The National Education Association (NEA) is discussed across four episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as the largest teachers’ union in the United States and the principal political opponent of school choice legislation. Guests and host treat it variously as a constitutional actor, a monopoly holder, a partisan advocate and a structural obstacle to democratic accountability in education.
Constitutional authority and the federal role
In the earliest episode, Bob Zadek frames the nationalization of education as a departure from roughly 220 years in which education was, in his account, as local as government could get, with no federal involvement and with PTAs, parents and teachers running things End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009). He describes himself as a 1958 graduate of Jamaica High School in Queens, New York, and asks what went wrong between then and a present in which the country seems to be crying for federal takeover.
Guest Andrew J. Coulson, identified as Director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, addresses the legal claim directly. He calls the idea of a federal right to education complete rubbish from a legal standpoint, and says it was understood to be rubbish through the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He cites a 1941 book published by the US Printing Office jointly by Congress and the administration, a history meant to educate children about the origins of the system of government, containing a question and answer: asked where in the Constitution there is mention of education, the book answered that there is none and that education is a matter reserved for the states. Coulson notes that this was under FDR, when it was still believed by functionaries lower down the political chain that there was no federal role and no federal right to an education End the Unconstitutional Federal Involvement in Education (2009).
The episode’s framing ties the NEA to this question through its listed topics, which include the National Education Association alongside No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, the General Welfare Clause and school choice. The excerpts do not record Coulson or Zadek making a specific claim about the NEA’s own constitutional position.
The NEA as political opponent of school choice
In the 2022 episode on Arizona’s education savings account legislation, Bob Zadek asks why such sensible legislation took so long to enact and who opposed it. Matt Beienburg answers that the opposition comes down to two words: teachers’ unions Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022). He says Arizona’s ESA program was established about ten years earlier with help from Goldwater, that it had been on the books for only a small portion of Arizona’s students, and that about one in four Arizona students were eligible until the expansion.
Beienburg describes union opposition at every step. In West Virginia in 2018, he says, there were Red for Ed protests, and a proposal that would have increased pay for teachers while also allowing ESAs; the teachers’ unions decided they would rather forgo extra pay for their teachers than allow ESAs to be established, because they see the program as competition and do not want another game in town. He characterizes the unions as holding a monopoly over the system, dominating school board elections, policy and curriculum, and says that as a highly organized, mobilized and politically active group they have been successful at blocking this sort of reform in states up until now.
Zadek asks whether groups purporting to represent minority and immigrant constituencies took a position in the fight. Beienburg answers that those groups largely fall in line and take their cues from the teachers’ unions. He says the NEA, which he calls the largest union in the country, has gone out of its way and fallen all over itself in recent years to pass resolutions on left-leaning political progressive social causes, describing them as extreme CRT-aligned and as a worldview that says everybody should be treated and viewed based upon race. He contrasts this with the unions’ opposition to giving disadvantaged minority families what he calls equal footing and an opportunity to get a great education Arizona Chooses Students Over Systems - Matt Beienburg (2022).
Beienburg cites polling by Education Next, which he describes as a Harvard-affiliated education journal, conducted just before the pandemic, asking whether respondents supported school choice if a program would offer taxpayer funding to help defray the costs of private education. He says Black and Hispanic families supported it by three or four to one ratios, while support among unionized teachers was the complete inverse. His conclusion is that these groups are putting their own desire for professional and political gain ahead of the constituencies they claim to support.
Union power and the pandemic
The 2023 episode with Philip K. Howard traces the legal history of public service unions. Howard says that prior to the 1960s there were public unions but they did not have collective bargaining power and could not consolidate the mass of public employees and require an official to reach an agreement with them Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023). He describes the National Education Association in that period as the teachers’ union and says it was actually like the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association: a professional group that had ideas, some of them in its self-interest, but that did not have power over politicians.
Howard attributes the change to John F. Kennedy, who he says entered an executive order authorizing collective bargaining in federal government as payback for union support, following a report chaired by Arthur Goldberg that Howard calls the most vacuous, substance-less report you can possibly make. He then describes agitation by unions with state employees, governors and state parties in the late 1960s, and explains that the civil service system, created in the late 19th century to avoid the spoils system, naturally allowed public employees to organize because they no longer lost their jobs every four years. He cites a report by the labor law professor George Taylor holding that management control could not be given up, that arbitrators could not decide disagreements, and that everything had to remain politically accountable or it would be unconstitutional and unlawful — and says the laws were then passed in exactly the way Taylor said would be unlawful, with California and Los Angeles doing the same after their own reports warned against it Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023).
Bob Zadek argues that the effect of public service unions exercising their power is as if a statute was passed. He asks listeners to think back to COVID, saying that when schools were closed one would think the decision would be the result of the democratic process, but that it was specifically the teachers’ unions that called all the shots, a direct line between the life of the average American and public service unions. Howard agrees that public employee unions make managing government hard and says people do not comprehend how wasteful the system is, that democracy is a process of accountability, and that elected officials lack authority to manage government operations. He says that when COVID happened they did not have authority to say you have got to come to school or that you have to do distance teaching, and cites a learning decline of about 17 percentile points which experts say will never be recovered. He calls this a direct compromise of the core governing principle of answerability, or accountability, of elected officials for the lives of citizens Government by the Unions, of the Unions, for the Unions (2023).
The NEA, charter schools and enrollment pressure
In the 2021 episode with Matt Welch, the discussion concerns structural differences between public, private and charter schools. Zadek asks what structurally enables private schools to cater to their customers better than public schools, and why losing enrollment matters to public schools. Welch answers that in most jurisdictions, though not all, a big chunk of school budgeting is based on per-student funding, and that his own school went from 948 students to perhaps 770, meaning a large loss of funding Parents Voting With Their Kids’ Feet (2021).
Welch notes that the federal government sent close to $200 billion to K-12 for emergency coronavirus-related help over the previous two years, against a typical year of about $40 billion, and that in practice the money was almost all personnel. He says teachers unions have a completely outsized influence on school policies in Democratic-run polities, which he says right now includes the federal government and the Biden administration, and notes that Dr. Jill Biden is a member of the National Education Association and that the two teachers union presidents were at the White House on literally day two of the administration.
Welch describes charter schools as public schools funded by government money but not run by governments and generally not unionized, and says that in New York City they educate 10 percent of the K-12 student population despite an artificial cap the state puts on the number of physical charter schools. He says private schools were open during the pandemic year while public schools across the street might be open twice a week, that California had the least open schools in the country, and that homeschooling doubled, with the biggest growth element being Black families Parents Voting With Their Kids’ Feet (2021).
Across episodes: the same question, differently framed
The same underlying question — whether the NEA’s institutional power is compatible with parental control of education — runs through all four episodes, but the treatment shifts. In 2009 the question is constitutional and historical, argued by Andrew J. Coulson through the 1941 government book and the absence of any constitutional mention of education. In 2021 and 2022 the question is budgetary and electoral, argued by Matt Welch through per-student funding and pandemic enrollment loss and by Matt Beienburg through ESAs, union opposition in West Virginia and Arizona, and Education Next polling. In 2023 the question becomes structural and legal-historical, argued by Philip K. Howard through the pre-1960s absence of collective bargaining power, the Kennedy executive order, the Goldberg and Taylor reports, and the COVID school closures. What changes across the episodes is the level of analysis — constitutional text, then money and votes, then the law of public-sector bargaining — not the conclusion that the NEA opposes expanded choice.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the NEA’s founding date, membership figures, headquarters city, governance structure or internal politics beyond the resolutions Beienburg describes. They do not identify the specific Arizona legislation by name or number, nor the West Virginia proposal, nor the Kennedy executive order, nor the Goldberg and Taylor reports by title or date. No excerpt states what any court has held about the NEA, about collective bargaining by public employees, or about a federal right to education; the constitutional discussion rests on Coulson’s reading of a 1941 government book rather than on case law. The excerpts also do not give the outcome of the Arizona expansion vote or the identity of the two union presidents Welch says visited the White House.