On Labor Day 2025, the streets near downtown Chicago swelled with thousands of protesters, their chants and placards echoing a deepening divide over the future of American education and politics. At the heart of the demonstration—dubbed the “Workers over Billionaires” march—stood the Chicago Teachers Union, leading a crowd estimated by organizers at between 5,000 and 10,000 people. Many waved signs demanding, “Shut Down ICE! No Military Occupation!” and “Resist Fascism!” Their message: opposition to President Donald Trump’s announcement that National Guard troops and federal immigration agents could soon be dispatched to Chicago to address crime and illegal immigration, as reported by Reuters and MSNBC.
Yet, beneath the surface of the day’s heated rhetoric and political spectacle, a different controversy has been simmering. According to a new report from Defending Education, a conservative watchdog group, the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions—the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—have funneled more than $43.5 million into left-wing and progressive organizations over the past three years. The report, based on union disclosures to the Department of Labor from July 2022 to June 2024, has ignited a fierce debate about the role of unions in both politics and education.
“Teachers exist to educate. They don’t exist to indoctrinate. So when their unions spend their union dollars on these political causes, we have a great deal of concern with that,” said Sarah Parshall Perry, Defending Education’s Vice President and Legal Fellow, in an interview with TNND. Perry described her organization as a grassroots coalition of teachers, students, and parents “dedicated to the proposition that every American school kid deserves a high quality, value-neutral education.”
The numbers are staggering. According to Defending Education’s findings, the AFT contributed over $14 million to left-wing organizations from 2022 to 2024, while the NEA pumped in nearly $29 million. Notably, a combined $9.3 million was donated to the For Our Future Action Fund, a liberal PAC focused on electing Democrats in key swing states. The NEA also gave $9.5 million to the State Engagement Fund, a progressive pass-through entity, and $500,000 to Future Forward USA Action. Meanwhile, the AFT donated $1.6 million to the House Majority PAC, $1.25 million to the Senate Majority PAC, and $250,000 to Future Forward, the main PAC for Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, as reported by National Review.
Other recipients of union largesse include the Clinton Foundation, MoveOn.org, PEN America, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Trevor Project, and state and federal Democratic political action committees. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, received nearly $1 million from the unions, while groups promoting gun restrictions, racial equity, and abortion access were also beneficiaries. The NEA sent $30,000 to GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network) and $60,000 to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, both organizations focused on LGBTQ+ advocacy in schools.
Rhyen Staley, research director at Defending Education, was blunt in his assessment: “Teachers unions claim they are about improving education, but their spending says otherwise. The fact that the unions have funneled tens of millions of dollars into left-wing political groups and nonprofits shows they are interested in advancing their own power and very unpopular far-left ideologies and policies.” Staley called the trend “insulting for American families and teachers who want student outcomes to be improved, not used as a tool to fund leftwing politics.”
This controversy comes at a time when public schools in major cities are facing mounting criticism for academic underperformance. According to The New American, multiple reports show that urban students are not proficient in basic subjects such as math and reading. In Illinois, the 2024 Report Card data revealed a sobering reality: 80 schools in the state had zero students proficient in math, and 24 schools had no students proficient in reading. These numbers increased from 67 and 32, respectively, in 2023. Nearly 20,000 students attend these “zero-proficiency” schools. Despite these figures, graduation rates remain high—Dunbar Vocational Career Academy in Chicago, for example, spends $26,834 per student, yet not a single student tested proficient in math and only 2% in reading in 2024. Still, 72% of its students graduated. Harlan Community Academy High School, spending nearly $35,000 per student, saw zero proficiency in both math and reading, yet graduated 64% of its students.
Maryland’s schools are not faring much better. Fox45 in Baltimore reported that, while scores for Math and English Language Arts are rising slightly, they remain abysmal. In 2025, just 26.5% of students statewide scored proficient in math, up from 24.1% in 2024. English Language Arts results were better, with 50.8% proficiency, but Baltimore City had the lowest scores in the state. In some city high schools, not a single student tested proficient in math, and only 5% of high school students were proficient in math in 2021-22, according to Project Baltimore.
Against this backdrop, union leaders remain unapologetic about their political advocacy. On its website, the AFT describes itself as a union of professionals that “champions fairness; democracy; economic opportunity; and high-quality public education, healthcare and public services for our students, their families and our communities.” The NEA, for its part, lists core values of equal opportunity, democracy, professionalism, and collective action as central to its mission.
Critics, however, argue that these ideals have been overshadowed by partisan activism. Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, is a well-known Democratic activist who led the push to extend school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic—a policy that, according to National Review, resulted in “disastrous learning losses for American children.” The NEA has also been outspoken in its opposition to former President Trump and a defender of critical race theory. Kendall Tietz of Defending Education told The Washington Stand’s “Outstanding” podcast that unions “see themselves as the ones who should take charge and influence kids into thinking the way they do about these issues.”
The debate over the unions’ priorities is intensifying as school policy remains at the forefront of national dialogue. Transgender policies, critical race theory, and parental rights have all become flashpoints, with conservatives and the Trump administration pushing back against what they view as ideological overreach. Meanwhile, tragic incidents—such as the recent attack on a Catholic school in Minneapolis, investigated by the FBI as a hate crime—have fueled concerns about the safety and direction of American schools.
While union leaders and their supporters argue that their political engagement is vital to advancing social justice and protecting public education, critics like Staley and Tietz say it’s time to “return to the basics”—focusing on teaching kids how to read and write, and leaving societal and political debates to parents and communities. As Casey Harper put it on The Washington Stand’s podcast, “What a school is supposed to be accomplishing is sending out kids into the world who know things—who know how to read, how to write, how to think intelligently. But the kids that are coming out now are really the worst we’ve seen in decades, particularly when it comes to performance.”
As the new school year gets underway, the clash between political activism and educational outcomes shows no sign of abating. The question of whether America’s teachers’ unions are prioritizing students or their own agendas remains at the center of a national conversation that is as contentious as ever.
