America’s largest teachers union “coached” teachers on how to expose students to gender identity in the curriculum, according to a new report.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) “coached its members on how to inject gender identity politics into classroom teaching,” said the report published Wednesday by the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute.
The report describes the ATF’s Together Educating America’s Children (TEACH) conference in July. Two of the sessions at the conference were titled “Affirming LGBTQIA+ Identities in and out of the Classroom” and “The TGNCNB [transgender, gender nonconforming, nonbinary] Inclusive School and Classroom,” the report said.
“Both session descriptions offered attendees ideas and action items to take back to their schools,” reads the report. “The unions’ mission is clear: train teachers to affirm every gender identity that conflicts with a student’s sex, ignore basic biological facts, hide the training from parents, and shape school policies to force others to do the same.”
The AFT along with the nation’s second largest union, the National Education Association (NEA), are both wholly committed to pushing radical gender ideology in schools, the report says.
Together, the two largest teachers unions represent nearly five million public school teachers across the country.
Just before the union’s July conference, the ATF also adopted an LGBT resolution that promotes “age-appropriate and inclusive policies” on trans-identifying students sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with the opposite sex.
The ATF’s resolution also commits the union to working with LGBT activist groups, one of which has a model policy advising school districts to use a student’s new pronouns without notifying parents.
Both unions have “vehemently” opposed legislation meant to protect students from sexually graphic content and gender ideology.
Meanwhile, the NEA called Florida’s parental rights law “extremist” at its “Freedom to Learn” rally during the union’s Representative Assembly.
Last year, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education law, which prohibits classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity through grade three.
The NEA also issued guidance last month on how to place “inclusive symbols” in classrooms and encouraged teachers to buck policies banning Pride flags and Black Lives Matter symbols.
The unions see the parental rights movement as “an existential threat to their power over public education,” the Defense of Freedom Institute’s report says.
“The average rank and file teacher got into that field because they care about learning and they care about students,” said one of the report’s authors, Angela Morabito.
“And it is not lost on them that teachers unions are actively working against those goals … The teachers unions are very clearly on the wrong side of not just what’s good for students and families, but what’s good for their own membership,” Morabito told Crisis in the Classroom.
Gender and sexual content in school curricula and libraries has become a hot button issue for parents in recent years. Parents have shown up to school board meetings to vehemently express their concerns about the content their children have access to through their public schools, in some cases even reading sexually explicit passages from school library books to get their point across.
About 74% of voters say they think schools should have to obtain parental consent before helping a child change their gender identity including using new pronouns, according to a March poll from Parents Defending Education.
About the same number, 75% of voters support laws that would require schools to get that parental consent, according to the poll.