In the wake of the controversy surrounding the National Education Association’s national meeting in Portland, Oregon, Republican U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Rep. Mark Harris, R-N.C., have introduced the National Education Association Charter Repeal Act to revoke the federal charter granted to the NEA in 1906. Conservative media have laid into the NEA over several approved business items that they correctly characterize as reflecting liberal political views.
For one, conservatives are unhappy over NEA’s Item 63, which characterizes some recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations as “kidnapping”.
This issue currently looms largest in Southern California where immigrants, with papers or without, are deeply woven into the fabric of our economy and society. The average person interacts with them continually in myriad ways, and without a thought to their immigration status.
Today, armed and often unmasked, unidentified men are grabbing unsuspecting, law-abiding mothers and fathers and swirling them away to God knows where. AI’s definition of kidnapping is the “unlawful taking and carrying away of a person against their will…it involves both seizure and confinement, and can be accomplished through force, fraud, or threats.” Yes, I’m aware that these ICE actions are “lawful” – many of them, anyway – but for those targeted by ICE, it feels like kidnapping, and the NEA description is not unreasonable.
NEA Item 59 defends birthright citizenship. Recently conservatives were outraged over new research indicating that as many as one out of every four U.S. public school children could be a so-called “anchor baby” – a child who was born here and is thus a citizen but whose parents were undocumented. Joy Pullmann, executive editor of The Federalist, says these parents are “defrauding” Americans and blames public school educators for “hid[ing] illegal aliens and anchor babies from federal law enforcement.”
Conservative opposition to birthright citizenship and “anchor babies” has become so widespread that even Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani – the one man in America who everybody likes – isn’t immune. An LA-area publication recently ran a piece from Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst Joe Guzzardi called Dodgers Superstar Welcomes Anchor Baby in which Ohtani is criticized because he “chose to have his child born in the U.S. instead of Japan.”
In defending birthright citizenship, the NEA is simply doing what all teachers and teachers unions should be doing – standing up for our students. Personally, I resent that the high school seniors I teach – whose character and intelligence I would put up against any students in the United States – are labeled “anchor babies.”
Conservatives are also criticizing the NEA over Item 66, which commits the union to oppose the Trump administration’s moves to downsize or close the federal Department of Education, and labels these efforts a “racist attempt to destroy public education.”
Republicans today wage war on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and sound the alarm at the mere mention of the word “racism.” However, to be fair, the American left has brought some of this on itself – “racist” is a harsh word that is sometimes thrown around carelessly in American political discourse, particularly by the left.
In this case, however, there is a basis for the accusation. The overwhelming majority of Black and Latino children attend public schools, and a large portion of the public school student body nationwide consists of Black and Latino students. Corey DeAngelis of the CATO Institute says, “calling the abolition of a federal bureaucracy ‘racist’ is absurd,” but the NEA believes that the downsizing and possible elimination of the Department of Education will reduce funds for education and harm public schools.
Whether this proves to be the case or not, it is certainly not an unreasonable belief – in fact, some funds to help minority children, such as money for the Migrant Education Program, which helps migratory children graduate high school, as well as English Language Acquisition State Grants, have been impounded by the Trump Administration, and those programs’ futures are in doubt.
Is it “absurd” to label knowingly implementing a policy that will disproportionately harm Black and Latino schoolchildren “racist”?
Harris condemns Item 60, which declares that the “NEA pledges to defend democracy against Trump’s embrace of fascism.”
It is certainly true that Americans on both the left and the right use “Nazi” or “fascist” way too much. The right-wing satirical site The Babylon Bee had a point about Trump haters with their pro-Trump January 11, 2021, post “Evil Fascist Dictator Censored And Voted Out Of Office.”
While Trump’s “embrace of fascism” is an exaggeration, he is a right-wing populist with authoritarian tendencies who seeks to expand the imperial presidency. He governs largely via executive order, seeks to circumvent judicial review, and clearly neither likes nor respects the constraints our democratic system puts on him.
When Trump lost the November 2020 election, like many people, I expected he would try to artificially extend his presidency. After major news outlets declared Biden the winner on Nov. 7, I told my students, “now we wait for the Reichstag Fire…probably a buffoonish version.” Trump didn’t disappoint, as we saw on Jan. 6.
Trump openly admires former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who is a supporter of the brutal, fascistic dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. That regime killed, tortured, and/or disappeared tens of thousands. Bolsonaro has praised the 1964 coup which overthrew Brazil’s left-wing parliamentary government, and today stands trial for allegedly plotting a coup himself.
Numerous Brazilian military officers have testified that Bolsonaro, after losing the 2022 election, had been planning an autogolpe (self-coup) to keep himself in power. Yet Trump likes this would-be strongman so much that he recently threatened tariffs on Brazil simply because they’re putting Bolsonaro on trial.
While teachers unions are a grand bugaboo for American conservatives, among the American right’s endless carping I’ve never once seen a serious examination of why teachers are loyal to their unions. But those of us who actually teach understand that it is the teachers unions that make it easier for teachers to do our jobs and, by extension, serve our students. While I don’t agree with everything the NEA and other teachers unions do or say, conservatives’ relentless hostility is unwarranted.
