Membership training for the National Education Association (NEA), America’s largest teachers’ union, makes the organization’s priorities unmistakably clear.
Defending Education, a watchdog group, recently obtained pre-attendance and participant materials for the NEA’s training session, “Advancing LGBTQ+ Justice,” which begins today. The documents, considered alongside other union programming, reveal the NEA’s fixation on identity politics.
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The pre-attendance materials put the training’s absurdity on full display. On the document’s second page, the NEA lists a series of principles that it expects attendees to accept. Among them are “Listening for Understanding,” “Being Gracious,” “Staying Engaged,” and “Saying ‘I’—tell your truth.” Is this program for adults or kindergartners?
Then, on the seven pages that follow, the NEA recounts “key terms” about “sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.” The list begins with “agender” and ends with “Two-Spirit”—an identity that non-Natives are instructed not to use. (Of course, males may identify and insist on being treated as females.) All of this is before one gets to the 56-page participant handout, which features pronoun-use instructions and oppression flowcharts.
These materials would be comical if they weren’t being used for a meeting of the nation’s largest teachers’ union.
The LGBTQ+ training session is just one installment in the NEA’s 2025–2026 program list. Most of the union’s other trainings relate to organizing and members’ interests. Academic subjects, by contrast, are ignored. The document refers to “organizer math”—but that’s about understanding campaign numbers, not working in a math notebook.
Two trainings unrelated to union organizing—“Advancing LGBTQ+ Justice” and “Advancing Racial Justice”—are tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology and critical race theory (CRT), respectively.
While the union never references DEI or CRT by name in its program list, the NEA seems committed to both ideologies. Throughout the document, the union deploys terms such as “implicit bias,” “micro-aggressions,” “white fragility,” “interpersonal oppressions,” “systemic racism,” and “white supremacy.” It counsels members to “develop counter narratives of inclusion and equity” and “develop a toolset of tactics for dismantling systems of privilege and oppression.”
What are the likely effects of the Advancing LGBTQ+ Justice training on schools?
The first will be to put females at a disadvantage. One training document implies support for allowing boys who identify as girls to use the girls’ restroom and denounces bans on “trans young people . . . participating in school sports.” Removing sex-specific spaces for female students is a form of oppression. After all, hundreds of female athletes have lost podium positions, titles, and scholarships. What ever happened to girls’ right to “tell [their] truth?”
The second will be to deceive parents. Some schools socially transition students—that is, treat and refer to them as members of the opposite sex—under guidelines endorsed by the NEA, which instruct staff to keep parents in the dark. What ever happened to “don’t trust people who tell you to keep secrets from your parents?”
Legal precedents, thankfully, affirm parental authority. The Supreme Court ruled in 2000’s Troxel v. Granville that parents have a fundamental right to direct their children’s upbringing and education. More recently, in June, the Supreme Court held in Mahmoud v. Taylor that parents can opt children out of lessons that use LGBTQ+-themed storybooks. These cases will shape the resolution of others in the country, including in New York State and City, whose departments of education are among the nation’s most aggressive in keeping secrets from parents.
As for the upcoming Advancing Racial Justice training, it will be revealing to see how attendees react to the NEA’s insistence on the dominance of “white supremacy,” considering that the union’s top four executives are all nonwhite.
The NEA is the nation’s largest teachers’ union. It should stop teaching its members to sneak around parents, erase biological reality, and divide people by skin color. If the union applied its time and energy to improving reading and math scores, America’s nearly 50 million public school students might finally catch up to their foreign counterparts.
Photo by Celal Güne/Anadolu via Getty Images