School’s out for the summer, and teachers union conferences are in full swing. As usual, the teachers unions have been holding their annual meetings and, as usual, those meetings have little to do with educating children—or even protecting teachers, for that matter, by addressing real issues such as violence in classrooms and chronic absenteeism. Instead, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have focused almost entirely on promoting progressive ideologies in the classroom and debating issues that have no relevance to schools.
While the NEA union’s conference was completely incapacitated by its internal union going on strike—its scheduled events, including a planned speech by President Joe Biden, were canceled—the Teacher Freedom Summit, which held its second annual conference from July 8-10 in Denver, was able to bring together 191 public school teachers from 26 states to resist the radical political agendas of teachers unions.
Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who promoted school choice and Title IX reform during the Trump administration, gave a virtual appearance to encourage attendees in the face of such a broken education system. The keynote address was given by Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters, who pointed to successful reforms in Oklahoma that could serve a model for schools around the country. Every event at the summit was designed to help teachers take back their autonomy from unions and progressive ideologues encroaching upon the classroom.
What does that encroachment look like? The AFT Convention this week—unless it winds up botched as the NEA’s conference was—will show us: resolutions up for debate include everything from the woke (“Protecting Public Education from Right Wing Extremism”) to the utterly off-topic (“Support Workers’ Rights in the Philippines”).
What’s more, the event will be led by the AFT president, Randi Weingarten, who spearheaded school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to learning loss and behavioral challenges in a generation of children. Not only is there little accountability for public school unions; but there is also little accountability for union leadership, seeing that Weingarten has maintained her position despite decisions that have now been proven to have devastated American children and American education more broadly.
The contrast could not be greater between the unions’ priorities and those of the Teacher Freedom Summit. After all, only the latter provided a positive vision for the future of education in this country.