It’s been many, many years since my first day as a high-school English teacher, but I still remember feeling like a kid in a candy store when my first principal – at the opposite end of his career from me – handed me the keys to the English department bookroom. I reveled in the shelves upon shelves of novels I could choose from. He encouraged me to supplement the curriculum with other materials I found germane.
“Just remember though,” he said, turning his sniffling nose away from the plumes of ancient book dust released into the air, “nothing with the ‘s’ word.”
I paused, trying to follow.
“Sex,” he clarified, leaving me to wonder whether he meant the literal word or the broader concept. I scanned the titles, imagining how I might teach Romeo and Juliet or even The Bible as Literature, a required unit, without running into inevitable questions from my adolescent students about adult relationships. But while I may have raised an eyebrow at the administration’s prudishness (this was the 1990s, not the 1950s), it would never have occurred to me to question its right to guide what I taught in their classrooms.
I certainly wouldn’t have rushed to my union representative to file a grievance.
Had I claimed that the school had no right to limit my classroom content on the grounds of free speech, I suspect my union rep would have laughed me out of the office.
The ideological landscape of US education
Today, that institutional understanding is eroding. US teachers’ unions, and nonprofits ideologically aligned with them, are increasingly embracing the view that public school teachers have First Amendment rights inside the classroom.
In April 2025, the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA), which an investigative report by the American Jewish Committee revealed to be overtly ideological and hostile to Israel and Zionism, passed a New Business Item (NBI) at its annual Representative Assembly to “safeguard MTA union members’ academic rights and to protect them from harm in an increasingly repressive environment.”
The Instagram account @mtarankandfileforpalestine, widely believed to be run by current and former MTA leadership, praised the NBI, posting: “MTA members in PreK–12, and especially those in higher ed, have faced retaliation and harassment for teaching truth and for daring to speak out in their personal lives against the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
Despite the odd inclusion of “in their personal lives” which, contract language aside, is a reasonable claim to make, the more troubling assertion is that K–12 teachers possess academic freedom in the classroom.
This is a dramatic and legally unsupported inversion of First Amendment protections, which are designed to protect private citizens from government censorship, not to protect government employees acting in an official capacity.
In fact, under long-standing Supreme Court precedent (Garcetti v. Ceballos, 2006), public employees, including teachers, do not have constitutional protection for speech made pursuant to their official duties. And to the captive five to 18-year-olds seated in their classrooms, teachers are the government. What they say may be considered government speech.
This trend toward ideological license is not isolated to Massachusetts.
THE MTA’s parent organization, the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers’ union in the country with over three million members, debated similar language at its Representative Assembly in Portland, Oregon, July 2–7. Although NBIs are intended to remain confidential until the Assembly concludes, they are frequently leaked. A delegate shared with me the language of one such NBI:
“NEA will host a webinar to explain the various resources available to educators to be better informed about academic freedom and First Amendment rights... Attacks on educator rights are increasing. While NEA has many resources to assist in fighting these attacks, a concerted effort needs to be made to get them to our local membership to be effectively utilized.”
What may appear to outsiders as an internal union matter has real-world consequences. It redefines the professional boundaries of public educators and further jeopardizes the neutrality of taxpayer-funded classrooms.
Teachers hold a sacred power over their students. For impressionable young people, teachers are often role models.
It is educational malpractice to exploit that trust to promote personal ideologies, especially on complex, emotionally charged subjects, such as war in the Middle East. Classrooms must be places of inquiry, not indoctrination.
Another proposed NBI this week would encourage members to use free resources and professional development tools offered by the Zinn Education Project, a collaboration between Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.
THE ZINN Education Project responded to the October 7, 2023, massacre by Hamas not with expressions of empathy for Israeli civilians, but by calling for an arms embargo on Israel. Its resources promote a one-sided, historically inaccurate depiction of Jews in Israel as colonial oppressors, ignoring millennia of continuous Jewish connection to the land and erasing the lived experience of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
By promoting such biased narratives under the banner of “teaching truth,” these materials risk transforming public education into an ideological echo chamber. And while academic freedom has a legitimate role in higher education, it must be circumscribed in K–12 settings, where many children are not yet equipped to discern opinion from fact and where attendance is compulsory.
When unions blur the lines between personal activism and professional responsibility, they erode the public’s trust in our schools. No teachers, however passionate, have the right to impose their worldview on students under the guise of “academic freedom.”
The First Amendment was never intended to shield public employees from accountability to the communities they serve.
If we truly believe in fostering critical thinking, we must demand intellectual integrity from our educators – not partisan crusades. If we fail to do so, we risk turning our schools into ideological battlegrounds rather than institutions of learning. Our democracy may depend on it.
The writer is the executive director of the K-12 Fairness Center, a division of StandWithUs, a bipartisan, international nonprofit that fights antisemitism.