Teachers union president who gave viral ‘off-the-rails’ speech has visited Biden White House over 20 times
FIRST ON FOX: The president of the largest teachers’ union, who was mocked over the weekend for giving an “off-the-rails” speech, has visited the White House dozens of times during Biden’s presidency.
White House visitor logs show that National Education Association (NEA) President Rebecca “Becky” Pringle, who delivered a viral speech over the weekend that drew intense criticism, visited the Biden White House at least 24 times between 2021 and early 2024, a Fox News Digital review found.
In March of this year, Pringle met with Biden’s national economic advisor Lael Branard roughly a month after meeting with Jade Cabrera of the White House Office of Public Engagement.
In February 2024 and December 2023, Pringle visited the White House as part of large gatherings with President Biden. Pringle had two other visits with Vice President Harris’s Deputy Chief of Staff Erin Wilson in October 2023.
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Over the course of 2023, Pringle met with at least two of First lady Jill Biden’s aides, including her special assistant and senior adviser, as well as a meeting with now-former White House Director of Domestic Council Susan Rice.
The visitor logs show Pringle participated in a virtual event with the first lady, along with American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten one day after Biden was sworn into office in January 2021. She also participated in a one-on-one meeting with President Biden in December 2022. She went on to visit several highly-attended White House events in 2021 and 2022.
During NEA’s Annual Meeting and Representative Assembly (RA) in Philadelphia over the weekend, Pringle called for transformative social justice change in the education system in the pursuit of equity.
“To unite not just our members, but the nation to reclaim public education as a common good, as the foundation of our democracy, and then transform it into something it was never designed to be—a racially and socially just and equitable system,” Pringle said.
“We worked hard to rid ourselves of a tyrannical, deceitful, and corrupt White House, but the reality is that the seeds that were sown during that horrible season continue to germinate,” she said, referring to the Trump administration.
She continued by vowing to “protect public education” and said, “We will fight privatization. We will fight vouchers. We will fight any and all schemes to drain resources from our beloved public schools,” appearing to refer to school choice.
Pringle, who donated $2,800 to Biden’s 2020 campaign and $500 to the Biden Victory Fund, said the union’s “work must be about electing people like” President Biden and Vice President Harris, promising to re-elect them this year.
She also said the union is pro- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), a controversial concept that has sparked backlash at colleges, K-12 schools, in all levels of government, and private companies across the United States.
The Florida Board of Governors passed a regulation in January limiting public funding for DEI, defining them as “any program, campus activity, or policy that classifies individuals on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, gender identity, or sexual orientation and promotes differential or preferential treatment of individuals on the basis of such classification.”
School choice advocate Corey DeAngelis ripped Pringle’s recent comments in a previous statement to Fox News Digital, calling her one of the “power-hungry control freaks [who] think they own your kids.”
“These power-hungry control freaks think they own your kids. They’re in a cult that worships government and detests parents. It’s time to defund teachers’ unions and allow the money to follow the child,” DeAngelis said. “Becky Pringle pulled a Dwight Schrute. She is off-the-rails and desperate to maintain control over the minds of other people’s children.”
Last year while speaking on a panel, Pringle said that “racial” and “social justice” must be at the forefront of education policy in the United States.
“For us at the NEA, education justice must be about racial justice, it must be about social justice, it must be about climate justice. It must be about all of those things,” Pringle said.
“For our students to be able to come to school ready to learn every day–We can never think of education as an isolated system because everything connects to our students’ ability to learn. So, we have to necessarily talk about housing justice, food inequality, and the reality that we all just went through a global pandemic together and of course it was the most marginalized communities that were already suffering from the inequities in every single social system in this country and every country.”
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Pringle previously faced backlash during the pandemic when she raked in over $500,000 while her teachers’ union was pushing for schools to remain closed and teachers were making a fraction of her high salary.
Fox News Digital reached out to the White House and NEA for comment on Pringle’s White House visits but did not receive a response.
Fox News Digital’s Hannah Grossman and David Rutz contributed to this report.
