In New Role, Ryan Walters Takes His Anti-Union Message National
The former Oklahoma chief inherits a battle with few wins for union detractors.
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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 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, dz’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 . 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 for striking over their recent loss of collective bargaining and joined 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, 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 union leaders for 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 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.
In 2023, Florida passed a law that requires unions to maintain a 60% dues-paying membership. In January 2024, United Teachers of Dade . Urbanik’s group saw an opening.
A year after the law passed, over 50 public sector unions in the state had been wiped out because they couldn’t reach the 60% threshold, according to . But only three of those were K-12 unions, all of which represented non-instructional staff.
of the Florida Education Association “have successfully re-certified,” Han said. The Freedom Foundation has seen small victories in other states where it’s been active, like Oregon, California and Washington.
Larry Delaney, president of the Washington Education Association, said the Foundation frequently sends mailers with messages encouraging teachers and other school staff to opt out. The cards include a section the member can rip off and mail back to the union’s address. Their campaigns get creative, he said. Around Halloween, one mailer portrayed Delaney as a monster. Another said “Give yourself a Christmas bonus! End your monthly union dues.”
But only a handful of members opt out each year, Delaney said.
Some mailers look like a and include a fake check representing how much money members would save in dues each year if they quit the union. Based on his own experience, it costs about $40,000 to send mail to all 84,000 members of the union statewide, and the Freedom Foundation sends a new mailer almost monthly.
“I don’t know what their direct mailing budget is, but it’s large,” he said. The Foundation didn’t comment on its mailing budget.
The Foundation, a $17 million operation, according to its most , is a nonprofit and doesn’t have to disclose donors. In Florida, the free market-oriented , founded by successful futures trader Bill Dunn, donated $100,000 to support the Miami Dade Education Coalition’s opt-out campaign, according to .
by the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive organization that tracks spending by conservative groups, show the Koch Brothers, the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation in Pittsburgh, are also among the Foundation’s contributors. Those organizations often fund right-leaning causes, like efforts to roll back and PragerU, a media operation that produces conservative videos for kids.
‘We won’t be intimidated’
The Foundation used some of its resources to fight that says union members can sue if someone is trying to impersonate them as an opt-out strategy.
“They say that we’re pretending to be union officials and going to union members’ homes to convince them to leave,” Withe, the Foundation’s CEO, said in an . “We won’t be intimidated. If anything, we’re more emboldened to go and get more of their members.”
The Foundation wasn’t able to keep the bill from passing. It allows union representatives to bring a civil lawsuit against a group or individual that tries to deceive a union member into opting out. Withe said the unions provided no evidence that the Foundation employed deception.
But his group did manage to get teachers in the small 126-student along the south coast of Oregon, to create a new independent union in June. When all 13 of their teachers voted unanimously to create the new Cruiser Educators Association, the Oregon Education Association didn’t oppose the move.
Gabe Shorb, a sixth grade teacher in the district, first heard Walters speak at one of the Foundation’s Teacher Freedom Summits and called his message “refreshing.”
He said several teachers had already opted out on their own and a few had joined the Teacher Freedom Alliance. Those remaining felt the Oregon Education Association wasn’t very helpful when they bargained with the district and asked for contract information from comparable districts. Membership in the new union is free.
“I’m hoping that we’ll make connections and show other small districts that, ‘Hey you don’t have to pay a lot of money for something that’s really not that useful,’ ” he said.
The Freedom Foundation also pushed this year for that would prevent teachers from using paid professional development days to attend the Montana Federation of Public Employees’ annual meeting. The sessions, the Foundation argues, are “oriented toward political activism, radical woke ideology and union marketing.” to panels on topics such as equity training and promoting LGBTQ issues. But the bill died in the session.
The Teacher Freedom Alliance aims to give school staff an alternative to the AFT and the NEA. Its free membership includes liability coverage up to $2 million, which protects teachers if they’re sued or need legal representation for other reasons. The American Association of Educators, with about 32,000 members, charges $19.50 per month for that includes liability coverage as well as other benefits, like shopping discounts.
Walters first promoted the new Alliance in March with a , drawing an ethics complaint from Rep. Ellen Pogemiller, a Democrat, who argued that he was using state resources to endorse an organization. The complaint was dismissed, and the state attorney general said he didn’t break the law. Walters did not respond to attempts to reach him by phone or text.
When he accepted the new job, Pogemiller filed , suggesting his promotion of the group was for personal gain. The state ethics commission hasn’t issued any findings.
Walters might have taken the job because he thought it would “give him a larger national profile,” said Julia Koppich, an independent consultant in San Francisco and expert on teachers unions.
He might also have been seeking a higher salary. His paid $124,000. The Foundation did not disclose his salary at Teacher Freedom Alliance, but past show Withe made $525,000 in 2023, and other top executives earned in the $200,000 range.
Koppich wonders how the new Alliance will benefit teachers. In states where unions have bargaining rights, teachers who drop their membership can’t negotiate their own salaries and working conditions with school districts, Koppich said. They’re bound by the union contract whether they pay dues or not.
In non-union states, teacher pay is set by a statewide salary schedule.
“Unionism is baked in where it’s baked in and anathema where it’s always been anathema,” Koppich said. “These [opt-out] organizations don’t have a great track record.”
In Miami, Urbanik blames part of his group’s poor showing in the election on the Miami- Dade district. He said officials “heavily suppressed” his organization’s message. Some teachers didn’t even know the vote was taking place. About two-thirds of the Miami-Dade teachers didn’t vote.
“We were not allowed to have contact with teachers on school grounds,” he said. “I was not allowed to have a mailer placed in mailboxes.”
Under Walters, opt-out drives are likely to go national and his rhetoric about unions funding agendas unrelated to the classroom are expected to intensify, said Han, with the University of Utah.
“I believe that with Walters’s leadership,” Han said, “we may see a more politically charged and aggressive version of the Freedom Foundation’s strategy.”
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