Dear Editor:

I was very disappointed to see the plug for (so-called) artificial intelligence on the second-to-last page of the May 2026 issue of NEA Today. This page claims that it’s in the interest of teachers and students to “build educator capacity for thoughtful and informed AI integration in schools and classrooms.”

Such a statement amounts to a depressing, defeatist capitulation to Big Tech’s (and our bosses’) pro-AI hype and propaganda, and to their concerted, extremely well-funded efforts to undermine teacher autonomy, further deskill and casualize an already precarious labor force, and profoundly degrade teachers’ working conditions and students’ learning conditions. (It also makes a mockery of the whole idea of “faculty governance.”)

By allowing AI into our classrooms, we’re teaching students to become willing participants in their own exploitation.

As the country’s largest union, the NEA’s response to the tech industry’s all-out assault on education — from pre-K to graduate school — sets the tone for the rest of the US labor movement. The NEA website’s (and leadership’s) current stance on AI is unacceptable and should by no means be treated as representative of what education workers really think about (so-called) generative AI.

Contrary to the views of NEA Today, there is an urgent, existential need for collective, aggressive forms of refusal, resistance, and (when possible) re-appropriation — not only of so-called AI, but also of cloud computing in general, including large-scale data centers.

Despite popular misconceptions, there’s nothing inherently “greener” or “cheaper” about digital course materials as opposed to printed materials — unless, of course, you totally ignore all of the other people and places that have had higher costs, risks, and burdens offloaded onto them. Indeed, the economic and environmental “savings” we often associate with digital tools and software are only made possible by systematically obscuring the higher costs (higher rates of extraction, exploitation, dispossession, waste, pollution, etc.) that have been shifted onto more vulnerable people and places and/or more distant stages of the supply chain. See, for instance, the MIT Technology Review’s series on “AI Colonialism” and an interview about “The Hidden Human Labor Behind AI” in In These Times.

Readers who’d like to equip themselves with some of the tools and knowledge needed to engage in organized resistance — including ideological counter-narrative — should consult the AI Chaos Prevention Committee’s bingo card, which collects many of the boss’s favorite (but seriously flawed, politically motivated) AI talking points in one place: https://www.workersdecide.tech/.

They might also want to check out Jason Resnikoff’s essay in New Labor Forum, “Contesting the Idea of Progress: Labor’s AI Challenge,” along with the People’s AI Action Plan’s list of 13 ways that the concerted techno-oligarchic “push for ‘AI dominance’ is already affecting the public” here and now — by, for example, “increasing workplace surveillance and automating our jobs,” “making everyday life more unaffordable,” “stalling our transition to affordable, renewable energy,” and by aiding and abetting the military-industrial complex’s push for increasingly unaccountable forms of algorithmic warfare.

When it comes to AI (and all other digital media technologies), NEA Today and the NEA leadership should not presume to tell teachers and our students what’s best for us. We’re the ones who get to decide that.

As RH Lossin and Andy Battle observe in their COVID-era Boston Review essay, “Resisting Distance Learning”:

In industry after industry, technology has been the Trojan horse to smuggle managerial control into the workplace. In the case of education, retaining this control is not just about protecting ourselves, the workers, but about protecting our ability to give something meaningful and unique to our students.

Resistance to these measures in education requires the same tactics employed on the factory floor to regain control and force management to negotiate: rank-and-file action in the form of slowdowns, work stoppages, constant grieving and, perhaps, some sabotage.

[But it also requires] a radical shift in our habits of thought: [namely, firm resistance to the assumption that our high-tech economy] must be characterized by a detailed division of labor and by a professionally trained management, which monopolizes its planning and supervisory functions, leaving only the most trivial decisions to workers in the arrogant belief that management alone can comprehend the whole complex process.

“Generative AI” is nothing if not an attempt to further monopolize knowledge and information — and thus public education — by forcibly enclosing the cultural commons, thus imposing artificial, commodified scarcity on what should be public, collective resources. Such efforts are a systematic attempt to (further) deskill and de-democratize civic and economic life.

Historically, labor unions have been far too concessionary when it comes to the coercive introduction of dehumanizing Taylorist and neo-Taylorist technologies in the workplace. (See, for instance, Montana’s flagrantly undemocratic Management Rights of Public Employers.) It’s time for the NEA — led, as it should always be, by the rank-and-file union members (and our students) who occupy the frontlines of this fight — to decisively break with that history.

The future of teaching and learning are at stake.

Sincerely,

Stephen Paur (MFPE-AFMSU, NEA, AFT, AFL-CIO – Local 7734)

Montana-based college writing instructor.

(This letter reflects the writer’s personal opinion and in no way indicates his employer’s official or unofficial stance on AI.)

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