OPINION:
It’s way past time to rein in the National Education Association, a misnamed organization if ever there was one.
Federally chartered in 1906 “to elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching … and to promote the cause of education in the United States,” the NEA now does none of that.
Instead, the last remaining labor union to hold a federal charter (a perk that entitles it to tax-exempt status on its property in Washington, among other benefits) has spent recent years mired in far-left causes that obfuscate rather than educate.
Just this month, it sent its approximately 3 million members an email with a map showing two labels of “Palestine” where Israel should have been. The same email linked to sources that defended terrorist group Hamas’ murderous Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, which left 1,200 people dead and resulted in the kidnappings of 251 others.
The NEA has since removed the map and links from its website, and a spokesperson told the New York Post that the union has always “opposed antisemitism.” It has a funny way of showing it.
In a 2025-2026 school year handbook that has also since been scrubbed, the union says it “will use existing digital communication tools to educate members and the general public about the history of the Palestinian Nakba … the forced, violent displacement and dispossession of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 during the establishment of the state of Israel” in an effort to understand “the ongoing trauma of our Palestinian American students today.”
What trauma might that be, exactly? The kind where your own leadership squanders the millions of dollars in aid intended for your people, where your parents and grandparents elect terrorists as “the government” and every Arab nation in the world plays “Not it” for nearly eight decades when it comes to finding you and your brethren a permanent home? Traumatic, perhaps — except none of it is Israel’s fault.
The misinformation continues. The same previous version of the handbook contained a section on “educat[ing] members about the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.”
Spoiler alert: There is none. If you don’t believe that the Jews — who have a documented, archaeologically verified claim to Israel going back thousands of years — deserve a homeland in that spot, you have a problem with Jews. Period.
The NEA has also partnered with the leftist Zinn Education Project to insert radical material and lessons into classrooms. Among the sanctioned learning activities: role playing in which students pretend to be Black Panther Party members, including Assata Shakur, who murdered a law enforcement officer in 1973 and escaped prison six years later. She fled to Cuba, where she died last month.
By way of announcing Shakur’s passing, the Chicago Teachers Union, an NEA affiliate, posted on X, “Today, we honor the life and legacy of a revolutionary fighter, a fierce writer, a revered elder of Black liberation and a leader of freedom whose spirit continues to live in our struggle.”
This must be the “character-elevating” way of saying “violent racist who executed one New Jersey state trooper at point-blank range, wounded another and committed multiple armed bank robberies.” What a role model.
Another Zinn resource, the lesson “Whose ‘Terrorism’?” is a 9½-page slurry of moral relativism that effectively blames the U.S. for 9/11. It calls the atrocities perpetrated that day “a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong” that may or may not have been orchestrated by Osama bin Laden (“Who knows?” it asks) but “could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America’s old wars.”
The discussion guide to “The United States and Palestine-Israel: Fifty Years of Choices (1956-2006)” blames Israel’s “apartheid” for the murders, rapes and torture committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and urges students to question the continuation of American aid to Israel.
“Students may be puzzled about the role that the United States has played in Israel’s war on Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks,” it reads. “With tens of thousands of civilians killed in Gaza, why has the United States continued to arm Israel?”
Congress should not allow an organization that foists such drivel on our nation’s youths to continue as it has been. Legislative efforts underway to revoke the NEA’s charter, such as the National Education Association Charter Repeal Act, have the right idea but may not have the intended impact.
Legislators should consider revising the NEA’s charter to “place limitations on the NEA’s lobbying and political activity and, importantly, authorize the attorney general to enforce these requirements,” as Daniel Buck and Anna Low wrote in National Review in July. “Tinkering with its charter might more effectively kneecap its political activities.”
That’s exactly what we need.
• Anath Hartmann is deputy commentary editor for The Washington Times.
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