Recently, a video surfaced of a speaker at a Florida Education Association (FEA) press conference encouraging students to walk out of school to protest federal law enforcement. Union officials have since attempted to distance themselves from the remarks, but the episode should not come as a surprise. The FEA’s parent organization, the National Education Association, recently adopted a resolution at its annual conference explicitly supporting efforts to help students organize similar protests.
The walkout controversy reveals a much deeper problem: teacher unions in Florida have abandoned their mission of representing workers and have become political organizations that put ideology ahead of students and the teachers they claim to represent.
What happens when a union is forced to hold a recertification election is even more revealing. Only five of the 125 union recertification votes held for employees in Florida’s K-12 schools between March 2025 and January 2026 secured the support of more than 50% of the vote. Under current law, unions that did not meet this standard won recertification anyway. Even when a majority of the workforce declined to participate, the outcome still conferred exclusive bargaining authority.
For instance, there are 2,034 instructional personnel eligible for the union in Santa Rosa County. Only 364, less than 18% of their total eligible membership, actually voted to recertify the union as the bargaining authority. In Gadsden County, it’s even worse, with only 15% of the 293 eligible instructional employees choosing to vote to recertify the union. And in Seminole County, 1,098 votes out of 4,407 possible, less than 25%, secured the union’s recertification.
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