How Education Minnesota Politicized Our School Boards

By Laura Conway

Coordinated political machine

Education Minnesota’s attached memo (see PDF at page bottom) about its Political Action Committee (PAC) should set off alarms for every parent and taxpayer in this state. Behind the friendly language of “pro-public education,” the document exposes something far more troubling: a coordinated political machine designed to control local school boards, silence parents, and turn public education into a partisan battlefield.

Let’s be clear about what the union admits. “We elect our bosses when we vote for school board,” the memo boasts. That’s not a slip of the pen, it’s a confession. The same organization that negotiates teacher contracts, benefits, and salaries is now proudly funding campaigns to elect the very people who will sit across the bargaining table.  In any other setting, this would be called a conflict of interest. When it happens with public money and public institutions, it’s a direct assault on democratic accountability.

Teachers’ unions exist to advocate for their members, and that’s legitimate. But when a union starts spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to capture local governing boards, the line between representation and regulatory capture disappears. School boards were never meant to serve as a union subsidiary. They were meant to represent parents, students, and taxpayers, balancing the interests of employees with the educational needs of children. When the people’s representatives are chosen and funded by the same organization they’re supposed to oversee, public trust collapses.

Education MN PAC

The memo brags that Education Minnesota’s PAC candidates win more than 80 percent of the time. Why? Because the union has built a campaign machine that most local parent groups can’t compete with — mass mailers, paid phone banks, stipends for campaign workers, and funding from national unions like the NEA and AFT. These aren’t volunteers handing out flyers at the local fair. This is a professional political operation targeting low-turnout, nonpartisan races, effectively ensuring that the only voices left in the room are those who already agree with them.

Cancel Culture

Even more disturbing is the union’s rhetoric toward anyone who disagrees. The memo names parent organizations like the Minnesota Parents Alliance and Moms for Liberty, smearing them as “anti-public education” or even labeling one an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.” That’s not dialogue, it’s demonization. By framing every dissenting parent as a bigot or extremist, the union seeks to shame parents out of participation and discredit legitimate concerns about curriculum, transparency, and accountability. In this worldview, “pro-public education” doesn’t mean supporting kids; it means supporting the union’s politics, and only those politics.

This is the real tragedy: when education becomes a proxy for ideological warfare, children lose. Classrooms should be places of learning, not campaign turf. Parents should be treated as partners, not enemies. And teachers, many of whom quietly dislike this politicization, are caught in the middle, forced to fund or defend a political machine that speaks in their name but often acts against their long-term interests.

Education Minnesota frames all of this as protecting “the freedom to learn.” But freedom doesn’t exist where dissent is punished and elections are pre-determined by money and messaging from one side. Real freedom in education comes from pluralism, from honest debate, transparency, and accountability to the public. This memo shows the opposite: a closed loop of power where taxpayer-funded salaries feed PAC donations, PAC donations elect compliant boards, and compliant boards return the favor with favorable contracts and policies.
 

Parents Get It

Parents see through it. They know that trust in schools isn’t being eroded by moms asking questions at board meetings, it’s being eroded by unions that treat those boards as political spoils. If Education Minnesota truly cared about students, it would welcome scrutiny, invite diversity of thought, and focus on the classroom instead of the campaign trail.

Until that happens, Minnesota’s parents will keep showing up, not because they want to fight teachers, but because they refuse to let their children’s schools become the property of a political machine.