Another Anti-Union Teacher Union

Those wacky folks at the Freedom Foundation are at it again, trying to convince teachers to dismantle their own unions. And they have a new high-profile edubro to help.

Who are they? Well, their website gives us a good introduction to them:

The Freedom Foundation is more than a think tank. We’re more than an action tank. We’re a battle tank that’s battering the entrenched power of left-wing government union bosses who represent a permanent lobby for bigger government, higher taxes, and radical social agendas.

Their language when approaching teachers and other members of public sector unions is a lot about liberating public employees from political exploitation. Their language in spaces like fundraising letters is a bit more blunt:

The Freedom Foundation has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation ... we won’t be satisfied with anything short of total victory against the government union thugs.

Destroy unions and defund the political left. And they work hard at it, too. They have put an army of foot soldiers out there going door to door in hopes of turning an entire state blue. In one example, they sent activists dressed as Santa Claus to stand outside government buildings, where they told workers they could give themselves a holiday gift by exercising their right not to pay that portion of union dues that goes to political activity.

The foundation was launched in 1991 as the Evergreen Freedom Foundation by Lynn Harsh and Bob Williams. These days Harsh is VP of Strategy for the State Policy Network, the national network of right wing thinky tanks and advocacy groups founded in 1992 (it appears that the foundation may have helped with that launch). Her bio says she started out as a teacher and went on to found two private schools. Williams was a Washington state politician and failed gubernatorial candidate. He went on to work with SPN and ALEC, the conservative corporate legislation mill before passing away in 2022. SPN started giving out an award in his name in 2017.

The foundation is not small potatoes operation-- the staff itself is huge, and the foundation operates out of offices in five states (Washington, Oregon, California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania).

Longtime CEO Tom McCabe is now the Chairman of the Board, and he has been pretty clear in his aims. “Labor bosses are the single greatest threat to freedom and opportunity in America today,” he wrote in one fundraising letter. The current CEO is Aaron Withe, the guy who headed up the door-to-door campaign the get Oregon union members to quit their unions. Presumably he didn't go door to door with the same smarm evident in his company bio pic.

The foundation gets money from a variety of the usual suspects, including the Koch family foundations, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Donors Trust, Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, and the State Policy Network. The have gotten small mountains of money from the Bradley Foundation, which also heavily funds the anti-union Center for Union Facts.

Many of these same folks helped fund the Janus lawsuit that did away with Fair Share, and the Freedom Foundation was one of the groups that immediately started to work to get teachers to leave their unions.

The Freedom Foundation has tried various pr stunts to get teachers to quit the union, like the time they sent out Halloween mailers exhorting teachers to "Stop these money-sucking vampires and TAKE BACK YOUR PAYCHECK TODAY"

But now they've added a new feature to the mix. Meet the Teacher Freedom Alliance-- an alternative to those evil unions! It's even Free Market! (What does a free market union even mean? Shut up, you!)

They held a big launch party for TFA (they should have checked to see if that acronym was taken) with special guest ranter, Oklahoma's Education Dudebro-in-chief, Ryan Walters! Walters pointed out that the union fights him on cool stuff like merit pay and signing bonuses. Of course, merit pay has never worked and is usually just an excuse to lower base pay, and signing bonuses are a one-time raise that is useless for things like home loans. But Walters is sad that they draw opposition from those awful unions that he has called terrorist organizations (meaning either they are really awful or Walters is easily terrorized). 

Walters's part of the festivities is a greatest hits collection. Teachers union is on the run! The Left is mad about dismantling the Department of Education (cheers) because they want bureaucrats in DC to tell teachers how to teach math, how they should teach our kids that America's an evil racist country. He even brings up Common Core! Free market, which I guess turns out to mean that the market tells teachers how much they can have. That teachers union-- they don't care about teachers or students. And Trump is great. And we should put the Bible in classrooms. 

Walters has gone all-in on promoting TFA, which has led at least one Oklahoma legislator to ask the state attorney general if it's legal for the state education chief to use state resources to promote this thing. Just add that to the list of Walters's questionable choices in office. Meanwhile, he issues a typical non-statement statement in response as reported by Murray Evans at The Oklahoman

"Democrats and union bosses are grasping at straws because teachers finally have a real choice," Walters said. "My office will always communicate with educators about their options, no matter how much it upsets the political establishment."

So what is TFA offering? For one thing, culture panic:

We are a group for teachers and by teachers, ready to change the direction of public education, returning us to traditional, American values. Excellence, not ideology.

On the website, that's in all caps. I spared you the shouting.

Turns out the "by teachers" part is a stretch. The three members of "the team" include Rachel Maiorana is the Director of Marketing and Advocacy; she is also the former Deputy National Director of the Freedom Foundation after serving as California Outreach director since 2021. She was also a Campus Coordinator for Turning Point USA, after doing "brand ambassador work for Coke and serving as a cheerleading coach. Coms degree from Cal State Fullerton.

Director of Member Programs Ali Abshire joined the program in December 2024. Before that she was a Behavioral Health Specialist at Cincinatti Children's, a program officer at the Reagan Ranch, a nanny, a kitchen team member at Chick-fil-A in Lynchburg, and a manager at Zoup! Eatery! Her BS in psychology is from Liberty University in 2022.

Executive Director Eloise Branch came from the Director of Teacher Engagement post at Freedom Foundation, after a couple of years as curator at Young America's Foundation (a campus conservatives outfit) and teaching for two non-consecutive years at The Classical Academy. She got her BA in History from Grove City College in 2017. GCC is about 30 minutes away from me, and it has fashioned itself into a small Hillsdale College of PA. 

So not exactly a deep bench of seasoned and experienced educators here. What benefits do they offer? 

Well, there's "dignifying professional development." And when it comes to that Big Deal that everyone frets about-- liability insurance-- their offer is novel. You get a chance to piggy back on the liability coverage offered to two other "alternative" teacher unions. You can choose the Christian Education Association (you can read their story here) or the Association of American Educators (more about them here). Both are longstanding non-union unions, with CEA very Christ-in-the-classroom emphasis and AAE more aligned with the Fordham-AEI axis of reformsterdom. Neither is large enough to provide credible support for a teacher in a big-time lawsuit, nor am I sure how hard they'd try to defend someone accused of reading Naughty Books or doing socialist DEI things. 

There's a third benefit offered, and that's "alternative curricula" which includes "alternative curriculums and teaching pedagogies ranging from the science of reading to classical mathematics to explicit instruction to the Socratic Method" which may lead one to ask "alternative to what?"

If you can't already guess based on the source of these folks, the website drops more hints about what these folks consider "alternative." 

We exist to develop free, moral, and upright American citizens.

That "free, moral, and upright" appears frequently. There's a blog post outlining the benefits of dismantling the department of education ("funding and decision-making authority" will shift to state and local levels, which is at least half right). There's a small assortment of news articles about education, including one from the conservative Illinois Policy website, a harmless Natalie Wexler article, a Rick Hess interview with Daniel Buck, an article from the right wing Daily Caller, and another from the wingnut right Daily Wire.

And you know, there's no reason that there can't be a right wing union for right wing teachers (though this is only the latest of many failed attempts), but their other repeated idea is "Excellence, not ideology."

We support the right of every educator in America to pursue excellence in the classroom free of ideological interference.

Except our ideology, because, you know, that's just "common sense." The fictional narrative is that teachers are too busy teaching Marx and Crazy Left Ideas to ever cover actual reading and math, which is a thing you can only believe if you have never spent any time in a public school. Anyway, by replacing Cray Lefty Stuff with academics laced with Common Sense (aka right wing ideology), we can Make America Smart Again. At the launch party, Withe said that their curricula would teach students “to love our country; we’re going to teach them that capitalism is the best economic system ever created.”

Now, how deeply they want to actually pursue this is anyone's guess, given that the organization's a wing of a group that has explicitly stated that they want to dismantle the teacher unions, which makes the actual mission of TFA secondary at best.

The launch party was attended by 50 whole educators and a bunch of Freedom Foundation staffers. 

Also worth noting-- the Center for Media and Democracy reports that Freedom Foundation tried this on a smaller scale in the Miami-Dade district, where they backed another faux union and, aided by Governor Ron DeSantis-backed anti-union legislation. They promised that they would "bring the nation's third-largest teachers union to the brink of extinction." They did not-- teachers voted 83% to 17% to stick with their existing AFT affiliate. 

TFA is mum on one other union function-- negotiating contracts. At the launch party, Withe promised that TFA would “provide benefits and resources that are far superior to anything that the teachers unions do.” He even made an emphatic gesture on "far." That's another piece of the free market fairy tale-- the free market will just pay teachers a whole lot. This is a silly argument. First of all, the free market doesn't work quite the same when you're talking about people paid with tax dollars. Second of all, the notion that people are just dying for the chance to pay great teachers a whole lot more, but that darned union is holding them back is unsupported by any reality-based evidence. You'll occasionally find young teachers declaring that left to their own devices, they could negotiate a far better deal than the union, and, oh, honey. What kind of leverage do you think you have. But even if you could, the finite pot of money that schools work with means that you would be negotiating against all the other teachers. Maybe teaching Thunderdome would be fun, but I doubt it. 

People don't pay teachers much because A) they can't afford to and B) they don't want to. And C) they especially don't want to spend a lot on education for Those Peoples' Children. And this is especially true of folks like the Freedom Foundation, who do not want to end unions for the teachers own good but because A) ending the unions would hurt the Democratic party and B) without unions, it would be even easier to pay teachers bottom dollar. 

At that same launch party, Ryan Walters said, "The Freedom Foundation-- it sounds too good to be true. I promise you it's not." I suspect he's right both times-- it's not too good, and it's not true.