda.

Read More

Commentary: There is a Good Reason Why Democrats are so Frightened of ‘Moms for Liberty’

For most Americans, “Mom” evokes images of kindness, courage, sympathy and love. Likewise, “liberty” calls up concepts like individual rights, freedom of expression, equality and justice. Yet, the perversity of the current political environment is such that a parental rights group whose name combines these two words has been demonized by Democrats, the corporate media and the reactionary left. Just recently, a New Hampshire Democrat denounced the group as “Assholes with casseroles,” the Hill ran a story titled, “Six reasons why Moms for Liberty is an extremist organization,” and the Southern Poverty Law Center added them to its Hate Map.

Read More

Commentary: Teachers Don’t Want to Tell Parents What’s Going on in Classrooms

Do parents have the right to know what their children are being taught in public school?

Parents say yes; teachers say no.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. The description of the latter party can be tweaked to “teachers unions” — although you don’t hear many individual teachers bucking the union line — but the dichotomy remains: parents want to know what’s going on in their kids’ classrooms, and teachers, administrators, and their union bosses would rather not tell them.

Read More

Commentary: The Systemic Racism of the Teachers Unions

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could reverse the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, in which SCOTUS asserted that the use of an applicant’s race as a factor in an admissions policy of a public educational institution does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The current case specifically cites the use of race in the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, maintain that Harvard violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, “which bars entities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on race, because Asian American applicants are less likely to be admitted than similarly qualified white, Black, or Hispanic applicants.”

Read More

Commentary: Trust Teachers to Make Their Own Decisions Regarding Union Membership

American’s respect for teachers is high coming out of the pandemic, according to a new EdChoice poll — placing them among doctors and members of the military as some of the most respected professionals in the country.

A whopping 70 percent of Americans respect the men and women who teach our children — yet across the nation, teachers are prevented from making their own decisions when it comes to key aspects of their job: their membership in a teachers’ union.

Read More

Teachers’ Union Boss Backs GOP Sen. John Cornyn’s Controversial ‘Civics’ Bill

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten announced her endorsement of a federal “civics education” bill sponsored by Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), one that the National Association of Scholars (NAS) observed “is more an attempt to smuggle activist training into American K-12 classrooms than it is a good-faith effort to improve civic literacy.”

Weingarten began her column at Newsweek last week with a call for renewed civics education that is all entangled with her view that Donald Trump “and his cronies ran roughshod over the principles most of us learned in grade school.”

Read More

Major Teachers’ Union Supports Keeping Students Sexual Secrets from Parents

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the largest teachers’ union in the country, demonstrated its support for teachers maintaining a level of secrecy around students’ sexual behavior, such as their so-called “gender identity,” even if it includes going so far as keeping such information from their parents.

Read More

Largest Teacher’s Union Plans to Compile List of Opposition Groups to Target

The National Education Association (NEA), the country’s largest teacher’s union, committed to spending more than $140,000 to research and target opposition groups at a convention July 3-6, according to Education Week.

NEA will research and create fact sheets on at least 25 organizations “that are actively working to diminish a student’s right to honesty in education, freedom of sexual and gender identity, and teacher autonomy,” according to a convention business item seen by the Daily Caller News Foundation.  The resolution was approved for $140,625 at the NEA’s convention last week, and the fact sheets that will be distributed to NEA state affiliates, according to Education Week.

Read More