For years the National Education Association (NEA) has given the education of our nation’s children a backseat to promoting Democratic Party politics. But now a leaked internal training document obtained by Defending Education has revealed that the nation’s largest teachers’ union has taken this agenda to another level.
The new enemy: conservative parents.
The political agenda
The leaked training, “Advancing LGBTQ+ Justice and Transgender Advocacy,” does not pretend to be about academics. Instead, it includes staff transition guides for teachers, exercises that instruct participants to analyze their “race, class, gender, and positionality,” and role-play scenarios in which educators practice challenging parents who disagree with gender ideology.
These are not fringe resources. They are official professional development tools that encourage teachers to practice how to argue divisive issues with parents. According to the leaked module, the NEA’s Organizing Department instructs teachers to profile “hostile” parents, build messaging strategies to discredit them, and frame Republican elected officials as threats to student safety.
This is a far-left activist bootcamp disguised as teacher development. There isn’t a single mention of reading proficiency, nor a strategy for improving math outcomes. There’s nothing about how to manage the behavioral chaos that has overtaken classrooms nationwide.
This activism is made possible by the enormous sums flowing to the NEA’s nonprofit arm, via union dues and other sources. The union reported revenue of $402 million for 2024.
And according to OpenSecrets, the NEA’s political committee gave $3.6 million to candidates and causes in 2024, with $3.54 million of the total (98 percent) sent to those aligned with the Democratic Party. A similar pattern exists for all elections going back to at least 1990.
What I saw as a public school teacher
The NEA’s battle against conservative parents isn’t new. It’s just part of a multi-decade partisan war against conservatives. I spent 15 years inside public schools and saw the NEA’s war against conservative parents long before it was leaked.
When I taught in a California school, those same frameworks and talking points appeared in my district’s mandatory Ethnic Studies curriculum for 9th graders. Students were taught that the reality of only two genders is just a social construct, that whiteness is inherently oppressive, that identity determines outcome, and that if anyone dares to dissent it is evidence of their own bigotry. When I spoke up to the school board about these lessons with a group of parents, including a black father, I was called “anti-people of color” by the school board president.
The unions have been the ideological pipeline for this content for years. Materials similar to what I saw in the lessons for students, including a visual on internalized and institutional oppression, appeared in the recently leaked NEA teacher training.
The NEA has also spent years promoting “gender-affirming” school policies that deliberately sidestep parental consent. The union has endorsed guidelines instructing teachers to use a student’s chosen name and gender identity at school while withholding that information from parents if the child requests confidentiality. NEA trainings have emphasized that a student’s “privacy” should override parental notification and that educators should not disclose a child’s social transition to their parents without the student’s consent.
In practice, the nation’s largest teachers’ union has encouraged teaching staff to prevent families from learning life-altering information about minors.
At their 2021 annual meeting, the NEA passed New Business Item 39, committing the union to pushing critical race theory into K–12 schools nationwide. When this arguably racist agenda was exposed, the union scrubbed the language from its website and claimed conservatives were “inventing” CRT in classrooms. I watched the same thing happen locally when parents questioned the Ethnic Studies curriculum we were required to teach. The unions protected the ideology, not the ruth.
We also saw this during the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures, when the NEA joined other teacher unions to support efforts to delay school reopenings and to oppose legislation tying federal relief funds to full in-person instruction.
Conclusion
In this latest training, the NEA instructs teachers to frame conservatives as threatening the safety of marginalized students and to build responses to conservative disinformation networks. Translation: parents who disagree with union politics are not partners in their children’s education—they are obstacles.
Though they didn’t mean for it to get out, the NEA has sent a clear warning to the nation in this leaked document. They are telling us that they are a far-left political and indoctrination machine that views parents as the enemy. We should believe them.
