Dear Editor,

In the last two months, the National Education Association (NEA) released its 2025 Handbook, the document that sets the goals and priorities for the nation’s largest teachers’ union for the coming year. And then, just as quickly, it was gone. Within 24 hours, the handbook was quietly removed from its website.

Why? What was so controversial that it had to be scrubbed from public view? Fortunately, a copy was preserved before it disappeared, and what it contains should give every educator, parent and taxpayer pause.

What the NEA Is Promoting

The handbook calls for “racial quotas over merit” – a direct rejection of merit-based advancement – and instructs that “all educators must acknowledge the existence of white supremacy culture as a primary root cause of institutional racism, structural racism and white privilege.”

Most troubling, it revises the way Holocaust education is framed, removing explicit reference to Jewish people as the primary target of Nazi genocide and instead lumping all victims together under generic categories of “faiths, ethnicities, races and genders.” For many, this was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back — and possibly the reason the NEA pulled the handbook offline. If so, perhaps it was due to the overwhelming pushback from members, Jewish leaders, and concerned citizens.

A Union That Rejected “Student Learning”

This isn’t the first time NEA’s priorities have raised eyebrows. Back in 2019, a business item was introduced that would have made student learning the priority of the association, asking every proposed action to be measured by the question: “How does this promote the development of students as lifelong reflective learners?”

Shockingly, the NEA’s own delegates voted that proposal down. Since then, what have they elevated instead? New Business Items and resolutions advancing gender-affirming care, radical Social-Emotional Learning frameworks, anticapitalist rhetoric, “Defund the Police,” “Stand with Palestine,” and even resolutions calling President Trump a “fascist” (spelled incorrectly, no less).

What About Local Teachers?

Here in Mesa County, many of our teachers are members of the Mesa Valley Education Association (MVEA), which is affiliated with the NEA. Do these teachers — and the community that supports them — know what they are funding with their membership dues?

We are told time and again that teachers are underpaid and under-supported. Yet thousands of dollars in dues are sent upstream every year to a national organization advancing policies that have little to do with reading, writing and arithmetic — and much to do with politics and ideology.

The Questions We Must Ask

It is time for some straight answers:

• Do MVEA leaders agree with these national NEA stances?
• Did local delegates vote for these resolutions?
• Do they denounce or distance themselves from them?
• Are these ideological priorities being taught — explicitly or implicitly — in our classrooms?

Parents, teachers and taxpayers deserve clarity. If the NEA can quietly remove its handbook from public view, then local unions should be willing to state where they stand publicly.

Our students’ education should never be used as a political experiment. Mesa County deserves a teachers’ association that prioritizes learning — not national agendas that divide communities and distract from the fundamental mission of education.

Austin DeWitt

Grand Junction