Revoking NEA’s charter is a good step toward holding teachers’ unions accountable for failing kids

A key US senator wants fellow lawmakers to consider revoking the National Education Association’s congressional charter.

What’s to consider? The union, the nation’s largest representing teachers, clearly hasn’t met its obligations under the charter; Congress should revoke it pronto.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who chairs the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, is urging colleagues to reconsider the NEA’s charter specifically over its links to a number of far-left nonprofits, including the Zinn Education Project and Rethinking Schools, and its alleged out-of-control financial mismanagement.

Those and other NEA-linked groups push agendas that actually justify the terrorism and murders committed by the Black Panther Party and push for indoctrinating young kids with gender extremism.

“Children are struggling to read and to do basic math. Instead of helping students succeed, teachers’ unions are injecting a dangerous, anti-American agenda into our classrooms,” fumed Cassidy.

“Parents deserve to send their children to school without worrying that they will be indoctrinated with DEI and taught that Americans have ‘misplaced faith’ in our institutions.”

A charter revocation wouldn’t stop the NEA from operating, but it would deliver a severe reputational blow to the group.

It’s one that’s long overdue —- and not only because the union has focused on hard-left politics instead of history, geography, math and science. 

In fact, the NEA, along with the American Federation of Teachers, has presided over a decades-long effort to completely wreck any meaningful standards in education in order to shield their millions of members from any accountability.

At the same time, they fought for ever fatter paychecks and pensions, while spending millions in union dues on radical-left political causes. 

After the 2020 George Floyd riots, both the NEA and the AFT ratcheted up their leftist activism and fought to turn America’s classrooms into BLM-indoctrination factories. 

Never mind reading and math, kids were taught that America is evil, brainwashed with antisemitic tropes about Israel and shown pornography as part of their sex and “gender” education; some educators even sought to socially transition kids without parental knowledge or consent. 

The results are tragic: An increasingly illiterate and innumerate nation, with the damage concentrated among the most vulnerable kids.

In New York, almost 30% of fourth-graders score below basic on the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ mathematics test, while 41% are below on reading — about where the depressing national numbers are. 

The NEA’s charter, dating from 1906, requires union to “elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching; and to promote the cause of education in the United States.”

For decades, all evidence shows the unions have done precisely the opposite. 

Though the AFT has no congressional charter, in July, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce began probing allegations that its boss, Randi Weingarten, spent the union’s dues on to write and promote a controversial, lefty-slanted book.

Now Congress must now take on the NEA as well — at the very least, revoking its charter, a small first step toward making sure our kids are actually learning in school.