By Linda Jacobson (The74 | October 29, 2025)
The former Oklahoma chief inherits a battle with few wins for union detractors.
Last year, the conservative Freedom Foundation made headlines with a high-profile effort to convince Miami-Dade teachers to dump their union.
Ultimately, it flopped: 83% of members voted to stick with United Teachers of Dade. Still, Brent Urbanik, president of the rival Miami Dade Education Coalition, said he appreciated the Foundation’s “all-hands-on-deck” support, which included funding mailers to teachers’ homes and sending staff to knock on doors. Urbanik said he couldn’t have run the campaign without the Foundation’s help.
But he’s not a fan of the group’s latest move. In late September, it named anti-union firebrand Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s former state chief, as head of its new Teacher Freedom Alliance.
“Most teachers just want to go to school. They want to teach their subjects, and they want to know that they’re not going to get fired for saying the wrong thing,” he said. With Walters at the helm, he said, the Teacher Freedom Alliance risks becoming “the right’s version of the left’s problem, which is the politicization of classroom material.”
To Aaron Withe, the Foundation’s CEO, Walters is a “freedom fighter” who brings passion and new energy to a cause that has seen mixed results since the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The court ruled that teachers and other public sector employees can opt out of paying fees to unions they don’t want to join. But Walters is escalating the attack. Since resigning from his state job, he’s criticized Colorado Springs teachers for striking over their recent loss of collective bargaining and joined Moms for Liberty members in Florida, where he said unions have turned schools into “Marxist indoctrination centers.”
One frequent target of his rhetoric doesn’t see the new Alliance as a threat. In a statement, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called the Foundation’s post-Janus efforts a “dismal failure.”
Urbanik, who teaches AP Psychology at a magnet school in Miami-Dade, is among those educators who think the AFT and the National Education Association have strayed too far from core bargaining issues like salaries, benefits and working conditions. That’s what Mark Janus, a former child support specialist in Illinois, argued when he challenged AFSCME on First Amendment grounds, saying that he shouldn’t be forced to financially support a union’s political activities or preferred candidates.
“There was an inherent unfairness in requiring people to join a union and spend money on political activities they disagree with in order to hold a government job,” said Dean McGee, senior counsel and director of educational freedom at the Liberty Justice Center, the conservative law firm that represented Janus.
Since Janus, some teachers say that unions continue to make it hard to opt out by automatically renewing membership without warning or creating short “escape” windows for canceling membership. But in 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear those concerns.
‘Power comes from money’
Teachers’ conflicts with their unions aren’t always political. Members of the Miami-Dade Education Coalition say United Teachers of Dade didn’t fight for raises and merit pay tied to a 2011 state law after the district said it was an unfunded mandate and they couldn’t afford the bonuses.
And in Chicago, Liberty Justice Center represents members of the Chicago Teachers Union who are suing union leaders for failing to produce a required annual audit for the past four years.
The Teacher Freedom Alliance, McGee said, takes the Janus ruling a step further. “The power comes from money, and the money comes from member dues,” he said. If unions are losing members, he suggested they focus on “members’ interests and not broader political fights.”
He didn’t mention specific priorities, but the NEA this year adopted resolutions that aim to counteract President Donald Trump’s “embrace of fascism” and to support “No Kings” protests.
Opt-out campaigns have generally seen mixed results, experts say. When they’re combined with legislation to undermine the unions, as when Wisconsin stripped public sector unions of collective bargaining in 2011, membership drops, said Eunice Han, an associate economics professor at the University of Utah who studies unions…article continued on the74 website here.