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by Fred Lucas, for the Daily Signal
The Vermont teachers union formally recognizes students’ right to play sports based on “gender identity,” rather than biological sex.
The National Education Association Vermont chapter also asserts that the state’s public school teachers must acknowledge the nation’s “white supremacy culture” as responsible for “white privilege” that is “conferred irrespective of wealth, gender, and other factors.”
It also supports sanctuary jurisdictions for illegal immigrants.
The parental advocacy group Defending Education obtained a list of resolutions adopted at the Vermont NEA 2025 Representative Assembly.
“The fact that the state-level teachers union requires its members to ‘acknowledge’ that white supremacy culture permeates society shows just how ideologically captured the organization is,” Rhyen Staley, director of research at Defending Education, told the Daily Signal in a statement.
“It should be deeply concerning for parents that members of the union are to accept the far-left conspiracy theory and to become activists while roughly half of the state’s third graders are reading at below-proficient levels.” Staley added.
One resolution was a “Gender Equity in Athletic Programs” resolution.
“Vermont-NEA believes that at all educational levels female and male students must have equal opportunity to participate in athletic programs,” the resolution begins. “The association urges that athletic funds for facilities, equipment, and remuneration of staff be allocated equally between female and male programs.”
But it then takes a sharp turn.
“Vermont-NEA believes that all should have the opportunity to play recreational sports in accordance with their gender identity, irrespective of their gender assigned at birth, and to have their personal dignity respected.”
By 2025, many politicians and corporations were backing away from the pro-transgender movement embraced in previous years.
The 33-page resolution also addresses more-traditional education and teacher concerns such as school financing, improving and maintaining schools, pay structure, and distance learning.
But the resolutions also hit several key political points, such as concerns about what the union perceives as a “white supremacy culture.”
“Vermont-NEA believes that to achieve racial and social justice, educators must acknowledge the existence of White supremacy culture as a primary root cause of institutional racism, structural racism, and White privilege,” the resolution says.
The document defines an educator as any staff person who works directly with students.
“Additionally, the association believes that the norms, standards, and organizational structures manifested in White supremacy culture perpetually exploit and oppress people of color and serve as detriments to racial justice,” the resolution continues.
“Further, the invisible, racial benefits of white privilege, which are automatically conferred irrespective of wealth, gender, and other factors, severely limit opportunities for people of color and impede full achievement of racial and social justice,” the resolution says. “Therefore, the association will actively advocate for social and educational strategies fostering the eradication of institutional racism and white privilege perpetuated by white supremacy culture.”
The union’s resolution on immigration says it “deplores the hardships imposed on families when family members, especially parents, guardians, or caretakers, are detained and/or deported for immigration status offenses and thereby separated from their children, many of whom are U.S. citizens.”
“Additionally, the Association supports the creation of sanctuary cities and the right of these cities to refrain from asking persons about their immigration status and to disregard Federal requests to detain individuals who are undocumented,” the resolution continues.
Another resolution on climate change says the Vermont NEA “recognizes the scientific consensus that global climate change is largely caused by human activity, resulting in significant, measurable damage to the Earth and its inhabitants.”
Fred Lucas is senior investigative reporter for the Daily Signal. He is the author of “The Myth of Voter Suppression: The Left’s Assault on Clean Elections.”
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Categories: Education
Is that why they need Prop 3? They can pick and choose new members?
There was a time when the public-sector unions were more concerned about their members employment rights than in pushing woke social policy. Mission creep has the teachers’ unions them the propaganda bidding of the left and shoveling money into democrat party coffers, while they market themselves as being “for the children”. Their influence in society is “union privilege”, running on taxpayer money…truly sickening.
THESE PEOPLE ARE TEACHING OUR KIDS !!!! ????We have to Clean House at VT ED Dept.
Good luck getting rid of the unions. They have their foot in the door.
https://issuesinsights.com/2026/09/18/time-to-file-a-rico-case-against-teachers-unions/
Thank you for posting that. Spot on.
I have to laugh. That graph in the article classifies Vermont as a swing state instead of a Democrat (blue) state.
The union needs to be disbanded at all costs. They are bankrupting our state, without producing any tangible results. Our future depends on it. Thanks Bernard, and your boy Scott, towing right behind catching the scraps.
Some things to think about.
Time To File A RICO Case Against Teachers’ Unions
I & I Editorial Board
September 18, 20262 comments
If you want evidence that teachers’ unions are nothing more than taxpayer-funded left-wing rackets, look no further than the evidence dug up by the Progressive Policy Institute — a group founded by centrist Democrats.
The stronger the union presence in a state, the worse students do on literacy instruction.
It’s no secret that, despite the fact that taxpayers fork over roughly $1 trillion every year to finance public K-12 schools, math and reading scores are in decline.
“Children have lost so much ground, they not only know less than their counterparts did a decade ago; older children know as little as they have this century,” notes the PPI’s Rachel Canter. A new Gallup poll finds that just 32% of adults are “completely” or “somewhat” satisfied with the U.S. school system, down from 51% in 2019.
But that broad brush obscures important differences. Namely, that some states are doing much better than others. And what do these states have in common? Teachers’ unions are weaker.
Wall Street Journal (screenshot)
“When my colleagues and I compared the Fordham teachers’ union strength ranking to ExcelinEd’s early literacy tracker, we found a strong, negative correlation between the two — the more powerful the unions, the fewer literacy policy principles the state had adopted,” Canter wrote in the Wall Street Journal. (See the chart at right.)
Sure, there are some outliers, but even those prove the point that teachers’ unions are a racket. As Canter notes, needed reforms in New Mexico, Maryland and Massachusetts came “despite pushback from their unions.”
The Massachusetts literacy reform bill requiring “evidence-based literacy instruction” in public schools has been described as “the greatest legislative loss for the teachers’ union in a decade.”
It’s not as though there isn’t evidence that these reforms work. Mississippi embarked on a comprehensive, science-based literacy effort more than a decade ago, and saw its students go from the bottom of the barrel nationwide to at or near the top 10 in reading and math.
So let’s see if we have this right. Each year, teachers’ unions collect more than $700 million in dues, all paid by taxpayers, and promise to “champion high-quality public education” and “fulfill the purpose of public education,” according to the mission statements of the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association.
Yet they wage wars against reforms that they know will improve education outcomes. Not just literacy programs, but merit pay, school choice, and countless other common-sense reforms.
So, what are these unions doing with all that money they collect if not fighting to fulfill their stated missions?
Turns out, they are far more interested in getting Democrats elected and pushing far-left causes.
Earlier this year, a report from Defending Education found that national teachers’ unions “have directed roughly $669 million toward left-wing political groups, advocacy organizations and campaigns since 2015,” a number that tops $1 billion when you count state and local affiliates.
This includes more than $2.4 million to the far-left Center for American Progress, $7 million to the Democratic Governors Association, nearly $26 million to the Democrats’ House Majority PAC and $32 million to the Senate Majority PAC. And, maybe because they figure it will cut down on class sizes, more than $400,000 to pro-abortion groups.
In 2024, the NEA and AFT gave more than $6 million to Democrats and less than $60,000 to Republicans.
Add it all up, and you have organizations that extort money from taxpayers to finance a protection racket for themselves, their Democratic patrons, and various far-left causes (which few taxpayers would support), while engaging in fraud by pretending to be looking out for the interests of public-school students.
We’re not lawyers, but we’d say that classifies as a criminal racket under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
I thought this might be interesting to share and discuss. There are other organizations that should face this same scrutiny in Vermont.
How do you file a RICO case against them??? Do you go to the justice department? And who exactly does that? Can private citizens do it? Or do we need legislators?
Let’s get this straight. Gender is not “assigned” at birth. It is “recorded” at birth.
Organize a mass statewide protest refusing to pay property tax that funds these evil people to decouple paying for education via property tax…for starters.
If you refuse to pay your property taxes, the town/state takes your property and puts it up for sale. Don’t think you really own your property. They got you by the you-know-whats.
The race-baiting is old but this pathetic cabal of child predators hasn’t gotten the memo. My Vermont forebears lived in abject poverty for generations — the whole racist liberal destruction of America and our state must be opposed. There is no such thing as “systemic racism” (a never-proven assumption) except the obvious systemic racism in Vermont AGAINST white people, regardless of wealth, merit, rtc. It is MLK Jr. in exact reverse, and such people have no business teaching ANYONE ELSE ANYTHING. They have failed at critical thought and breached public trust. They are not qualified to teach kindergarten math — they’d send Drag Queens to slobber on others’ children instead.
A great argument to prohibit public employees from unionizing. Fire them all and stop contributions to their pensions! My border collies can teach humans better than these criminal creepers.
Teaching is no longer the honorable and prestigious vocation it once was. It is now firmly allied with the anti American dark side.
Taught in Vermont for thirty years. I only joined the teacher’s union my first year. Because I did not agree with them after that first yea, I never joined again. I would never join today with what they are pushing!
I believe many, if not most teachers agree with you.
It (NEA) continues to get worse every year, and continue to make Vermont more and more unaffordable. Primarily due to property taxes. They should be ashamed about the resulting test scores.
They’re not ashamed at all because teaching isn’t their objective. Their objective is communist ideology, keeping themselves in power, and getting communists elected into office. Read the I&I article someone posted above.
Again I ask why am I forced into paying for the Marxist indoctrination of Vermont children? Property taxes have to be decoupled from the public school system! Its no longer about educating kids. I should not be forced with confiscation of my property for no return on the property taxes! Raise up Vermonters, refuse to pay taxes for schools that are not teaching but instead indoctrination by pedophiles!
Of course nothing from the NEA on improving student academic outcomes when you can teach kids how to cut off their weiners
We reject school budgets not just because of the money, but also because of what they spend it on.
The NEA/VEA are the single biggest enemy of our children, the more money we pour into “education” the more damage that they will do.
We are definitely funding the left wing agenda with our taxes.
This is already been banned. And anyone that is in this corrupt decision should be fired and never allowed back into a school system again. The woke is over. There are only two genders and if you can’t accept science, then it’s time for you to stop corrupting our children. Anybody teaching anything else as a pedophile. and should be Prosecuted as a pedophile
Vermonters – get you children OUT of these crappy schools! Save them from this nonsense. What a load of crap.
On Prop 4, VOTE NO!
These rights are already in our Vermont Constitution, in Chapter 1, and Vermont’s most respected Constitutional Law expert Vermont Law School Professor Peter Teachout says; to apply the brakes and write this Amendment correctly.
Here is my recent “Conversations with Gregory” PEG-TV show with Renee McGuinness on why we must defeat Prop 4 Article 23 to the Vermont constitution.
#VermontStrong
#TurnVtRED
https://videoplayer.telvue.com/player/MFXsvSYzjQOlecorW3Sq8GyBkhIm0OQN/media/1047278?fullscreen=false&showtabssearch=true&show_title_description_summary=true&autoplay=false
Next week’s headline “VT Teachers Union claim students test scores are too high “
Everyone involved in this teachers union should be fired immediately and replaced. There are only two sexes. boys don’t belong in girls sports and vice versa. Stop the mental sickness and stop corrupting children! Anyone involved in this should be prosecuted as pedophiles
It would be nice if the school systems would get back to reading writing and arithmetic. Teaching the kids Home Ec, most students today don’t know how to read an analog clock, balance a checkbook, learn cursive writing. That is what the education system should go back to teaching. But no, they are focused on all this gender crap and I do mean crap. God made only two genders. Male and Female. Check out Genesis 1:27, ‘So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; MALE AND FEMALE he created them’. So, no biological males have no business in biological female’s sports, locker rooms, bathrooms and vice versa. This all-gender stuff is a joke. Males are much stronger than females. If you don’t know what gender you are all you have to do is look down in your pants and check. Let’s get back to educating our kids on what they need to have to be able to function as an adult and no teaching this gender crap is not one of them.