Unions Against Teachers

On April 28, 2023, the Superintendent of Schools for a small, suburban school district outside of Philadelphia approached a podium awkwardly placed in front of a giant brass eagle statue depicting the school’s mascot. He announced, in Philly staccato, that the local teacher union would launch a project called “I’m Here,” and that he and the school board were in support. After a few minutes emphasizing the school’s commitment to diversity, he introduced the local teacher union president.

The local teacher union president, a tall, white-haired man in a yellow polo shirt and blue lab coat, thanked the superintendent. He pulled from his lab coat a credit-card-sized rectangle, a badge meant to be clipped to one’s shirt, reading “I’m HERE” alongside a 35-stripe rainbow pattern. The union president explained that the badge marks the wearer as a “safe person” to whom LGBTQ+ students can go for “help and resources.” “It is very simple,” he said. “You wear the badge, it tells any student, ‘I stand with you, I’m not going to judge you, I accept you for who you are and I am a person you can talk to and come to.’”

Anyone present at the ten-minute press conference would have immediately realized the implications for teachers. Merits of the program aside, it had the obvious—even intended—effect of pressuring teachers into participating. By declining to wear the badge, a teacher would risk appearing hostile to LGBTQ+ students, or at least something less than “safe.” But there were all sorts of other reasons a teacher might decline: for starters, the badge included a QR code pointing children to explicit information on anal sex and bondage, among other sexual acts.

Unfortunately, this is just the latest episode in a long-running cultural compliance campaign, set in motion by teacher union executives who seem intent on burning their own union to the ground. Instead of protecting teachers and preserving academic freedom in a politically divisive environment, those running the country’s largest teacher unions are actively harming rank-and-file teachers by exposing them to career-ending—and sometimes bankruptcy-inducing—liability.

Pressure from Above

At the press conference announcing the “I’m Here” program, representatives from the state and local teacher union made clear that the program came from their shared national affiliate—and the largest teacher union in the country—the National Education Association (NEA). In fact, the local union president explained that the program “was brought to us” by the NEA’s LGBTQ+ Caucus, a robust organization within the NEA that collects its own dues and attempts to influence NEA policy. The same “I’m Here” program had been introduced by the NEA in Ohio the previous year.

This is not a one-off program. The NEA’s EdJustice initiative, which encourages all kinds of political activism in public school, pushes a similar agenda, insisting that “[o]ur LGBTQ+ students need us to ensure our schools are places where all students are protected and empowered” and asking teachers to sign a “pledge” to “stand against hate and bias.” The NEA’s Read Across America program features LGBTQ+ books for kids, including one in which a 17-year-old girl goes to see a “male impersonator” before visiting a “San Francisco lesbian bar where they being to explore their sexuality and their relationship.” Several others depict LGBTQ+ children hiding their sexuality from their Muslim or Christian families.

Of course, the NEA—and its smaller but more vocal ally, Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers—have long veered left on many of these social issues. What’s most fascinating about their more recent journeys into the progressive wilderness is how ruthlessly they force rank-and-file teachers along for the ride. In a world with new and changing workplace rules, especially surrounding sex and transgender issues, union executives aren’t taking any chances. Instead, they’re creating liability to prevent teachers from defecting.

NEA “Guidance”

Late last year, for example, the NEA released something it called a “Pronoun Guide.” If you’re an NEA member, you already knew this wasn’t a tool to help English teachers with grammar lessons. As it turns out, it’s a really good way to get teachers fired.

The NEA’s Pronoun Guide—intended for members and staff as well as leadership—begins, “[i]n an effort to be more affirming of all, it is important to get out of the habit of assuming pronouns.” Instead, we should “[a]lways use the pronouns of the individual once they have told you what pronouns they use,” whether “She,” “He,” “They,” or “Ze.”

What happens if you don’t know and therefore can’t use someone’s adopted pronouns? The NEA suggests you flush out this information by “[r]ole model[ing] your pronouns” first. You should say: “Hi, my name is Meg and I use she/her/hers pronouns. Could everyone please go around and share their name and pronouns.”

If this rigid dialog doesn’t provoke enough anxiety, the Guide reminds us that the stakes are really, really high. According to the NEA, mixing up someone’s pronoun would “misgender the person,” a deep insult, and it cautions the reader to apologize for any such mistake.

But be careful, says the NEA, not to “over apologize,” a supposedly selfish act itself:

Do not over apologize. Over apologizing could sound like, “Oh gosh I am SO SO sorry, I really am. I know it’s wrong and this must happen all the time. Gosh pronouns are so difficult!” You’re doing a few things when you over apologize. Instead of the moment being about them, you’ve made it about your feelings.

Finally, the NEA suggests that this whole enterprise of actively sussing out other people’s gender identity might get you in trouble to begin with. The Guide warns that “[s]ome transgender, nonbinary, or questioning individuals might not be ‘out’ yet or ready to let others know of their trans status. Others might object to sharing for any number of personal reasons.”

Somehow, the NEA’s “guidance” manages to be both rigid and unhelpful at the same time. Violating the rules could get you into trouble, but so could following them.

Pronouns as Threats

Teachers are already under fire for making pronoun-related mistakes. Peter Vlaming, a Virginia high school French teacher, was fired from his job in 2018 after he tried to protect a transitioning student from accidentally running into a wall by shouting “Don’t let her hit the wall!” According to the complaint, Vlaming had up until that point been extremely accommodating—meeting with the student’s mother and agreeing to use the student’s preferred name even before it was legally changed.

Vlaming’s school had a far-reaching nondiscrimination policy, but it didn’t have its own policy on pronouns. For that, it appeared to rely on a pamphlet prepared by an outside, transgender advocacy organization “regarding protocol with transgender students.” The pamphlet, styled alternatively as a “Fact Sheet,” “Policy Letter,” or “Guidance,” stated that, under federal law, “schools are required to treat transgender students according to their gender identity.” And more specifically, the pamphlet said,

Students have the right to be addressed by the names and pronouns that they use. That’s true even if they haven’t legally changed their name or gender. If teachers and school officials refuse to use the right name and pronouns, they may be breaking the law.

Vlaming was placed on administrative leave on the day he uttered the wrong pronoun, and he was eventually fired after suggesting to the school’s administration that he simply use proper nouns for the student and avoid pronouns altogether. Vlaming lost his lawsuit and now—five years later—awaits a ruling from the Virginia Supreme Court.

Vlaming is hardly alone. Pamela Ricard, a Kansas middle school teacher, was suspended for three days for calling a student “Miss.” Vivian Geraghty, a Missouri middle school teacher, was forced to resign because she was avoiding pronouns by using students’ last names only. John Kluge, an Indiana high school music teacher, was forced to resign when transgender students complained of being “dehumanized” by his practice of calling students by their last names. And Jessica Tapias, a California physical education teacher, was fired for refusing to hide students’ desire to transition from their parents and to let students use their preferred bathroom.

NEA (not) to the Rescue

The NEA could have used Vlaming’s—or Ricard’s, or Geraghty’s, or Kluge’s, or Tapias’s—situation as a chance to emphasize the importance of academic freedom, due process, and empathy for overworked teachers in today’s political environment. I mean, aren’t teacher unions known for protecting even the “bad apples” from getting fired?

But NEA executives have gone in the complete opposite direction. Now, the NEA is the most powerful force working against teachers like Vlaming. Whereas Vlaming’s school had to rely on a NCTE pamphlet, schools today can go straight to the NEA’s rigid Pronoun Guide—one of many other products the NEA is peddling—to show nonconforming teachers are committing cultural malpractice.

In fact, the NEA—which has long pushed the dubious theory that a child has a legal “right to be called by their preferred names and pronouns”—now promotes its own radical “Model Resolution” for school boards to ensure teachers comply. The NEA’s Model Resolution, intended to “create a safe climate for LGBTQ students,” requires that students be allowed “to use requested names and pronouns without requiring a legal name change or medical diagnosis,” and it mandates a reporting procedure so that “students may report bullying and harassment.” It’s a minefield for teachers, each of whom must now deliver hours of unscripted instruction without a pronoun misstep.

Picking a Fight?

Union members want their union to focus on core union functions, not politics. The top reasons employees give for joining a labor union, according to Gallup, are “Better pay and benefits,” “Employee representation/Employee rights,” and “Job Security,” and each of those reasons are shared by around 50% of respondents. Just 5% of respondents, in contrast, cited the broader catch-all, “Positive effect on country.”

The battle over gender is just one front in the war. Last year, in a U.S. Supreme Court case involving a high school football coach who got fired for praying quietly to himself at midfield after games, the NEA and AFT teamed up to advocate against the coach. In a case recently decided by the Supreme Court, the AFL-CIO argued that an employer has the right to ignore employees’ religious rights not to work on the Sabbath.

Union executives seem to have rejected the most important part of their job, preferring instead to fight on the front lines of a laborious culture war. But in their zeal, union executives are pressing rank-and-file employees into service, threatening new reasons to fire and sue them if they refuse.

All of this is surely taking its toll on teachers and unions alike. The NEA and AFT reported a combined loss of nearly 60,000 members during the 2021-2022 school year, after losing more than 80,000 the year before. You might think these losses would be sobering to union executives, but according to Americans for Fair Treatment, a nonprofit helping public employees hold their union accountable, the NEA continues to spend $2 on politics for every $1 it spends to represent its members.

Conclusion

Many teachers comply, despite disagreement with the union, simply to avoid perceived or actual liability. Among those who don’t, many would rather quit than get dragged to court or end up in the local news over a political dustup.

Perhaps that’s partly why, according to the NEA’s internal polling, “[a] staggering 55 percent of educators are thinking about leaving the profession earlier than they had planned.” The NEA cites as the cause an “unprecedented level of strain, made worse by recent dire staff shortages.”

NEA executives, who certainly bear some of the responsibility for this strain, continue to disserve teachers and put them in precarious legal positions. The scary thing is, these union executives seem to be doing it on purpose.