Every summer, the National Education Association gathers its delegates to decide what the country's largest teachers' union will do next. 

The NEA represents nearly three million teachers nationwide and this year some 7,000 of them met in Denver over the past several days. The Assembly is the NEA's highest-level decision-making body, which is why the agenda and issues its members bring to the floor deserve close scrutiny.

This year, NEA delegates brought to the floor a new business item calling for the 'impeachment, conviction, and removal' of President Donald Trump. The proposal, which was not adopted, would have directed the union to advocate for his ouster and to organize a so-called National March on Washington before the 2026 midterm elections.

The price tag would have run than $5.2 million.

The NEA agenda turned stranger from there.

Fifty delegates submitted an item that would commit the NEA to campaign against what they called a Trump-funded 'fascist insurrection' and the building of an 'American Gestapo.'

Huh?

Another item proposed would send newly-elected NEA President Princess Moss to lobby the Congressional Black Caucus for what the union labels 'Educational Reparations.' Such a plan would reduce student loan debt, steer more money toward historically Black colleges and dismantle the property-tax system that funds local schools.

Such goals are not without merit, but how exactly would they address far more crucial concerns such as teacher pay and classroom safety, or help a struggling child learn to read?

Compare the NEA's priorities against the real emergency in American education and they appear even more farcical.

Some 40 percent of fourth graders read below proficiency for their grade level, according to 2025 US Education Department data. Among eighth graders, only one in three read at grade level. Twelfth grade reading scores have hit the lowest point ever recorded.

These are not abstractions. Behind these statistics are children who are being failed by the system and teenagers who are graduating from high school without the skills to handle college, get a job or cast a ballot.

That is the crisis that should have dominated the NEA gathering in Denver. Instead, it was mostly glossed over.

A serious union would have thrown its weight behind safer schools, stronger discipline, real pay for the highest-performing teachers and reading instruction that works. It would have driven every spare dollar toward tutoring and phonics to help every kid read at grade level.

Instead, delegates debated a multimillion-dollar march to oust a democratically elected president, proving that partisan politics matter more than students to the NEA.

But most teachers are not radicals. They are not sitting at their kitchen table after a night of grading, plotting to bankroll an impeachment march. Rather, they are focused on failing students, holding classrooms together, answering worried parents and buying school supplies with their own money.

America's teachers deserve better. They deserve a professional organization dedicated to improving classrooms, not radical causes. And, most of all, they deserve honesty and transparency from their union about how exactly their dues are spent.

But transparency is what the NEA refuses to provide, forcing outside watchdog groups to pry the numbers loose. 

Defending Education recently found that the nation's two largest teachers unions have reportedly funneled more than $1 billion into left-wing causes over the past decade, including roughly $669 million from the NEA and its counterpart to progressive groups, Democratic committees and campaigns to kill school choice. 

The NEA alone poured $7.2 million into a Kentucky group fighting school vouchers and $4.3 million into a Nebraska drive to repeal school choice, all with money teachers were told would go toward their profession. Despite these reports receiving widespread media attention, the NEA did not respond to the specific allegations.

The NEA is likely to counter criticism of the Denver Assembly by insisting that proposals such as the anti-Trump march or reparations campaigns are the result of democratic procedures, suggested by delegates who are free to debate all kinds of things at annual get-togethers.

But the NEA should disclose the true breadth of these proposals, their entire cost and commitment. They must fully inform members, who can then decide whether this is the outcome they desire from a union that reaches into their pay checks each month.

NEA activists have every right to their own politics. The real question cuts deeper: Has a union that claims to represent educators become a political operation that treats the classroom as an afterthought?

American children are in an academic crisis. Parents see it, teachers see it, employers see it. And student test scores incontestably prove it.

None of this is a sudden lurch. The NEA cast its first presidential endorsement in 1976, backing Jimmy Carter after he pledged to create the federal Department of Education, and it has lined up behind the Democratic nominee in every election since. The Trump impeachment push in Denver was simply the newest chapter in a fifty-year habit.

In Denver, the NEA chose politics once again. 

Ryan Walters is CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance and Former Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction