Beware the New Red Lesson Plan

By Siena Rose & Nilesh Umapathy

There’s a new red lesson plan emerging in the United States public school system, and it’s being pushed by the leaders of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who have urged young people for years to become educators and join teachers’ unions. The goal: degrade the system from the inside.

The DSA wants to create a pipeline of young socialists becoming teachers. Those teachers join teachers’ unions. The unions give them structure, money, legal protection, activist networks, professional credibility, access to curricula, contracts, school policy and even political endorsements.

And the organization’s leaders are making no secret of their intentions. DSA has published — and continues to actively promote — a pamphlet that states unambiguously its plan to steer followers into professions that would put them directly in the path of children and impressionable young people. The DSA writes, “(S)ocialists should take jobs as teachers (and other school-based workers) for the political, economic and social potential the industry holds.”

The authors continue, noting that, “(W)e as Socialists need to build a ‘militant minority’ of class-conscious teachers.”

But instead of encouraging teachers to train up objective adults, the DSA exploits the trust both students and parents place in the system and notes that teachers need to be constantly molding this generation into “political actors.”

DSA Co-Chair Confirms Its Extreme Agenda in Stunning Admission on Live TV

That strategy has a name in labor politics — salting. Salts are workers who take jobs at a workplace with the goal of organizing it from within. The DSA has cultivated an ideological path into unionized public-sector jobs, and education is one of its most obvious targets of opportunity.

According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers in education, training and library occupations had the highest union membership rate of any occupational group in the U.S. during 2025, at 32.5 percent, and public-sector workers were more than five times as likely to organize as private-sector workers.

For any socialist trying to turn labor power into political power, public education is a potential gold mine.

The teacher enters the school. He or she joins the union. The union becomes the organizer and the political machine. Through that machine, the DSA does not need to control every classroom to influence the direction of education; it only needs a militant minority organized well enough to drag the union leftward and patient enough to stay inside the system for years.

In June 2026, DSA’s Boston chapter published an article celebrating a militant rank-and-file caucus inside the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the state affiliate of the NEA. The article described Educators for a Democratic Union as a caucus that has repeatedly won leadership positions and pushed the union left.

The DSA’s rank-and-file strategy site also treats the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), known for its militancy and penchant for political subterfuge, as its model for success.

The curriculum is the next link in the chain. The Zinn Education Project, which deliberately reframes American history “based on the lens of history highlighted in Howard Zinn’s best-selling book ‘A People’s History of the United States,’” has been highly recommended and supported by DSA chapters across America, including the Twin Cities DSA, which called Zinn’s “Pledge to Teach the Truth” a galvanizing resistance educators could sign onto.

The National Education Association (NEA) partnered with the Zinn Education Project in June 2025 to provide educators with resources to fight against what it called attacks on public education. NEA’s own writing said the Day of Action was led by Zinn in partnership with NEA and co-sponsored by more than 80 civil rights and advocacy organizations. AFT’s Share My Lesson platform lists the Zinn Education Project as an SML partner and describes its materials as campaigns to teach “people’s history.”

The point is that the DSA supports a teaching framework that the NEA promotes, that the AFT hosts, and that DSA chapters praise as a tool for resistance.

The same pattern appears outside the curriculum. In June 2026, the NEA and AFT jointly called on all 24 Democratic governors to reject President Trump’s private school voucher program. NYSUT and the Illinois Federation of Teachers helped organize more than 30 educator union leaders to make the same demand.

These are the marching orders sweeping through American education. It begins with young socialists being told to become teachers. It moves through rank-and-file organizing, salting logic and militant caucuses inside teachers’ unions. It reaches students through curriculum networks like Zinn’s. It reaches governors through the political muscle of the NEA, the AFT and their affiliates.

Parents don't need to guess at any of this — it's written down, published, and celebrated by the people doing it. Lawmakers weighing curriculum transparency bills, and school boards weighing union contracts, should ask a simple question: does this system serve students, or does it serve a movement that has told us, in its own words, exactly what it's building?

The answer is already public. It's time school districts and politicians started acting like they've read it.

Nilesh Umapathy is a Research Analyst at the Freedom Foundation. Siena Rose is a Communications Associate at the Freedom Foundation.

Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America's kids get the education they deserve.

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