America's two biggest teachers unions have poured more than a billion dollars into left wing political causes since 2015.
Now a 26 year union insider is confirming from the inside exactly what that money bought.
What this longtime teacher watched his own union chase instead of your kids will make you furious.
A Union Insider Breaks Ranks
Michael Greer belonged to the National Education Association and the California Teachers Association for 26 years.
Picture a special education teacher, the kind of job where patience matters more than politics.
He didn't quit in anger.
He stayed long enough to become a local CTA chapter president.
He stayed long enough to sit on his county's school board.
Then he told Fox News Digital what he'd seen.
Greer says the union he joined to help teachers teach reading, math, and science has become something else entirely.
Union conferences that once trained teachers in classroom instruction now train them in something very different.
The new curriculum is strikes, organizing, and what Greer calls social justice power.
"They are no longer focused on children and what they are learning," Greer said.
That is not a line from a conservative think tank.
That is a longtime insider describing his own union in his own words.
A Billion Dollar Political Machine Wearing a Teacher's Badge
Greer isn't guessing. The numbers back him up.
An education watchdog named the North American Values Institute pegged the NEA's political spending at $547 million over the decade ending in 2025.
The AFT reported $383.2 million in political spending over that same decade.
A separate tally from Parents Defending Education counted more than $660 million in national union spending on left wing causes since 2015, and found the total climbs past a billion dollars once state and local affiliates are counted.
Defending Education's research director summed up what that spending actually represents.
"These entities are a political machine," Rhyen Staley said.
More than $60 million of that money went to something called the State Engagement Fund.
Another $40 million went to the For Our Future Action Fund.
None of it bought a single textbook, a single tutor, or a single reading specialist.
A separate analysis by the Network Contagion Research Institute and the Gevura Fund found something even more damning.
That NEA political machine spends about four dollars on campaigns for every single dollar it spends on the collective bargaining members actually pay dues for.
More than $51 million went to politics in its most recent filing, while collective bargaining got less than $46 million.
Dues Go Up Test Scores Go Down
Here is the part union bosses hope you never connect.
While the money poured into Democrat campaigns, American students fell further behind.
Only about three in ten students nationwide can read or do math at grade level.
That's after more than $3 trillion in federal money has flowed through the Department of Education since it was created in 1979.
In California, 75 percent of eighth graders failed to hit proficient reading scores by 2024.
That's the same CTA that poured $106.4 million of member dues into mostly left wing candidates and causes.
Pacific Research Institute's Lance Izumi has been asking the obvious question for years.
"That didn't move the needle at all," Izumi told The Center Square.
Meanwhile AFT president Randi Weingarten took home more than $514,000 in salary and benefits.
For two years during COVID, she and the AFT pushed hard against reopening schools.
Districts with the strongest unions stayed closed the longest, no matter what COVID was actually doing in that town.
National reading scores haven't been this low since the early 1990s.
Weingarten's response was to blame screens and devices.
She did not mention her own union's role in keeping kids locked out of classrooms.
Teachers Are Already Walking Out the Door
Greer is not alone, and the unions know it.
Florida banned automatic payroll deduction for union dues in 2023.
Membership in the Florida Education Association has fallen 15 percent since.
Arkansas's teachers union lost 36 percent of its dues revenue in a single year after a similar reform.
Idaho and Arizona passed their own versions of the law this year.
The Freedom Foundation's Teacher Freedom Alliance says more than 272,000 teachers have walked away from their old unions altogether.
Over 50,000 of them quit in 2025 by itself.
Greer is still inside by choice.
He says that makes him an outlier among his California colleagues for speaking up.
The Bigger Picture Democrats Don't Want You to See
This is simple once you actually look at it.
Teachers union bosses built a machine that collects dues from classroom teachers and spits out campaign cash for Democrats.
Roughly 98 percent of that federal political money went to one party.
Republicans got scraps.
That is not an accident, and it was never about helping kids read.
It is a permanent fundraising operation wearing a teacher's badge, propped up for decades by state laws that made it nearly impossible to opt out.
Every state that has broken that monopoly has watched teachers flee the union within a single year of getting the choice.
That tells you everything about how many teachers actually wanted to be there in the first place.
Michael Greer just confirmed from the inside what the spending reports already proved from the outside.
Sources:
- Joshua Q. Nelson, "Member of largest teachers union in US claims org is 'no longer focused on children,' only 'political power,'" Fox News, November 7, 2026.
- Aaron Withe and Tina Snider, "Weingarten Blames Screens, Not Herself, For Falling Test Scores," RealClearPolitics via ZeroHedge, 2026.
- Lance Izumi, "California teachers union shortchanges students with left-wing activism," Washington Examiner, June 2, 2026.
- "Critics question unions after $1B in political spending," The Center Square, 2026.
- Fox News Digital, "Watchdog report exposes teachers union political machine funneling $1 billion liberal causes," 2026.
- National Right to Work Committee, "Reforms Help Teachers Ditch Unwanted Unions," 2026.
- Aaron Gifford, "More States Enact New Laws Curbing Teachers Unions," The Epoch Times, 2026.
