California’s largest teachers’ union has poured unprecedented amounts of campaign dollars into local affiliates trying to boot conservative board members in school districts that have become battlegrounds for gender ideology policies, according to a Washington Free Beacon review of campaign finance disclosures.
The California Teachers Association has given some $213,000 to four local unions that are fighting to subvert or reverse school board policies that require officials to tell parents if their child begins socially transitioning at school, such as by adopting pronouns of the opposite sex and using opposite-sex bathrooms and changing rooms. The funding levels are multiple times higher than any union contributions those affiliates have previously received.
California Teachers Association president David Goldberg told EdSource last week that his group is fighting “white Christian nationalists” who want to mount a “fundamentalist attack on democracy.”
This cash infusion marks a new strategy for the Golden State’s most influential union, and highlights its intensifying role in the contentious campus culture wars raging across California. While the California Teachers Association perennially ranks as a top campaign and lobbying spender in the state, the group typically directs its large-dollar donations to its biggest and most influential members in Los Angeles and San Francisco, independent expenditure committees, and powerful statewide officials rather than unions in low-profile districts.
The California Teachers Association did not respond to a request for comment. Union critics, meanwhile, have noted the play.
“Like George Soros is planting district attorneys that don’t follow the Constitution, the CTA is doing the same thing for school boards,” said Tracy Henderson, the conservative president of the California Parents Union, which formed to fight COVID-19 lockdowns.
Henderson noted that local school boards can create policies that mitigate state-level initiatives, such as bills passed by the Democratic supermajority legislature. “CTA has figured that out,” she said.
The school board for the Chino Valley Unified School District in Southern California, for instance, passed a “no deception” policy, which requires staff to be “truthful and honest and not misrepresent” issues when speaking with parents. While it makes no mention of gender transitions, opponents see the new policy as a workaround to a court order that allows teachers to keep student gender transitions secret.
The Chino Valley board was also the first to require schools to notify parents if their child begins socially transitioning, though that was ultimately gutted by a state judge.
The California Teachers Association, meanwhile, dumped $36,000 into the local teachers’ union to bankroll board candidates who would work to reverse the “no deception” policy. That’s nearly double the affiliate’s previous top gift of $19,700 in 2016 when it fought to oust conservative members who had been sued for praying at their meetings.
The union in Riverside County’s Temecula Valley has also received a sizable investment from the California Teachers Association—$72,000, or nine times the amount given in the 2022 cycle when union-backed school board members lost their majority to conservative parents. This year, four out of five board seats are up for grabs.
Of the total funding, $34,000 was given during the Temecula Valley union’s effort to oust the board’s conservative president. The June recall ultimately succeeded with 51 percent of the vote. The booted president is running for election again on Tuesday.
Temecula Valley became a target of both the unions and California governor Gavin Newsom (D.) after a conservative majority was elected in 2022 and subsequently banned teaching Critical Race Theory and secret social gender transitions. Last year, the local union—with backing from the California Teachers Association, the ACLU, and the state—sued the district over both policies and lost.
Local unions in two other districts that passed parental notification policies also received big checks: Rocklin, near Sacramento, and the Orange Unified School District. The Rocklin union took in almost $50,000—nearly 10 times its last contribution in 2020. The only other campaign funding that affiliate received in the past decade was $4,800 in 2018.
The California Teachers Association gave the Orange union $55,000—about three times its previously largest gift of $17,800 in 2018. The affiliate didn’t receive any funding from the state union in the last campaign cycle.
The state association has also invested significant cash to prevent conservatives from being elected to school boards in big districts. The Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, which grabbed headlines and even drew reproval from Rep. Adam Schiff (D.) last year after anti-gender ideology protesters fought with antifa members at a demonstration, is one of these. The California Teachers Association gave that local affiliate $100,000 last year—a big jump from its last contribution of $3,800 in 2017—as union-backed progressives vied with conservatives to take the majority in March.
Nearly $80,000 went to the teachers union in San Jose, a district of nearly 26,000 students. There, a member of the conservative group Moms for Liberty is running for a seat on a progressive-majority board.
“Now that non-union backed independent candidates are getting elected, the California Teacher Association’s control is threatened,” said Julie Hamill, a politically independent lawyer who sits on the school board of her Southern California school district and who advocates for parental rights.
