Updated: The story has been updated to include a response from the U.S. Department of Education.
“There is no way I can come to the largest labor union of the country and act like we are in normal times—we are not,” President Becky Pringle told more than 5,600 National Education Association delegates sprawled across the Oregon Convention Center here Thursday.
The NEA’s annual representative assembly, typically held over Independence Day weekend, opened with a particularly revolutionary air, as representatives of the union’s more than 2.8 million members debated the educational fallout of the first six months of President Donald Trump’s second administration and a wave of conservative state legislation that unions have said would gut public education and teacher professionalism.
“We are educators, not lawyers, and we are being forced to become both. Instead of focusing on our students, we are spending time decoding legislation and defending ourselves against laws designed to undermine our rights and our safety,” said Valerie Hannah, the president of the Springdale, Ark., Education Association, who noted teachers in the state have in recent years lost collective bargaining and due process protections, as well as the right to strike.
“One by one, the foundations of our profession are being stripped away,” she said. “If they can do it in my state, then they can do it in every state.”
Delegates rearranged the four-day meeting’s typical business schedule to vote on similar items together and clear time to devote the last day to training in organizing advocacy and protest strategies in their home states.
More than a third of this year’s delegates are people of color, and Pringle urged members to fight the Trump administration’s directives against diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives and programs in their schools.
“We cannot allow Trump or anyone else to reduce these sacred values to a simple three-letter slur,” she said.
After multiple close votes, delegates decided late in the assembly for the national union’s materials to use “fascism"—a reference to authoritarian and hyper-nationalist political ideology—to “characterize Donald Trump’s program and actions.” It’s not clear yet how and when the term would be used.
Ellen Keast, the deputy press secretary for the U.S. Department of Education, said in a statement, “If the NEA spent as much time focused on improving literacy and math instruction for students as it does on ideological and partisan grandstanding, student achievement might not be at a historic low.”
The group also amended some proposals to focus on specific issues, such as preventing the U.S. Department of Education’s elimination.
“Focusing on [Trump] and giving him things that he can talk about ... is distracting from the actual issue, which is the intent to destroy the Department of [Education],” said Kizzy Nicholas, a learning support teacher at State College Area school district in Pennsylvania. “He’s not the first person to try to eliminate the Department of Ed. ... We need to make sure that we are focusing on the problem and hearing our members who might be Trump supporters.”
NEA delegates vote on a wide range of measures
Over the course of the representative assembly, NEA delegates are tasked with setting the priorities for the nation’s largest teachers’ union for the next year, as well as approving the budget and electing union officers. It takes just 50 delegates to propose a new business item, which directs the NEA to do something for a year.
This year, delegates considered new business items on a range of issues, from workplace concerns like teacher safety and the role of artificial intelligence in education to broader community issues including immigration and housing. As they voted on the proposals, Pringle noted the cost to members. By the time the group had voted on all of its new business items, it had pledged more than $1.7 million to the new initiatives.
Last year’s annual representative assembly ended abruptly when NEA staff members went on strike, leaving the NEA executive board to set the budget and decide on nearly 100 business items that could not be considered during the shortened assembly. Some of those items were re-introduced and voted on by delegates this year.
Among the few items approved by delegates last year was the NEA’s first guidance on the use of artificial intelligence in schools. At this year’s assembly, delegates voted to create model contract language on issues like the ethical use of AI; professional development for teachers on AI literacy, data privacy, and preventing bias; and protections for jobs that may be affected by developing AI technology.
“I think if you’re a teacher thinking, what’s the biggest issue that we’re going to be grappling with in the next few years, it could be artificial intelligence,” said David Kinsella, a special education and history teacher at the Prince William County, Va., public schools. “How are we really going to manage this? Are we going to make it a tool where the students can be very transparent about how they’re going to use it? Because we know we’re getting a lot of work that’s not produced by the student.”
The assembly also voted to develop resources and training for teachers on how to update their lessons and assessments in response to students’ use of generative AI.
Protecting immigrant students and teachers
Immigration issues also proved a hot-button issue. Delegates voted to partner with other labor and immigrant rights groups to oppose immigration raids in schools and defend students’ free speech rights.
“When we go back to our schools and our communities, we’re not just going to register people to vote,” said Adarene Hoag, a resource specialist at Oakland Unified school district in California, who sponsored the action. “We are going do what is necessary to protect each other, to protect our immigrant students.”
The delegates also narrowly approved support for the more than 15,000 immigrant teachers working under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or Temporary Protected Status, which provide working rights and temporary protection from deportation for undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children or from unsafe situations in their home countries.
The Trump administration repeatedly has moved to roll back protections from both programs, and the delegates voted to create a toolkit for local unions to help those immigrant teachers gain permanent status through their workplaces.
“Our [immigrant teachers] need to feel confident that they can work long term in the school communities that they serve and love,” said Maria Miranda, the elementary vice president of the United Teachers Los Angeles, who sponsored the new business item.
NEA delegates focused on teacher safety
Delegates also discussed the need for more physical protection for teachers.
While federal data show reported threats to and physical assaults on teachers declined from 2011 to 2022, violence against educators has ticked up in the years since, amid rising student behavior and mental health problems in the classroom. Four out of 5 teachers now report having been verbally threatened by students, and more than 3 in 5 teachers said they have been physically attacked by students.
Delegates greenlit the development of a report on current protection laws for educators and support staff across states, and directed the NEA’s legislative committee to develop a strategy to improve workplace protections, leave, and mental health supports for educators who experience trauma because of an attack at school.
The delegates also voted to partner with mental health experts to develop best practices for teachers on how to respond to “extreme behaviors” in early childhood and primary grade students, including physical attacks, self-harm, and sexual harassment of other students or teachers.
Other topics on the table included cursive instruction, cellphones, and more
The delegates separately voted to create a new microcredential for teacher professional development on instructing more advanced multilingual students in “transition[ing] from social fluency to academic proficiency.”
Delegates rejected calls for NEA to promote cursive writing or advocate against grade inflation, but they directed the NEA to develop guides for local unions to promote affordable housing policies, single-payer health care, and recovery efforts for schools following natural disasters.
Ashley Olson, an inclusion teacher and president of the Maui chapter of the Hawaii State Teachers Association, said she continues to drive through a massive burn zone to teach at Lahainaluna High School two years after wildfires devastated the community. She called for better integration of community and school disaster recovery efforts.
“As educators, we console and counsel, we feed and we educate kids, and we provide peace of mind to parents who know their kids are in a safe place while they work or they meet with insurers or attorneys, Red Cross, FEMA, and public officials,” Olson said. “Folks see the cost to rebuild buildings, but schools help to rebuild lives.”
Delegates also directed the NEA to collect data on a range on issues, from recess and pension policies to violence against educators.
The delegates ultimately voted down a proposal to build a database of policies around the use of cellphones in schools, but Connecticut Education Association President Kate Dias said teachers need to take a stronger public stance in policy debates over the issue.
“We have allowed for a very long time for the people like Jonathan Haidt [author of The Anxious Generation] and other so-called experts to decide what happens in our schools, to determine what are the policies and the impact on our children and in our classrooms,” Dias said. “We continue to give our expertise away to other parties. And why do we do that? I don’t know. ... We need to be experts.”
