In practice, the year-long campaign was a public relations stunt while the union bureaucrats forced teachers to “wait.” Moss has proved herself to the bureaucracy for years—she also helped shut down the semi-insurrectionary 2018 West Virginia strike alongside AFT President Weingarten and then-NEA Vice President Becky Pringle. The same pattern is now unfolding in Chicago, where the school district has just imposed more than 1,700 job cuts despite the AFT-aligned Chicago Teachers Union signing an April 2025 contract billed as “Trump-proof” and “historic.” What the conventions approvedRejecting the class struggle entirely, the conventions focused on mobilizing educators to get out the vote for Democrats in the midterms. Current LM-2 filings show both the NEA and AFT presidents now collecting annual compensation of $514,000—seven to nine times a teacher’s salary.