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According to RedState, the nation’s largest teachers’ unions are not content with having turned public schools into vehicles for social engineering; they are now partnering with major technology firms to ensure that AI systems used in education are saturated with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) dogma and other radical priorities. Defending Education, a watchdog group, warns that “The integration of AI into education is not a matter of if but when. The problem is that unions, left-wing activists, and groups in the education field are already setting the foundation to use these AI tools to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives to students during their formative years.”
The strategy is straightforward and deeply troubling for anyone who believes schools should teach knowledge, not ideology. As Defending Education explains, “The goal of these groups is to implement DEI ideology into AI before it can be fully integrated into America’s education system. If DEI is embedded in AI before schools adopt these new tools, then DEI, as part of AI, becomes institutionalized in the nation’s schools once the tools are adopted.”
At the center of this effort is a familiar cast of union power brokers and education bureaucrats who have long pushed leftist agendas under the guise of “equity.” The report describes how the unions working with this emerging Big Tech alliance to construct what critics call WAI—Woke Artificial Intelligence—form a “who’s-who list” of education insiders, including the National Education Association (NEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the California Teachers Association (CTA), the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), and the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP).
The American Federation of Teachers, led by the notoriously partisan Randi Weingarten, has taken a particularly aggressive role. The AFT has launched the National Academy for AI Instruction, a $23 million joint initiative created with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and backed by tech giants Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic—companies that already lean heavily to the left in their corporate culture and content moderation.
These are some of the most influential names in the AI space, and their products already reflect a clear ideological tilt. Conservative commentator Kangmin Lee captured the concern succinctly, writing, “Most AI chatbots are already extremely leftwing, and 1 in 5 adolescents and young adults are using AI chatbots for advice or help when they felt upset, nervous or anxious,” and warning, “Letting Democrats have control and dictate the direction of AI is national suicide.”
Current AI platforms largely confirm that fear, with only a handful of systems—most notably X’s Grok—willing to present robust conservative perspectives. “As you can see, only XAI’s Grok offers conservative points of view, while every other one pushes left-wing talking points and a meager amount of ‘both sides’ answers,” one analysis noted, underscoring how the digital environment is being curated to normalize progressive narratives while marginalizing dissent.
Yet, in a twist of ideological projection, the unions and their allies insist that the coders who built these systems—often white and Asian engineers—are themselves biased and must be overridden by DEI frameworks. They have even adopted the term “Jim Code” to suggest that existing AI reflects a kind of digital segregation, a rhetorical move that conveniently justifies embedding race-conscious, identity-based programming into every layer of educational technology.
The vision, critics argue, is a kind of bureaucratic, sanitized, state-approved intelligence that parrots progressive orthodoxy on race, gender, climate, and politics. One commentator quipped that “If Kamala Harris and Wall-E had a baby, that's the kind of Artificial Intelligence these teachers' unions want,” capturing the fusion of robotic technocracy with the vice president’s trademark word salads and identity politics.
Defending Education’s report catalogs a series of developments that should alarm parents and taxpayers who still believe schools exist to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. Even though the Trump administration attempted to roll back the DEI bureaucracy—what some critics jokingly called a “Joe-had” against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—the ideology has proven remarkably resilient, burrowing into HR departments, accreditation bodies, and now AI design itself.
Few union leaders embody this hyper-partisan posture more than AFT president Randi Weingarten. Her organization’s campaign finance record reads like a Democratic National Committee wish list: “Campaign contributions from the American Federation of Teachers to Democrats: 1996: 99.1% 1998: 98.9% 2000: 99.2% 2002: 99.3% 2004: 98.0% 2006: 99.1% 2008: 99.1% 2010: 99.4% 2012: 99.4% 2014: 99.0% 2016: 99.7% 2018: 99.8% 2020: 99.6% 2022: 99.97% 2024: 99.89% Money laundering.”
Given that record, it is hardly shocking that Weingarten routinely attacks conservatives and Republican leaders with open contempt. In one widely shared episode, she launched into an unhinged tirade against President Donald Trump, prompting one critic to post, “NOW: Teachers union president Randi Weingarten is getting ripped for going PSYCHO ANTI-TRUMP MODE, violently jumping up and down and saying she just wants to ‘drink vodka’ She's ‘fed up’ with Trump and says the ‘power of the people’ is necessary to stop him Teachers' unions are just Democrat political weapons! DEFUND THEM ALL.”
Weingarten has also taken aim at Elon Musk and his more free-speech-oriented approach to technology, particularly in the realm of AI. “Students need their teachers — real human beings, not robots and not chatbots,” she declared at the National Press Club, a line that plays well rhetorically even as her union works hand-in-glove with tech corporations to shape the very AI tools that will soon be omnipresent in classrooms.
Ironically, some school districts, frustrated by poor performance and chronic staffing issues, are already experimenting with literal “teacherbots.” One New York district has deployed a humanoid robot named Sally as a classroom assistant, a pilot program that has drawn attention not only for its cost—around $57,000—but also for the unsettling spectacle of a lifelike machine standing in for human educators in AI, robotics, and coding classes.
For parents watching academic standards erode while ideological content explodes, the temptation to replace unionized activists with machines is understandable, even if misguided. As critics dryly observe, teaching has become “a profession where results are optional,” with K–12 spending climbing year after year while standardized test scores stagnate or fall, and university tuition soaring even as graduates’ real wages remain flat.
Against that backdrop, the unions’ determination to “weaponize” AI for political ends looks less like innovation and more like entrenchment of a failing model. Instead of using AI to streamline bloated bureaucracies, cut costs, eliminate propaganda, and focus on real job skills and measurable outcomes, union leaders appear intent on turning the technology into yet another delivery system for progressive ideology.
The tragedy is that AI, properly designed, could help restore rigor, personalize instruction, and give parents transparent insight into what their children are being taught. But that would require the kind of Actual Intelligence—and respect for parental authority, academic excellence, and ideological balance—that the current education establishment seems determined to avoid, whether in human teachers or in the machines they are now programming.
