‘Princess Moss’ Declares National Education Association ‘Must be the Most Powerful Force in America’

Over $1 trillion in spending as national test scores fall to new low

National test scores are down to the lowest level since testing began and school spending has shot up, passing $1.1 trillion, while urban schools dole out such lavish benefits to teachers’ unions as six figure salaries, free Ozempic and abortions, and public school students suffer.

‘Princess Moss’, the new president of the NEA, announced that the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union, “can be and must be the most powerful force in America.”

Why make the NEA, which destroyed education for a generation of students during the COVID lockdowns, into the “most powerful force in America”? Is it to help the students? Obviously not.

Instead, the NEA may join a “National March on Washington D.C. to remove Trump before the November 2026 midterm election” at a cost of over $5 million. This is the same NEA, which keeps claiming that students don’t have enough school supplies, spending $5 million on a Democrat protest rally. But those six-figure salaries from failed school systems in Chicago and San Francisco have to go somewhere. And that ‘somewhere’ is radical political activism.

There’s also a push for demanding the impeachment of President Trump.

The NEA is potentially preparing for a general strike on May Day 2028 not because any local school demands haven’t been met. Indeed, the NEA doesn’t even know why it’s going to be calling for a nationwide strike in 2028 and will create a task force to decide in 2027 why it’s going to strike in 2028. The strike is already confirmed, it just needs to decide why it’s striking.

But as Princess Moss said, “We are not only educators, not only organizers. We are advocates.” Her majesty’s campaign platform focused on “resistance” and set out to “create a NEA where every member is an everyday organizer” so that every teacher is engaged in non-stop political activism. Teaching basic literacy is surplus to requirements which is why her platform also claims that “truth-telling forms a foundational tenant of my leadership approach.”

If you can spot what’s wrong, you’re more qualified to teach children than the head of the largest teachers’ union in America. Fortunately, the NEA needs teaching like a fish needs a bicycle.

Other NEA ‘new business’ include town halls to promote socialized medicine, transgender activism, open borders, racial reparations and anti-Israel activism including spending $86,000 to “publicize” its false accusations that Israel is committing ‘genocide’ in Lebanon by bombing the Islamic Hezbollah terrorists who are shooting rockets into Israel.

That last comes from Tania Kappner, an English and History ‘teacher’ at a virtual academy in Oakland, who ran for the NEA presidency and vice-presidency on a compelling educational platform of “Impeach and Remove Trump Now” and “Stop the War on Iran Now/Defend the Rights of the Palestinian People”. In Oakland, 66% of students did not meet state standards for English and 73% did not meet state standards for math. They must need even more politics.

But as Princess Moss snarled, “I’m sick and tired of people who drive by school, who have never been inside of school, telling us what to do with our kids. They don’t know anything about how to teach, or what our kids really need. We need to lean into our professional authority, and that’s something I want to build with the organization.”

The kids don’t belong to the NEA and for a group of people to have professional authority, they must demonstrate that they have some idea of what they’re doing and that they’re getting good results. Any other profession that produced the kind of outcomes that the NEA’s members do would lose all its customers, face lawsuits and government interventions.

The NEA was and is on the wrong side of every educational issue, from phonics to testing to school lockdowns, harming students while benefiting its members. The more student scores drop and assessments show that students are failing to meet basic standards in English and Math, the more the NEA tries to shut down testing while pushing political activism under the guise of promoting ‘critical thinking’ Actual critical thinking shows that a union demanding six figure salaries when students can’t read or add numbers together is not doing its job.

America is spending over $1 trillion a year and getting the test scores of a third world country.

Instead of teaching students, the NEA pushes politics into the classroom and then claims that ‘standardized tests’ are racist, that school rankings are irrelevant and that its members should be allowed to promote students regardless of performance, and that knowledge is an entirely subjective category to be left to the discretion of its members. That is how students in Baltimore and Los Angeles graduate from high school without being able to read.

The approach championed by the NEA and other educational unions emphasizes politics (or what it calls ‘critical thinking’) over basic skills for both teachers and students, pushes complex and esoteric educational theories that completely fail in the classroom and that leave its members unprepared to actually teach students, maximizes staffing for its members while removing accountability so that each school district has extensive teams tackling broad concepts like ‘equity’ rather than conveying specific skills to specific groups of students.

The NEA’s pursuit of racial relativism and identity politics has not helped black students or any other group. The more it has politicised schools, the less actual skills and knowledge students come away with. The NEA has resisted educational mandates to focus on essentials and instead continues pivoting to whatever urgent leftist political issue is on the Facebook timelines of its leaders, from BLM to Transgenderism to Gaza, while always taking the wrong side.

Despite what the NEA claims, this isn’t a money problem. Teachers’ unions have demanded and secured record breaking spending and delivered record breaking low test scores. They’ve tried to change the subject to social inequity, over and over again, not just because their real mission is radical leftist politics, but because it shifts the blame away from them and to society at large.

Princess Moss’ accomplishments as NEA VP include “enhance education, racial, and social justice agendas and tool that further lift up equity and respect for all.” Education is briefly mentioned in that stew of wokespeak and illiteracy and then quickly abandoned.

But whose fault is it that the new NEA president can’t put together a coherent sentence?

Moss has an MEd degree. More and more schools financially incentivize and reward advanced degrees for teachers even as evidence shows that these degrees have no impact on student achievement, but instead correlate with radical politics. Public schools have been turned into a faculty lounge of woke illiterates who drop buzzwords about ‘lived experience’, but have less and less ideas of how to convey even the most basic forms of education to their students.

The NEA isn’t there to educate students. It’s there to exploit the infrastructure of the educational system to extract maximum profits for its members in exchange for their participation in radical political organizing. This is bad for students, bad for schools and bad for America.

Unless we actually want the NEA to become the “most powerful force in America”, as teachers’ unions have already become the most powerful force in Chicago, we have to take back public education from the unions and bureaucrats that have destroyed the public school system.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.