The National Education Association spent $39 million on politics in 2024 and only 9% of its budget on actually representing teachers.
Now union dues money are paying to march activists through the front doors of public schools.
And the group they hired to do it has been training radicals since Saul Alinsky was still alive.
NEA Paid a Teachers Union-Funded Radical Training Group $1.4 Million
The Washington Examiner broke the story: the NEA has funneled roughly $1.4 million since 2020 to a Chicago-based group called Midwest Academy.
It's a 50-year-old radical organizer factory founded by a direct student of Saul Alinsky – the man who dedicated Rules for Radicals to Lucifer and taught that activists must identify an enemy and never let up until they break him.
Midwest Academy's founder, Heather Booth, studied directly under Alinsky at his Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago.
She took his methods, built a national activist network, and has spent five decades turning left-wing agitators out by the thousands.
As of 2025, the Academy claims to have trained more than 50,000 activists across the country.
The NEA just paid them $1.4 million to point those tactics at schools across the country.
Here's what Midwest Academy is running before May 1.
A "Four Weeks of Power" training series where activists learn to have "one-on-one conversations" with students and teachers – targeting what "motivates" students to "take risks and move into action."
The final training session is scheduled the day before protests begin.
Promotional materials demand "no work, no school, no shopping" on May 1.
Then comes the piece that should make every parent in America pick up the phone and call their school board.
Organizers are planning "walk-ins" – rallies lasting 30 to 45 minutes outside school buildings, after which demonstrators enter campus grounds together.
Nobody is explaining what happens once they're inside.
Rhyen Staley, Director of Research at Defending Education, put it bluntly to the Washington Examiner: "It should be deeply concerning that one of the suggested tactics is to enter schools to protest against policies they don't like. Putting children's education and safety at risk for political gain is unethical and immoral."
Defending Education has already tracked 334 student walkouts and protests in 2026 – 306 of them explicitly targeting ICE – across 236 school districts in 48 states.
This isn't organic. It's a funded pipeline running straight from the NEA's checkbook into the classroom.
The Coalition They Don't Want You to Read
Pull up the website for the May 1 protests and scroll through the coalition partners.
Midwest Academy sits alongside the Party for Socialism and Liberation and Democratic Socialists of America chapters.
These are the groups the NEA chose to work with.
The protest demands mirror the No Kings rallies that drew millions into the streets on March 28 – greater restrictions on immigration enforcement, an end to military action in Iran, and higher taxes on the wealthy.
By 2025, the NEA was spending $450 million a year. Just 10% went to representing teachers – the one thing a teachers union is supposed to do. Four times as much went to political activities, contributions, and left-wing grants.
NEA President Rebecca Pringle pulled in over $514,000 last year.
The teachers paying her salary averaged less than $79,000.
Midwest Academy's own training document frames all of this as resistance to authoritarianism: "History teaches us that authoritarian movements only succeed when people comply in isolation."
What it's actually teaching is how to recruit children into political activism before they're old enough to understand what's happening to them.
Schools exist to educate children, not serve as staging grounds for socialist agitators bankrolled by a union that stopped caring about teachers a long time ago.
Every parent who still believes a classroom belongs to students – not the NEA's radical allies – needs to be furious about this.
Sources:
- Robert Schmad, "Teachers union funds group planning to stage anti-ICE protests at public schools," Washington Examiner, April 2, 2026.
- "National Education Association spends on politics over teachers," Illinois Policy Institute, December 22, 2025.
- "Midwest Academy," InfluenceWatch, October 16, 2025.
- "Thousands of students ditch class as anti-ICE protests surge in 2026, watchdog warns," Fox News, March 2026.
