A November 2025 report from the Defense of Freedom Institute (DFI), The Fall of Woke?, casts a harsh light on the radical causes teacher unions continue to support—even as the Trump administration moves to dismantle left-wing ideological programs in public institutions.

According to the report, teacher unions have metastasized from workers’ rights organizations into political machines for Democratic and socialist reforms—effectively becoming “safe harbors” for wokeness.

Transgender Ideology

Despite opposition from many students, parents, and educators, teacher unions—who claim to represent those groups—continue to advance the transactivist movement.

In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Supreme Court ruled that parents have a constitutional right to opt their children out of age-inappropriate curricula. The National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers’ union, had filed an amicus brief urging the Court to allow schools to block parents from opting their children out of lessons involving sexually explicit or gender-ideology-themed materials. After the Court sided with parents, the NEA’s Representative Assembly voted to allocate more than $200,000 to help educators “avoid possible disciplinary action” when teaching LGBTQ-related materials while at school.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union, has also supported policies that critics say conflict with Title IX protections. A union resolution declared support for access to school facilities based on gender identity and for allowing transgender athletes to compete on teams aligned with their gender identity. The same resolution also endorsed what it called “gender-affirming care” and expressed support for insurance coverage of such treatments without distinguishing between adult and minor patients, the report notes.

Anti-Semitism

The NEA and the AFT have both openly advanced the pro-Palestine movement via handbooks, trainings, and other member resources. 

DFI also found that the NEA released a 2025 Handbook removing Jews as the primary victim of the Holocaust; in October, the union forwarded anti-Semitic resources to its 3 million members, including a “page to a map that erased Israel and labeled its land as Palestine” and a link to PalestineRemembered.com, which falsely purported that Hitler was trying to avoid genocide and hoped to “save Jews.”

This radicalization came at a cost to the union’s own members. 

At the NEA’s annual National Assembly, “Jewish delegates … reported being intimidated, scorned, and harassed throughout the proceedings to the extent that some were shaking, felt uncomfortable sitting with certain delegations, and had panic attacks.” DFI published a 48-page report dedicated exclusively to revealing teacher union anti-Semitism, which I covered for Minding the Campus last fall. 

National Security

Teacher unions frequently oppose federal immigration enforcement, engaging in what DFI describes as “pro-illegal immigration, anti-law enforcement activism.”

Last June, union leaders Becky Pringle and Randi Weingarten protested outside the U.S. Department of Justice, demanding the release of David Huerta, a Service Employees International Union leader detained for allegedly interfering with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in California. 

As recently as January 2026, the NEA union released a statement calling for ICE to withdraw from the Twin Cities in Minnesota. “We demand that ICE immediately end its occupation, withdraw from our communities, and stay far away from schools, hospitals, and places of worship,” the statement read.

Also demonized by teacher unions are the National Guard, whom President Trump deployed to high-crime cities like Chicago in 2025 in an effort to bring much-needed order and safety. Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president, Stacy Davis Gates, railed in USA Today that “the President declared war on the people of our city” in a “militarized invasion,” calling the National Guard’s presence “demoralizing and heartbreaking.”

DFI noted, however, that what’s truly heartbreaking is the number of senseless acts of violence in Chicago affecting school-age children: “In May 2025, three shootings wounded five Chicago Public Schools students outside their school buildings. Between 2019 and 2024, more than 100 kids were shot within one-tenth of a mile of a public school in Chicago, during daylight hours and on school days.” 

Education and the Media

Beyond their overt political activism, teacher unions also shape the media narrative surrounding education policy—often through sympathetic outlets that echo union talking points. National Public Radio (NPR), for example, has produced coverage of school choice initiatives—policies teacher unions have long opposed—that closely mirrors union criticisms.

When the Trump administration moved to withdraw taxpayer funding from NPR, citing concerns about bias, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten warned that doing so would lead to the “backsliding of democracy” and even turn the United States into a “police state.”

Union leaders never fail to decry education freedom initiatives such as the K–12 Federal Scholarship Tax Credit. The program encourages taxpayers to donate funds to scholarship organizations (SGOs), which then award scholarships to families attending public, charter, or private schools. Families can use these funds to cover tuition, tutoring, specialized therapies, transportation to school, and other education-related expenses.

Union leaders do, however, advocate integrating concepts such as critical race theory, “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and environmental justice into classroom instruction.

The Unions’ Real Priorities

As the Fall of Woke? report reads, many teacher union initiatives “have little to do with helping students or teachers.” Instead, union leadership has aligned itself with a broader anti-school choice, anti-parent political movement—one that continues to prioritize leftist ideological campaigns and media narratives over improving classroom outcomes.

The report argues that this posture persists largely because union leadership can afford to ignore both public opinion and its members’ concerns. Protected by institutional privileges and steady streams of dues, national union organizations have doubled down on an unpopular agenda even as “woke” politics lose favor with the broader public. Whether that trajectory changes, the report suggests, will depend less on political shifts in Washington than on whether rank-and-file teachers decide to challenge the priorities of the organizations that claim to represent them.