The Closed Classroom, Part 3. Our third installment in a four-part investigative series on America’s teachers unions. Read the series introduction here.
The American Federation of Teachers represents 1.8 million members: teachers, healthcare workers, public employees, retirees. Their pension contributions, accumulated over decades of classroom work, are pooled into public pension funds with at least $4 trillion in assets.
Pension trustees have a legal obligation called fiduciary duty: to maximize returns for the beneficiaries. Instead, the teachers unions have been advancing political causes and pressuring corporate boards into political positions favored by union leadership.
The American Federation of Teachers represents 1.8 million members: teachers, healthcare workers, public employees, retirees.
Their pension contributions, accumulated over decades of classroom work, are pooled into public pension funds with at least $4 trillion in assets.
A Pattern Emerges
Last week, school choice advocate Corey DeAngelis posted a video on X of AFT President Randi Weingarten describing how she had pressured Target to oppose ICE in Minnesota. The clip was originally surfaced this winter by Stu Smith of the Manhattan Institute and covered by Heritage and the Washington Times.
In the video, Weingarten says this:
“There’s two times for retailers that are really big times for them. One is Christmas and the other is back to school. So first, using our pension funds, but also using ourselves as consumers… to try to actually get these corporations or the moneyed interests, the capital interests in the country to be far more aligned with workers.”
That is the strategy, in her own words: using our pension funds. What follows is what that has actually meant.
September 2023: GM and Stellantis
During the United Auto Workers strike, Weingarten wrote to AFT pension trustees overseeing over $660 million in GM stock and hundreds of millions of euros in Stellantis stock. She told them to highlight the automakers’ “investment risks” until they bargained on terms favorable to the UAW.
While the framing appeared to be fiduciary, this was all about politics.
January 2025: Davos
At the World Economic Forum, on a panel about social media, Weingarten told a room of global executives:
“We have used the economic power sometimes against a place like Facebook or others to say, actually, you have to stand with what is moral and what is legal.”
Her strategy is working- we have unelected bureacrats and NGOs pressuring public sector companies to bend at the knee or else… By weaponizing pension funds to bully corporations the unions are using money from teachers’ paychecks as leverage for a political crusade. It’s a betrayal of trust,a professional organization has been transformed into a tool for ideological warfare.
February and April 2025: Tesla
Weingarten wrote to BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, and TIAA in February, and then to more than 75 state and city chief fiduciary officers in April. She told them to “urgently review” their Tesla holdings.
In an interview with Reuters, Weingarten said the quiet part out loud: her concern was that “because of the politics, and the proximity Mr. Musk has to Mr. Trump,” fund managers were “standing down… rather than doing their jobs.”
Once again, she framed it as a fiduciary responsibility, but this was all about politics.
February 2026: Target
On February 1, 2026, Michael Fiddelke arrived for his first day as CEO of Target. Waiting for him was a letter from Weingarten, and issued as a formal press release.
Weingarten writes that AFT members “directly own nearly 7 million shares of Target stock” and tells Fiddelke that Target is “extremely vulnerable to extensive brand damage and human capital consequences” if it does not publicly demand that ICE leave Minnesota.
Within 48 hours CBS News, Modern Retail, and IBTimes had picked up the story. By March, the AFT had passed an official resolution urging its 1.8 million members to “shop local” for back-to-school. The campaign expanded to Home Depot and Amazon.
Various estimates put Target’s market value loss due to AFT boycots since fall 2025 (after Target dropped their DEI policy) in the range of $12 billion.
Teachers in Phoenix did not vote on this. The pension trustees did not vote on this.
The Dues
The pension capital is the leverage. The dues are the engine.
Earlier in this series, I cited the older Defending Education number: $254 million in member dues moved to outside political organizations since 2015. Last month, Defending Education released an updated investigation, with coverage by Fox News, RedState, and others.
The new figure is nearly $670 million in member dues and PAC funds from the AFT and NEA combined since August 2015. Including state and local affiliates, the figure passes $1 billion.
A partial list, all from the federal LM-2 filings:
$85 million to Democratic Party entities
$60 million to the State Engagement Fund, connected to the Democracy Alliance
$44 million to For Our Future Action Fund
$7.2 million to Protect Our Schools Kentucky to fight a voucher law
$4.3 million to Support Our Schools Nebraska to repeal a school choice law
$1.75 million to the Midwest Academy, training activists for May Day 2026
In the 2024 election cycle, 99.89% of the AFT’s reported political contributions went to Democrats. The NEA: 98.24%.
A teacher in Phoenix or Pittsburgh or Houston has her dues deducted before she sees the paycheck. The money is pooled and disbursed by union leadership to organizations she may never have heard of. Pass-through entities like the Sixteen Thirty Fund make the trail untraceable by design.
Defending Education President Nicole Neily, who oversaw the investigation, put it this way:
“It’s time to dispense with the myth that unions care whatsoever about teachers’ best interests. Educators are victims of a bait-and-switch: instead of their dues going to advocate for increased pay or improved working environments, they’re being spent advancing a hard-left political agenda, underwriting causes such as climate change, gender activism, and abortion (as well as supporting progressive politicians at all levels).”
What Replaced Learning
In 2019, NEA delegates voted down a resolution that would have made student learning the union’s top priority. The full text is now part of the federal record in S.2428.
Six years later, in July 2025, NEA President Becky Pringle gave the keynote at the union’s annual Representative Assembly in Portland. She gave delegates seven verbs:
Educate. Communicate. Organize. Mobilize. Litigate. Legislate. Elect.
These are verbs for social change, not for school. And, once again, children’s best interests are not part of the picture, as we learned during the protracted pandemic school closures.
Six years ago, these same union leaders kept America’s schools closed. They edited federal reopening guidance. The kindergartners of 2020 are now in middle school. Reading scores for that cohort are the worst on record.
The unions did not pause to repair the damage. They reinvested the political muscle the closures gave them.
The same leadership that decided your seven-year-old could not attend kindergarten is now deciding which Fortune 500 companies should be punished for which political positions, using teachers’ pension money to do it.
Subscribe for Part 4 next week.
The four parts of this series are free to every subscriber. Restore Childhood is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit funded by readers, not advertisers. If this work matters to you, become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers get exclusive access to something connected to this work in the weeks ahead.
For more on how the teachers unions fueled the school closures to usher in social change, Watch 15 DAYS on Amazon Prime | Apple TV | Google Play | All links
This is infuriating to say the least. Thank you for sharing these behind the scenes details. Homeschooling really seems like the way to starve the union!
Generational culture shock has caught up with me this afternoon.
She is a poster child for myofunctional therapy. I have never seen such a bad adult tongue tie. If children depend on you, I have a post on it,
https://mymontessorihouse.substack.com/p/myofunctional-therapy-for-kids-safe
Have you noticed how the educational and medical systems have normalized facial deformities that lead to problems with breathing and speaking? Instead of nutritional intervention and physical therapy for the jaw, they have the kids doing various behavioral therapies with medication.