As the nation’s largest teachers’ union positions itself squarely against most of President Donald Trump’s education platform, leaders are also working to find more common ground with conservative teachers and communities.
The National Education Association recently took the unprecedented step of dedicating the final day of this year’s representative assembly to training nearly 7,000 delegates and guests in how to organize locally for education issues. Among training on school funding, advocacy, and organizing, state and local advocates also worked to help educators in a largely liberal organization build political bridges.
This spring, 400 self-described Republican union members met with NEA President Becky Pringle and the union’s political strategists about how to better engage and advocate for conservative teachers’ education priorities.
“There’s obviously a paradigm shift where the NEA is looking for more of an outreach to Republican members, because there’s a realization that the focus on one party is not accomplishing everything that they would like to do, particularly in so many red states,” said David Kinsella, the chairman of the NEA’s Republican teacher caucus and a special education and history teacher at Prince William County, Va., public schools.
Union membership tends to be lower in conservative states, many of which have legislative restrictions on union recruitment and collective bargaining.
A 2024 Pew Center study found about 35% of teachers lean Republican, compared to 58% of teachers who lean Democratic.
But only about 1 in 4 GOP teachers say they trust their own party to do a better job ensuring adequate education funding, equal access to high-quality K-12 education for all students, or adequate teacher pay and benefits. By contrast, at least 55% of liberal teachers thought the Democratic Party would do a better job in those areas. And when it comes to shaping school curriculum, more than 40% of teachers, both liberal and conservative, trusted neither party.
“I’m in a very red state,” said Margaret “Peggy” Hoy, the director of the Idaho Education Association. “But it’s more about how we organize around the issues, take the partisanship aside and build relationships with our elected officials, no matter their party. You can build relationships and just remind people that our students, they’re not Democrats or Republicans. Their needs have nothing to do with a party.”
Hoy said she tries to keep her personal beliefs out of her education policy discussions, but said she and other teachers in her state lack training in how to build bridges across the political spectrum.
“Our members are hungry,” said Hoy, “for how to have political conversations to support their profession without having a lot of knowledge on the political side.”
Political tensions rise
It’s a hard row to hoe, amid deepening political divides and a mostly progressive union angry at the Trump administration’s education policies. The recent passage of the controversial federal budget bill, which received almost universal Republican but no Democratic support in the House and Senate, exacerbated political tensions going into the assembly.
“I think Republican members of the NEA probably get a little triggered by the mention of the president if it’s in a context where it’s generally not going to be positive,” Kinsella said. “Republican members have been told things like, ‘Well, if you voted for Trump, that’s morally irresponsible.’ With that kind of opener, nobody’s going to have a good dialogue. We need to try to just focus on issues that have an impact on our students.”
At the union’s annual representative assembly July 3-6, delegates approved five proposals that specifically critiqued the Trump administration’s stances on issues including federal education funding, student activism, and birthright citizenship. Several delegates critiqued Trump by name during debates, while others argued against using the president as a lightning rod in larger education issues.
The U.S. Department of Education fired back in a statement to Education Week: “If the NEA spent as much time focused on improving literacy and math instruction for students as it does on ideological and partisan grandstanding,” said Ellen Keast, the department’s deputy press secretary, “student achievement might not be at a historic low.”
School choice a potential for common ground
Pringle said the union has found some traction in more conservative states around school choice issues. Voters in both Kentucky and Nebraska, two deeply conservative states, voted against private school choice measures in 2024.
“We saw in our wins last year—particularly in Kentucky, because it’s deep red in so many places—it’s important for our Republican members to lift up information about ‘this is what this bill is going to do,’” Pringle said. “We’re making sure that our Republican members are armed with that information, because they’re living it every day. They know the impact [of different education policies], especially in our rural areas.”
Kinsella said advocacy for public school funding, teacher retention, and professional rights tend to garner nonpartisan support and create options for broad coalitions.
For example, in Utah, a coalition of 19 labor groups helped secure a midterm vote to repeal a ban on collective bargaining for public workers that state lawmakers passed this spring.
“It’s been really amazing to put aside egos and do the work for the good of the people,” said Jen Bramson, the secretary/treasurer of the Utah School Employees Association. “If [the ban on collective bargaining] had just attacked educators, it would’ve been a much harder fight, but when they went after everyone at the same time, it was good to come together and show we have each other’s back.”
Even failed advocacy can help build coalitions. An ultimately unsuccessful fight against a billion-dollar private school voucher program in Texas, set to start in the 2026-27 school year, has nonetheless generated broader public interest in education issues, said Ovidia Molina, the president of the Texas Education Association.
“In the community at large, that voucher [program] was a big thing; it brought people out on all sides against vouchers,” Molina said. “We have more allies because of that fight and ... now we have a larger coalition of people that we didn’t even think we could talk to before.”
Read more from Education Week’s coverage of the National Education Association’s 2025 representative assembly.
Here are the NEA’s priorities: Delegates for the largest teachers’ union voted on a host of new business for the year ahead, including measures focused on President Donald Trump’s K-12 initiatives.
“We’re not done yet": NEA President Becky Pringle, who is nearing the end of her final term in office, shared her focus for the coming year. Read the interview.
Outreach toward Republican members: The NEA, a largely liberal organization, is working to find more common ground with conservative teachers and communities. Here’s why.
Engaging new teachers: The NEA is also making strides to better engage early-career teachers.
Meet the Education Support Professional of the Year: The 2025 NEA award went to Andy Markus, an assistant facilities manager in Utah who found a way to get students to stop vandalizing and take pride in their school.
