The school year is over, report cards are coming home, and parents are asking the same questions they ask at the end of every school year: Is my child learning? Are they better prepared for the future?

For far too many families, the honest answer is no. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, fewer than one in three American students can read at grade level, fewer than one in three eighth graders are proficient in science, and only 22% of high school seniors are proficient in math. Yet public school spending is approaching $1 trillion a year, nearly 60% higher than in 2013, when student performance was significantly stronger.

New York City, for example, spends roughly $44,000 per student each year, about 30% more than other large school districts without producing better outcomes. The disconnect has become so absurd that even Jeff Bezos recently weighed in. As Bezos put it, if Amazon operated the same way, “packages would take six weeks to arrive, we would charge you a $100 delivery fee, and when the package did finally arrive, it would have the wrong item.”

Parents and taxpayers have every right to wonder where all that money is going.

If you follow the dollars, the answer leads straight to Randi Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Parents are constantly told that teachers’ unions exist to support educators and improve schools. A closer look at how the union spends its money and exercises its influence, however, tells a very different story.

According to federal filings analyzed by the Illinois Policy Institute, AFT spent more than $277 million in fiscal year 2024. Only $100.7 million of that, barely 36 cents on the dollar, went toward representing teachers, the union’s supposed core function. The rest flowed into politics, administration, and union leadership priorities. That includes $38 million in political activities and lobbying alone. The Better Business Bureau recommends nonprofits devote at least 65% of their resources to their core mission. By that standard, the AFT falls dramatically short. Meanwhile, Weingarten herself collected more than $500,000 in salary and reportable compensation in FY2024, while the average teacher earns around $72,000.

When those factors are combined with the union’s overwhelmingly one-sided political spending, the picture becomes even more troubling. During the 2024 election cycle, 99.89% of AFT Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions went to Democrats and allied causes. In fact, the union’s PAC spent $15.6 million supporting Kamala Harris and Democratic congressional candidates.

That may come as a surprise to the millions of Americans who still assume teachers’ unions are primarily focused on improving schools and supporting educators. Then again, consider how Weingarten uses her platform.

She called Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act a “gross political attack” because it gave parents a clearer view of what young children are taught about gender and sexuality. She welcomed the Biden administration’s effort to rewrite Title IX in ways that allowed biological males to compete in girls’ sports and access private female spaces. At the 2024 AFT Convention, she invoked the specter of fascism to warn members about the consequences of the “wrong” election outcome. As American Enterprise Institute scholar Robert Pondiscio put it, her social media is “a litany of hot takes on politics and current events. Effective teaching? Barely a whisper.”

More recently, an investigation by Defending Education uncovered an AFT affiliate connected to a Minnesota network that promoted parent-alert systems designed to counter ICE operations. Separate research found DEI provisions embedded in AFT-affiliated union contracts nationwide, including race-conscious programming and ideological trainings unrelated to pay, benefits, or classroom conditions.

As parents, we have been told to stay in our lane. We’ve been told that questioning curriculum is book-banning, that wanting a say in our children’s education is extremism, and that the union knows best.

All the while, academic performance continues to deteriorate across nearly every subject and grade level, even as one of the most powerful organizations in American education pours millions of dollars, countless hours, and enormous political influence into elections, activism, and ideological causes that have little to do with helping students learn.

Parents have every right to expect better.

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Alleigh Marré is the executive director of American Parents Coalition and a mother of four.

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