By Larry Sands, American Greatness
The Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision asserted that no teacher or any public employee has to pay a penny to a union as a condition of employment. While the unions have made it very difficult for teachers to leave, it is certainly doable.
So how many teachers have left their union?
According to a U.S. Department of Labor report filed in December, which includes data from the 2023-24 school year, the National Education Association has 2,839,808 total members, including educators, student teachers, retirees, NEA staff, and other miscellaneous categories. That’s down from 2,857,703 the year before. The number of working members—such as active teachers and support staff—was 2,471,782, a decline of 12,558 or about .005%.
While many observers are happy to see that the union is losing members, I am not joining the party. Instead, I wonder why so many still belong.
When teachers join a union, they are joining three—their local, state, and national affiliates. And the bulk of their dues money is not going where they think it goes. The NEA currently siphons off $213 yearly, but most of the money goes to the state affiliate. In the Golden State, the California Teachers Association, the NEA’s state partner, grabs $816 yearly. There is no set amount for the local union; however, it is typically about $200 per annum.
How does the union spend the dues?
As explained by Mailee Smith, Illinois Policy Institute’s senior director of labor policy, the NEA’s spending on politics and other contributions is more than four times higher than its spending on representation, with just 9% of its expenditures on teacher representation, which should be its core focus.
And just who benefits from the political spending?
As Open Secrets discloses, in 2024, NEA spent $22,744,023 on politics, with 98.24% going to Democrats and a paltry 1.76% going to Republicans.
The California Teachers Association, which considers itself “the co-equal fourth branch of government,” per former Democratic State Senate leader Dom Perata, is no better. As the Freedom Foundation notes, the union reports its political expenditures under three separate filings:
- The Issues Political Action Committee (PAC);
- The Association for Better Citizenship (ABC); and,
- The Independent Expenditure Committee (IEC).
From January to October 2024, union filings show more than $12 million in political contributions. The Issues PAC alone made an $830,000 contribution to the Democratic Party, while the ABC gave $287,000 to Democrats compared to just $21,425 to Republicans.
The CTA is hardly the only union led by left-leaning leadership. The Colorado Education Association has adopted a resolution opposing capitalism. This NEA affiliate, which represents about 40,000 educators and staff, has issued a statement saying it believes “capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources.
Some local unions, especially in big cities, also get into the act. In California, after the terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel in 2023, leaders of the Oakland Education Association called on school leaders to stand in solidarity with Palestinians. “We, the members of OEA, express our unequivocal support for Palestinian liberation and self-determination. We condemn the genocidal and apartheid state of Israel,” a now-deleted post on Instagram read.
But aren’t teachers invariably on the left?
Well, no.
NEA president Reg Weaver stated in 2008 that one-third of his union’s membership is Republican, one-third is Democrat, and one-third is “other.”
Mike Antonucci explained in 2010 that NEA members lean no further to the left than any other large group of Americans. “The national union conducts periodic internal surveys to ascertain member attitudes on various issues. These surveys are never made public, and results are tightly controlled, even within the organization. The 2005 NEA survey, consistent with previous results, found that members are slightly more conservative (50%) than liberal (43%) in political philosophy.”
A 2017 EdWeek poll found that 43% of teachers described themselves as politically moderate, 29% as liberal, and 27% as conservative.
In 2024, a Pew study found 58 percent of public school teachers identified as Democrats and 35 percent identified as Republicans.
Don’t teachers’ unions help teachers get higher pay?
Absolutely not!
In fact, the opposite is true. Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute writes that collective bargaining agreements (CBA) hurt the bottom line of all teachers. “Teachers in non-collective bargaining districts earn more than their union-protected peers—$64,500 on average versus $57,500.” Petrilli’s study was conducted in 2011, and research by Michael Lovenheim in 2009 and Andrew Coulson in 2010 bore similar results. Also, University of California, San Diego professor Augustina Pagalayan reported in 2018 that CBAs do not improve teacher pay.
Liability insurance is one of the only decent benefits offered by the teachers’ unions. However, teachers can instead join the Association of American Educators or Christian Educators Association International—professional organizations—and get better coverage at a much lower cost.
Aren’t students better off when teachers are unionized?
Another resounding no.
One union-mandated atrocity is the seniority, or “last in, first out,” regimen. If teachers must be laid off, the typical union contract stipulates that it must be done this arbitrary way. A study from Stanford University finds that only 13% to 16% of the teachers laid off in a seniority-based system would also be cut under a system based on teacher effectiveness.
Additionally, there is tenure, or more accurately, “permanent status,” which in California means that after just two years on the job, teachers essentially have a job for life. We most definitely should not have this awful law on the books for people who are in charge of our most precious commodity—our children.
During the Vergara trial in California, it was revealed that just 2.2 of the state’s 300,000 teachers (0.0008%) were dismissed for unprofessional conduct or unsatisfactory performance in any given year. This compares to 8% of employees in the private sector being dismissed annually for cause. Applying the 8% number to teachers, about 24,000 underperforming teachers per year should be let go.
For teachers who want to be in a union but don’t want to fund the left-wing agenda of their state and national affiliates, what can they do?
For starters, they can decertify their current union and start a local-only union. No easy task, but it is doable.
Recently, in St. Louis, teachers and staff members at KIPP St. Louis High voted to oust the American Federation of Teachers local. The vote to remove the union followed turbulence over strikes at the charter school in the spring of 2024.
In January, a group of California teachers dumped their union in favor of an independent, dues-free entity. Educators in the Blochman Union School District voted to leave their NEA-affiliated union and start the Blochman Teachers Group.
The effort began last summer when a Blochman teacher contacted the Freedom Foundation, which helps public employees get out of their unions.
In reality, public employee unions should never have seen the light of day.
“All government employees should realize that the collective bargaining process, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.”
Progressive icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued the above caveat about government unions. Additionally, George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO for 24 years, stated in 1955, “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”
Both men understood that the very nature of government makes it wrong for its leaders to negotiate with any union. When government unions bargain, they often sit across the table from people they helped put in office with generous campaign contributions. And when these unions go on strike, they walk out on the taxpayer, who foots the bill but has no voice.
On March 27, President Trump may have gotten this essential reform rolling, signing an executive order to end collective bargaining for unions across most of the federal government.
If we did away with the teachers’ unions, taxpayers, children, and good teachers would benefit greatly.
Barring that, teachers should simply walk away from their unions.
This article originally appeared at American Greatness.
Larry Sand, a retired 28-year classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network—a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.