National Education Association

The National Education Association (NEA) is the United States' largest labor union, representing 2.8 million educators — classroom teachers, education support professionals, higher-education faculty, and aspiring educators — across every US state and territory, with its headquarters in Washington D.C. From fall 2023 onward, the NEA has conducted the US education sector's most comprehensive democratic-governance exercise on AI: a task-force-built, representative-assembly-ratified policy statement setting five principles for AI in public schools, followed by a standing federal-advocacy programme and a professional-development infrastructure reaching every state affiliate. Its position in the make-AI-good movement is as the organised voice of the educator workforce — the professionals who are simultaneously the most directly exposed to AI's deployment in classrooms and the most politically credentialed constituency for shaping that deployment. Where organisations like the Authors Guild and the Concept Art Association pivot into AI advocacy from creative-industry bargaining, the NEA pivots from its standing role in public-school governance: 2.8 million educators as a constituency, a representative assembly as the democratic instrument, and a federal-lobbying infrastructure already pointed at Congress, the Department of Education, and regulatory agencies.

Founding and structure

The NEA traces its origin to 1857, when the National Teachers Association was established in Philadelphia with the founding mission of advancing "the dignity, respectability and usefulness" of the teaching profession and advocating for equal working conditions and learning opportunities. The National Teachers Association became the National Education Association in 1870 after absorbing the American Normal School Association, the National Association of School Superintendents, and the Central College Association. A 1966 merger with the American Teachers Association — formerly the separate association for Black educators, formed in response to the NEA's pre-desegregation segregated structure — completed the civil-rights-era integration of the organisation and unified the teaching profession's national representative body. The NEA has been the largest US union by membership for decades, with 2.8 million members as of 2024.

The NEA's governance is member-driven. Delegates to the annual Representative Assembly (RA) — which drew approximately 7,000 educator delegates to the 103rd RA in Philadelphia in July 2024 — set association policy on issues ranging from collective bargaining to federal legislation to, as of 2024, AI. Between annual assemblies, the nine-member Executive Committee and the Board of Directors hold governance authority. The current leadership team is led by President Becky Pringle — a middle school science teacher with more than 30 years of classroom experience, elected to the presidency at the 2020 Representative Assembly — with Princess R. Moss as Vice President, Noel Candelaria as Secretary-Treasurer (a special education teacher and former teacher's aide from El Paso, Texas), and Kim A. Anderson as Executive Director.

Task Force on Artificial Intelligence in Education

In fall 2023, President Becky Pringle created the Task Force on Artificial Intelligence in Education, charged with examining AI's current and future roles in Pre-K–12 and higher education and developing policy recommendations for the membership. Secretary-Treasurer Noel Candelaria chaired the task force; membership comprised teachers, education support professionals, higher-education faculty, and specialised instructional support personnel. The task force ran virtual sessions from November 2023 through April 2024 and convened in person in Chicago on March 1, 2024; two virtual subgroup sessions addressed AI uses in education and professional support for educators, and ethics, equity, bias, and intellectual property respectively. The group consulted subject-matter experts, reviewed academic research, and engaged with educators at national conferences over its seven-month run.

The process surfaced a striking baseline: more than 7 in 10 K-12 teachers had never received professional learning on AI, and fewer than 20 US states had issued any AI guidance to schools — the institutional vacuum the task force was addressing. The task force also documented the specific harms educators and students were already reporting: inaccurate AI grading systems assigning zero scores incorrectly; facial recognition failures disproportionately affecting Black students; object-recognition tools wired to alert police; and district-level adoption of untested technologies without systematic evaluation. The Task Force Report was published on June 26, 2024, and an open hearing on the proposed policy statement was held on June 24, 2024, to receive delegate input ahead of the Representative Assembly.

Policy statement and five principles

On July 4, 2024, approximately 7,000 delegates to the 103rd NEA Representative Assembly at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia voted by voice to approve the NEA's first policy statement on artificial intelligence in education. President Pringle framed the vote with the formulation that has anchored the NEA's AI messaging: "the student-educator connection must always be the center" — that the fundamental relationship between educator and student that enables learning is not replicable by AI and must not be displaced by it.

The five principles the policy statement establishes:

One: Students and educators must remain at the center. Human relationships form the foundation of education; AI should supplement, not substitute. AI-generated content cannot be the sole basis for consequential decisions — grades, employment actions, discipline — and qualified educators must make determinative educational calls. Collective bargaining protections against surveillance and job displacement are explicitly included under this principle.

Two: Evidence-based AI technology must enhance educational experience. AI adoption requires rigorous research establishing efficacy before widespread implementation; evidence must come from independent researchers or from industry-sponsored research meeting equivalent methodological standards. Particular attention to vulnerable learner populations — students with disabilities, multilingual learners, early learners — is required, and AI tools must be evaluated through equity lenses examining effects across different student demographics.

Three: Ethical development and strong data protection. The principle names algorithmic bias as a primary concern — noting that technology developers are predominantly white, male, cisgender, and without disabilities, which creates discriminatory outputs disproportionately affecting students of colour, disabled students, and multilingual learners. Strong FERPA and COPPA compliance is required; data collection should be minimised; remote proctoring and engagement-tracking tools that discriminate against students with disabilities and students of colour are explicitly identified as problematic.

Four: Equitable access and implementation. Native communities, communities of colour, and rural communities must evaluate AI tools for local appropriateness; AI must not subject marginalised students to heightened surveillance, nor feed school-to-prison or school-to-deportation pipelines; AI must not replace qualified educators as primary content providers.

Five: Ongoing education with and about AI. Comprehensive AI literacy development — for both educators and students — must accompany any AI deployment; educators must be included in adoption decisions, ongoing assessment, and mechanisms for raising concerns.

Professional development programme

Following the policy statement's approval, the NEA built the AI in Education Hub as the standing professional-development and policy-resource infrastructure. The hub's learning programme comprises twelve micro-credentials across four competency domains — Fundamentals of AI Technology, Responsible Creating with AI, Human-Centered Use of AI, and Social and Ethical Impacts of AI — along with seven independent study courses covering foundations, human-centred approaches, evidence-based learning, ethical use, equity and access, educator practice enhancement, and student AI literacy. A webinar series run in partnership with ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) addresses AI as a creative catalyst, special-education applications, algorithm literacy, and teaching and learning enhancement. The programme is described as grounded in "equity, ethics, and educator voice" and is designed to reach the estimated 73%+ of K-12 teachers who had received no prior AI professional learning.

Federal advocacy

The NEA's federal policy programme on AI runs on eight positions. Before Congress, the NEA advocates for federal legislation requiring transparency into AI algorithms, with civil rights protections, equity safeguards, age-appropriate-use provisions, and data-rights frameworks. It calls for the Department of Education to establish a standing task force including educators, parents, students, and administrators to address AI's effects on teaching, learning, accessibility for disabled learners, and data protection. It demands FERPA modernisation addressing educational technology and AI systems, and urges every state to appoint a chief privacy officer protecting student and employee data. On the civil-rights front, the NEA presses the Office for Civil Rights to issue guidance explicitly preventing "existing biases in the educational system" from being "replicated or exacerbated by AI" — naming the structural concern that, without active OCR enforcement posture, AI tools deployed at scale in schools will deepen racial and disability-based inequities rather than reduce them.

The NEA also provides its state and local affiliates with model tools for negotiating AI governance into institutional structures: model school-board resolutions, model collective-bargaining contract language, and procurement guidance aligned with accessibility standards. This channel converts the policy statement's principles into enforceable local provisions through the affiliate-and-collective-bargaining infrastructure that the NEA's 2.8 million members already operate in.

On May 29, 2025, Daaiyah Bilal-Threats, Senior Director of the Education Policy and Implementation Center, submitted the NEA's response to the National Science Foundation's call for input on the 2025 National AI Research and Development Strategic Plan. The letter's seven asks included funding for research hubs that embed educators alongside researchers and developers in collaborative design (not as end-users), investment in bias-detection and monitoring tools across demographic categories in educational AI, federal data-governance standards, and curriculum and professional-development funding for AI literacy.

Position in the corpus

The NEA's place in the make-AI-good corpus is as the organised voice of the US educator workforce on AI deployment in schools — the dominant sectoral-pivot entry for the PreK–12 and higher-education sector. Structurally, the NEA's AI work follows the same sectoral-pivot pattern that the Authors Guild, the Concept Art Association, and the WGA represent elsewhere in the corpus — a long-standing professional community whose institutional infrastructure pivots into AI advocacy when AI deployment directly threatens its members' working conditions, autonomy, or equity interests. Where the Authors Guild's concern is copyright and training-data consent, and the Concept Art Association's concern is the visual-art labour market, the NEA's concern is the deployment layer: AI systems being installed in classrooms and school administration without educator input, with racially biased outputs, without data protections, and with economic displacement of the educators who are the corpus's definition of "people whose work makes AI in schools what it is." The NEA's distinctive advantage over other sectoral organising vehicles is the democratic governance structure it brings to the AI question: a 7,000-delegate representative assembly that can pass a binding policy statement is a form of legitimation — an expression of the organised teaching profession's collective position — that no NGO statement or think-tank report can replicate.