The Public School Activist Pipeline: ‘A Joyous Rebellion’

During the summer months, educators across the country flock to professional development conferences, often on the taxpayers’ dime. These events are supposed to sharpen the instructional skills of teachers and equip them with new methods for helping students succeed, addressing real challenges of education, such as declining test scores, reading comprehension, and math proficiency.

But as Defending Education’s analysis of the programming shows, what actually dominates these conferences is not literacy strategies or math interventions.

Instead, the recurring themes are race, social justice, gender, activism, and equity. From English to math, and from history to science, the same ideological buzzwords surface again and again. It’s little wonder parents are concerned, or that the nation has grown more politically divided.

Take the National Education Association (NEA), the country’s largest teachers union. At its Conference on Racial and Social Justice in Portland this summer, activism, not academics, took center stage.

Unions like the NEA make no effort to hide their contempt for Donald Trump and the values of his supporters. At its annual Representative Assembly, the union approved business items labeling Trump’s agenda as “fascist” and opposing efforts to eliminate the Department of Education, which it called racist and anti-democratic. In direct response to a Supreme Court decision (Mahmoud v. Taylor) affirming religious parents’ rights to opt their children out of LGBTQ curricula, the NEA allocated $209,000 to push back and expand LGBTQ advocacy in schools. In total, the NEA committed more than $340,000 toward initiatives designed to counter conservative policies.

This union-driven activism is not confined to Portland. Across the country, teachers are being coached to use classrooms as platforms for reshaping opinions on society’s most sensitive issues. Students are not simply taught about history or literature; they are encouraged to become activists themselves. The worldview behind this approach borrows heavily from Marxist theory, framing society as an endless struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. That lens is being embedded into lesson plans, teacher training, and classroom culture, gradually shifting education away from its original purpose — academic instruction — toward political reeducation.

The sessions at NEA’s conference illustrate this shift. One workshop, “Building Narrative Power for Education Justice,” trained teachers to use storytelling to fight “anti-truth” and anti-LGBTQ legislation. Another warned about “White Christian nationalist forces” allegedly exploiting pan-Asian communities. Additional sessions covered “racial battle fatigue,” blurred lines between racism and ableism, and framed climate change as disproportionately harming communities of color, women, and students with disabilities. One even linked the MAGA movement to Jim Crow and Native land theft. Teachers were urged to affirm transgender student identities, disrupt curriculum challenges, and fight political opponents under the banner of education justice.

The conference also promoted the NEA’s pronoun guide, which encourages teachers to adopt nontraditional pronouns such as ze, zir, zirs, and zirself, and to display their own pronouns as a sign of being a “safe person.” Misgendering, teachers were told, is itself a form of marginalization.

While parents worry about declining math and reading scores, union-sponsored trainings are focused on dismantling ableism, confronting White Christian nationalism, and embedding queer theory into K–12 classrooms. These are not the priorities of most American families, but within the union bubble, they are treated as urgent and non-negotiable. 

And it’s not just the NEA. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) filled its 2024 conference with sessions such as “Disrupting the Canon with LGBTQIA+ Themes,” “Queer and Trans-Affirming Education,” and “Antiracist Pedagogy Workshop.”

In a perfect example encapsulating how this ideology makes its way into the classroom, one teacher at a school district in New York reframed Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as a “cli-fi,” or climate fiction text, using the play as a vehicle to teach climate change.

Math education has not been spared either. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ (NCTM) 2024 conference features sessions on antiracist math, whiteness, and social justice.

One session, Reflecting on My Whiteness, describes math itself as a “white, patriarchal space” and offers strategies to “confront the oppressive forces of whiteness” and “dismantle inequitable practices” in the classroom. Another highlights how black women in math education “disrupt systems of oppression” and center “Black Girl Joy.” A third, Democracy and Data, claims math should be used to advance democratic participation through a social justice lens.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) follows the same script. At its July conference, sessions focused on “racial harm,” “LGBTQIA+ allyship,” climate activism, and “mass mobilization training.” Teachers were also told to resist curriculum oversight as a political attack. In one session, the AFT admitted the obvious: the pandemic had a “devastating effect” on student literacy.

Yet, the same union that now bemoans literacy loss was a key player in lobbying to keep schools closed during COVID, a decision that fueled the very learning setbacks reflected in the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores. Despite $190 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funds, the data indicate a failing K–12 education system.

Meanwhile, many educators are turning to ethnic studies, often presented through a victim–oppressor lens. The radical ethnic studies group, Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing (XITO), held a 2024 Summer Institute that promoted “decolonial popular education” and urged educators to view teaching as a political weapon. Its sessions featured activists tied to anti-Western and antisemitic rhetoric, with the explicit goal of uniting street activism and classroom instruction. And yes, school districts are footing the bill with taxpayer dollars for teachers to attend.

The common thread across these trainings is the glorification of victimhood and activism, with teachers encouraged to turn students into activists for leftist causes. Rather than instilling confidence and agency, this mindset risks fostering learned helplessness, where students believe success is unattainable without intervention.

Summer training conferences are less about improving learning outcomes and more about transforming classrooms into engines of political activism — serving unions and activist groups, but leaving behind the very students schools are meant to serve.

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Kendall Tietz is an investigative reporter for Defending Education.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.