The National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) spent billions on lobbying and political contributions despite little or no relative wage growth for dues-paying members for more than five decades, a recent report said.
The May 18 report by a nonprofit research and data analysis firm, Network Contagion Research Institute, summarizes public records of political contributions and finances of the nation’s largest public school teachers’ unions, mainly the NEA and the AFT.
The unions, with a combined 4.7 million members, “operate as large-scale political and funding institutions with limited transparency and unattenuated accountability to their members.”  
This raises concerns about the preservation of academic freedom and educational neutrality, the report said….