Teachers Unions Spend $40 Million Funding Leftist Groups

A watchdog group, Defending Education (DE), exposed two of the largest teachers’ unions for donating millions of dollars to left-wing organizations.

According to DE’s investigation, which was based on union disclosures to the Department of Labor from July 2022 to June 2024, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) have collectively funneled over $40 million into liberal and far-left groups. This isn’t money that’s been funneling in for decades. Rather, $43,524,123 has been “doled out” in a matter of roughly three years.

National Review broke it down: AFT “donated $1.6 million to the House Majority PAC and $1.25 million to the Senate Majority PAC over the respective time periods combined. Future Forward, the primary PAC for former Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed 2024 presidential campaign, received $250,000 from the AFT, Defending Education found.”

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Additionally, the outlet wrote, “The unions together gave $9.3 million to the For Our Future Action Fund, a left-wing PAC that primarily operates in swing states. Likewise, the [NEA] poured $9.5 million into the State Engagement Fund, a progressive pass-through entity that dishes out cash to other left-wing organizations.”

Beyond these large groups, the unions were also found to have given a sizeable sum to smaller groups devoted to progressive activism. For example, the liberal think tank Center for American Progress received almost $1 million. Money was also given to groups that promote gun restrictions, so-called racial “equity,” and abortion access.

Both unions are led by highly outspoken progressive individuals. As NR went on to highlight, “Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation for Teachers, is a well-known Democratic activist who uses her organization for partisan purposes. Weingarten has steered AFT in a progressive activist direction and led the push to extend school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic, a policy that resulted in disastrous learning losses for American children.” NEA is also staunchly opposed to President Donald Trump and a major defender of critical race theory.

Rhyen Staley, research director at DE, addressed these findings. “Teachers unions claim they are about improving education,” he said, “but their spending says otherwise. The fact that the unions have funneled tens of millions of dollars into left-wing political groups and nonprofits shows they are interested in advancing their own power and very unpopular far-left ideologies and policies.”

Staley called this trend “insulting for American families and teachers who want student outcomes to be improved, not used as a tool to fund leftwing politics.” This explosive report raises a burning question: Are these unions prioritizing students — or their own political agendas?

These findings also come at a time when school policy is at the forefront of national dialogue. On the one hand, transgender policies have been under intense scrutiny, with an increasing number of Americans opposed to biological males being allowed on women and girls’ sports teams and in their private spaces. This alone has prompted a fierce response from conservatives and the Trump administration. But the concerns go further.

This week saw a horrific attack on a Catholic school in Minneapolis. Two children were killed and several others injured in what the FBI is investigating as a hate crime against Catholics by a man who identified as transgender. Reportedly, this heartbreaking tragedy occurred after years of residents asking Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Tim Walz to bolster security for the state’s private and religious schools. No action has come of that request, but back in 2023, Walz did take the time to make Minnesota a “transgender sanctuary city.”

During a recent episode of The Washington Stand’s “Outstanding” podcast, host Casey Harper spoke with Kendall Tietz of Defending Education. She dug deep into the ideological takeover of America’s schools and how many of these controversial agendas are being fueled by taxpayer dollars.

Not long ago, Tietz noted, the NEA made headlines “over business items they approved at their conference … calling President Trump a fascist, condemning his ‘authoritarianism,’ opposing recent Supreme Court rulings.” She also highlighted how the NEA decided to stop using Anti-Defamation League materials, a move she called “pretty brazen considering the anti-Semitism that we’ve seen post October 7th.”

Tietz went on to address one of DE’s reports that showed how roughly $20 million in federal dollars in 61 school districts alone have gone toward “woke education” — whether it be “race and gender-based programs, equity grading, restorative justice, [or] DEI training.” There’s even been a significant push for what Tietz called “social emotional learning,” which is a means of implementing “surveys to ask … invasive questions about students.”

The unions’ role in this ideological shift, Tietz asserted, is clear: “unions as a whole are extremely left-wing,” and many teachers “see themselves as the ones who should take charge and influence kids into thinking the way they do about these issues.”

Harper chimed in, highlighting the disconnect between what these unions are pushing versus what schools are designed to do. “[W]hat a school is supposed to be accomplishing,” he stated, “[is] sending out kids into the world who know things — who know how to read, how to write, how to think intelligently. But the kids that are coming out now are really the worst we’ve seen in decades,” particularly “when it comes to performance.” He argued that instead of addressing declining reading and math scores, money and efforts are, evidently, “going towards … calling Trump a fascist. I don’t see how it’s relevant at all to educating kids.”

Moving forward, Tietz advocated for a “return to the basics,” urging educators to “teach kids how to read and write” and leave societal and political discussions to parents, especially since “parental rights is usually a winning issue among those who are sending their kids off to school in the morning.”

LifeNews Note: Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand, where this originally appeared.

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