This November will be the most expensive midterm in American history. AdImpact projects $11.6 billion in political advertising, more than the 2024 presidential race. Part of that money is coming out of teachers’ paychecks. Most of them have no idea.
Over the past decade, the two national teachers unions and their state and local affiliates have steered more than $1 billion in dues and PAC money into political causes, according to Defending Education, which tracked the spending through federal labor and campaign finance filings. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers alone account for $669 million since 2015. More than $85 million went straight to Democrat Party committees. More than $60 million went to the State Engagement Fund, a progressive clearinghouse most teachers have never heard of.
The NEA’s latest federal disclosure shows how the machine runs. In one year, the union took in roughly $390 million in dues and fees. It spent $51.7 million on political activities and lobbying and handed out another $123.3 million in contributions, gifts and grants, including $300,000 to the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the largest dark money network on the left. The biggest single recipient was its own super PAC, which got nearly $8.6 million. Representing teachers, the thing dues are supposed to buy, came to less than $46 million. Ten cents on the dollar.
The AFT filed its own report this fall. It spent $37 million on political activities and lobbying in the year ending June 30. Its grants included $250,000 to the Center for American Progress, $100,000 to Emily’s List, $100,000 to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Randi Weingarten was paid $546,158 for the year. Her NEA counterpart, Becky Pringle, took home $514,755. A teacher earning $55,000 would need more than nine years to match that.
The rank and file never voted on any of it. NEA-affiliated committees have given $134.5 million to federal candidates and committees since 1990, and 97 percent went to Democrats and liberal groups. Pringle herself has admitted that two-thirds of NEA members are not Democrats. Weingarten told a New York outlet this summer that she approves the total her union sends to outside spending groups and then has no say in how it is used. If the union president has no say, the classroom teacher in Tulsa has less.
The agenda is no secret. At the AFT’s July convention in Washington, speakers framed Democrat victories in November as essential to the future of education policy. The receipts followed. On October 9, the AFT wrote a $200,000 check to defeat a Washington State ballot measure repealing the state’s new income tax, a law that rolls back longstanding protections for public employee pensions. Teachers’ dues are now defending a tax that can reach teachers’ retirements.
Washington is hardly an outlier. Education Minnesota’s political arm has spent nearly $2 million this cycle, and about $1.1 million of it went directly to Democratic legislative caucuses and the state party. Candidates got $12,400. Every dollar went to a Democrat. A Minnesota teacher pays around $1,000 a year in dues, and state dues have risen every year since 2014.
Then there is Weingarten’s book. The Freedom Foundation combed AFT’s filings and found more than $1.4 million in union expenses tied to writing, publishing and promoting it, including a ghostwriter, a literary agent and a photographer for the author portrait. Weingarten kept a share of the proceeds. In July, the House Education and Workforce Committee opened a review and demanded the records. Teachers paid for a book that calls their neighbors fascists, and the author collected royalties.
None of this is required. In Janus v. AFSCME, the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that no public employee can be forced to pay a union. Every dollar of that billion came from a teacher who was told it would buy better pay, safer classrooms, and a voice in the building. It bought a seat at the Democrat Party’s table.
Before Election Day, every teacher should pull up those filings and read them. The numbers are the unions’ own. A teacher who backs this agenda is free to keep paying for it. A teacher who does not is free to keep the money.
Ryan Walters is CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance and the former Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction.