The American Federation of Teachers was organized in 1916. From the beginning it has been a militant, Marxist organization, using force, politics, pressure, and propaganda to gain control over teachers and thus build power for itself. The AFT never did achieve a large national membership. Its strength has always been concentrated in a few eastern cities - mainly, New York City. But the AFT influence on public education in the U.S. has been enormous, for two political reasons: first, during the critical period of the 1930s, such people as John Dewey and Norman Thomas were members of the AFT; and second, rivalry between the AFT and the NEA helped induce the NEA to adopt the socialist tactics of the AFT.

The National Education Association was organized in 1862. In 1906, Congress conferred upon it a federal charter, to work as a professional organization in the field of education. For a long time, the NEA did operate as a professional group, publishing information helpful to classroom teachers, trying to improve the quality of teachers and of teaching in public schools. But by the mid-1930s, the NEA - like its rival, the AFT - was militant and Marxist. The NEA became the foremost leader of the drive that was begun by John Dewey educationists in the American Federation of Teachers - the drive to create "an educational program for a socialist America," which would be governed by an elite of professional educator-politicians.

By the 1960s the NEA had a stranglehold on American public education. Today, NEA officials hold so many key positions in the Department of Education that the NEA practically runs that federal agency, which dispenses billions of tax dollars. NEA influence on Congress, the Supreme Court, and local state senators and assemblymen is also powerful. The NEA works with monopolistic unions, huge tax-exempt foundations, racial-agitation organizations, the National Council of Churches, and similar groups, lobbying for court decisions and big-spending federal and state programs.

For years, the NEA pretended that it was not a union, and claimed to be opposed to teacher strikes. The NEA's malign influence and political pressures on elected officials can never be fully measured, but can be indicated by the words of its own spokesmen. In 1970, NEA President George Fischer said: "We will put the fear of God in politicians all over the country. We plan to make it political suicide to vote against kids and educations." And so it came to be.

One irony in all this is that the NEA's political lobbying is an open and direct violation of the federal tax law which gives it tax exemption. The Internal Revenue Service has never revoked that tax exemption.

Today, we have created the most extensive and expensive educational system that has ever existed in the history of the world. Yet, it graduates thousands of young people who cannot spell, write a correct sentence, work a simple arithmetic problem, or read with understanding. They have no worthwhile skills. They do not even know the alphabet well enough to work effectively as file clerks. The present American educational system has left a generation of Americans largely ignorant of the moral, economic, political, and spiritual principles on which the greatness of our nation is founded. It has brainwashed a generation of Americans into accepting the illegal conversion of our Constitutional Republic into a tyrannical, inefficient socialist-welfare state. It scorns individual excellence and extols mass mediocrity. Can you really be sure your children won't come out any different?

Many a person has supported federal aid to education because he thought that getting "federal money" to help pay for schools in his district would ease his local tax burden. The opposite has happened. As federal and state taxes increase to pay for increased aid, the increased aid creates and mandates more expensive educational systems - which are still financed in large part by local taxes on real estate. Throughout the United States, all taxes are going up because of the costly (and unconstitutional) state and federal programs we have permitted.

So, when the teacher unions run full-page ads to "save our schools", we know they really do mean their schools - not ours.