Politically Unstable: School choice and the NEA's special privileged status

Video

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Washington Times Commentary Editor Kelly Sadler interviews Corey DeAngelis, school choice advocate and a senior fellow at the American Culture Project.

[SADLER] This was a big week because lawmakers on the Hill, Representative Harris and Senator Blackburn, introduced legislation to revoke the National Education Association’s federal charter. Now, Corey, I didn’t even know these guys had a federal charter. Why are they getting federal monies to the nation’s largest teachers’ union?

[DEANGELIS] It’s insane. It’s the only union in the country that has this special privileged status. They have this federal charter, they have the backing of Congress, and they’ve had it for over a hundred years now. It started in 1906. Other unions should be upset about this. We’re picking winners and losers here, and there’s only one: The NEA is winning, the kids are losing, parents are losing, the other unions are losing, they don’t get this special status. So I’m thankful that these congressmen, Republicans in Congress have introduced this bill to revoke that special status, to get rid of their federal charter.

And it’s a fantastic timing, because earlier this month, the NEA, the largest teacher union in the country had their annual convention and I leaked to the public some of their resolutions. They used to be public, they used to post them online until 2019. They failed to pass a resolution to rededicate themselves to being about student learning. Think about that, the educators’ union defeated a resolution to being about educating children. But this year, they had all these wacky resolutions. They were so political, none of them had anything to do with education.

[SADLER] Walk us through a few of these. I wrote about a few of them in a column that I did last week, but they’re too good to be true. They’re anti-Trump, anti-Republicanism, totally political, nothing to do with education.

[DEANGELIS] They have Trump Derangement Syndrome and it’s on full display. At the annual convention, they elevated one person out of all the teachers in this country, out of millions of teachers, they elevated one person as their “Teacher of the Year.” Her name is Ashlie Crosson, and what she said, she’s from Pennsylvania, she let the mask slip during her annual convention speech, where she said that her job teaching – of all things — is deeply political and always had been. That’s free advertising for school choice and homeschooling if I’ve ever seen it. But some of these resolutions, in one of them, they misspelled the word fascism. I mean, a union supposedly representing educators, they can’t even spell.

[SADLER] But they green-lighted it to use, to talk about President Trump, that his policies are all fascist.

[DEANGELIS] Exactly, in their resolution to label Trump, the duly elected president of the United States, as a fascist, they misspelled the word. You just can’t make it up. It’s beyond parody. They passed another one to basically call any move to abolish the Department of Education racist. I mean “everything I don’t like is either racist or fascist.” It is devoid of any logic whatsoever. If anything, it’s the status quo that is failing minority kids all across the country.