Trojan Hearse? A Right-Wing Think Tank Aims to Abolish the Miami-Dade Teachers’ Union

Miami New Times | By Francisco Alvarado | September 19, 2024

The Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit based in Olympia, Washington, is behind a campaign to decertify United Teachers of Dade.

Over the past year, Miami-Dade Public Schools teachers and support staff by the thousands have received a steady torrent of mailers trashing their collective-bargaining unit, United Teachers of Dade (UTD). In a recent flurry of six flyers sent in a single week, a group called the Miami-Dade Education Coalition accused the union of lying about its efforts to fight for higher teacher pay.

“UTD tried to spin salaries,” one mailer states. “Teachers were not impressed.” Another features a photo of UTD president Karla Hernandez-Mats under an all-uppercase headline that reads, “UTD Refuses to Fight for You.”

The coalition is led by a small group of public school teachers that seeks to unseat UTD as the bargaining unit for the 24,150 employees of Miami-Dade County Public Schools in a mail-in recertification vote scheduled for September 24. The coalition’s slick mailings fail to note that the blitz is bankrolled by the Freedom Foundation, an Olympia, Washington-based think tank that openly aims to dismantle unions representing rank-and-file government employees.

The Freedom Foundation doesn’t disclose its donors, but according to media reports, past contributors include billionaire conservatives like the Koch brothers and Betsy DeVos who aim to privatize public education.

Shawn Beightol, a teacher at John A. Ferguson Senior High School in Kendall who formed the Miami-Dade Education Coalition (MDEC) confirms that the Freedom Foundation is funding his group’s offensive against UTD.

“They are underwriting our entire campaign,” Beightol tells New Times. “It is impossible to do this kind of campaign without some outside force. So yeah, we allied ourselves with a group that has a common enemy.”

Each mailer likely costs between $5,000 to $15,000 to produce and send to 25,000 people, Beightol says. He says he doesn’t know precisely how much the Freedom Foundation has spent but estimates the campaign’s price tag to be in the low seven-figure range.

Rusty Brown, the Freedom Foundation’s southern director, also confirms that the think tank paid for mailers, digital and television ads, canvassers, and legal representation but declined to put a number on the cost or share the identities of its financial backers.

“It is not a small amount of money,” Brown says. “But we will spend whatever it takes to get the job done. And we don’t disclose our donors.”

A Bull’s-Eye on UTD

The Freedom Foundation played a key role in setting up UTD for its potential demise before MDEC came into existence.

Rusty Brown and the think tank take credit for a state law enacted last year that bars government agencies across Florida from deducting union dues from public employees’ paychecks.

The measure only applies to unions representing public school teachers, nurses at public hospitals, and other civil employees, such as transit workers. Those employees now must mail a check or a union rep must collect it at their workplace. In addition to teachers, UTD represents teachers’ assistants and other support staff, clerical workers, and security guards.

In conjunction with the ban on deductions, the new law mandates that if less than 60 percent of eligible workers pay dues, a union loses its certification as a collective bargaining unit, triggering a new election.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, who supported the law’s passage, has referred to the deductions ban as a way to protect public employees’ paychecks. But a political motive is at play.

Tellingly, police and firefighter unions (which endorsed DeSantis) are excluded from the ban.

Additionally, in its literature and videos, the Freedom Foundation criticizes teachers’ unions for pushing liberal policies such as defunding the police and advocating for teaching critical race theory in classrooms.

UTD president Karla Hernandez-Mats says the Freedom Foundation, DeSantis, and Republican state legislators intend to break apart Democratic-leaning, public-sector unions, starting with her organization.

Indeed, the GOP set its sights on the Miami-Dade teachers’ union after Hernandez-Mats ran as Charlie Crist’s running mate on the Democratic Party ticket in the 2022 governor’s race.

“This is a political attack from right-wing extremists trying to undermine working people in the state” – Karla Hernandez-Mats

“We know Freedom Foundation has taken credit for writing the most egregious anti-worker legislation Florida has ever had,” Hernandez-Mats tells New Times. “This is a political attack from right-wing extremists trying to undermine working people in the state.”

Brown denies that his group engages in partisan politics. Rather, he says, the think tank is merely holding public-sector unions accountable when they stop representing the interests of their dues-paying members.

“If you take a step back and look at it with an unbiased perspective, UTD uses members’ dues to enrich its own officers’ lives and fund political wars that don’t benefit teachers,” he contends, adding, “All the school districts in Florida are unionized and are the worst paid [in the nation].”

At any rate, the tedious process of collecting dues directly from members has resulted in an exodus of dues-paying teachers in Miami-Dade.

When the ban went into effect, the number of teachers paying dues to UTD was 52 percent, triggering the recertification process with Florida’s Public Employees Relations Commission (PERC).

Coalition Mounts Challenge to UTD

In July of last year, Shawn Beightol was among dozens of Miami-Dade teachers who attended an all-expenses-paid trip to Denver to attend the Freedom Foundation’s Teacher Freedom Summit, a three-day event sponsored by conservative groups, including the controversial right-wing organization Moms for Liberty.

New Times obtained a copy of the agenda, which indicates that Betsy DeVos appeared via Zoom as a surprise first-day guest speaker. On day two, Beightol introduced Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr., who leads DeSantis’ “anti-woke” policies in Florida’s public schools and universities and who delivered the keynote address at dinner.

In addition to introducing Diaz, Beightol says he attended workshops and seminars about supplanting unions currently representing government workers with groups “that are more local and more representative.”

Teaming up with the Freedom Foundation was the only way to mount a viable campaign against UTD, adds Beightol, who placed second with 23 percent of union members’ votes in a UTD presidential election in 2007. “They don’t like UTD because it donates half of its money to political agendas that have nothing to do with teachers,” he explains. “We don’t like them because they sell us out.”

He insists that if teachers vote to supplant UTD with MDEC on September 24, his union will serve its membership as a nonpolitical, nonpartisan collective-bargaining agent.

Beightol does represent a vocal minority of teachers who believe UTD has failed to secure higher pay for teachers, is ineffective in handling employee grievances, and does a poor job at improving working conditions at public schools.

Yet in 2023, 91 percent of the union’s 24,000-plus members ratified a UTD-negotiated contract that won raises of 7 to 10 percent for teachers. Prior to that, UTD had successfully campaigned in 2018 and 2022 to raise the county sales tax by a penny to provide millions of dollars for additional teacher raises.

In the meantime, the Freedom Foundation was hitting up donors.

“If we are successful, this would be the largest public-sector decertification in American History…!” – Freedom Foundation fundraising email

“The Freedom Foundation is launching our largest single campaign ever and we need your help!” Freedom Foundation CEO Aaron Withe wrote on an October 23, 2023, email obtained by New Times. “If we are successful, this would be the largest public-sector decertification in American history and it will deal a big blow to the unions, costing them millions of dollars annually!”

Attached to the email was a video of Shawn Beightol promoting the Miami-Dade Education Coalition.

Three months later, Withe informed donors that the Freedom Foundation had succeeded in forcing the UTD into a recertification election.

“This is huge news because it means the Freedom Foundation’s efforts to decertify UTD will march on,” Wiche wrote on December 20. “Decertifying UTD would cripple one of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions virtually overnight.”

Wiche noted that the Freedom Foundation “had a donor generously step up and offer to match all donations for the Miami-Dade campaign from now until December 31 up to $500,000.” The funds would “provide campaign support to the independent union run by teachers that is vying to replace UTD,” he added.

Is MDEC a Front for the Freedom Foundation?

Hernandez-Mats maintains that the coalition is merely a conduit for the Freedom Foundation to continue its attacks on United Teachers of Dade. “It’s so obvious that they don’t even try to hide it,” she says. “They are 100 percent bought and paid for by Freedom Foundation.”

Beightol counters that financial assistance from the foundation serves to level the playing field for MDEC. He notes that UTD has sent out dozens of mailers of its own, including an attack piece that contains a photo of him beneath a name tag that reads, “Hello, my name is Shady Shawn Beightol,” and that claims he’s “working with a right-wing group to destroy UTD, your contract, and working conditions.”

Beightol notes that UTD sent out an attack piece with a photo of him beneath a name tag that reads “Hello my name is Shady Shawn Beightol.”

“They complain that the Freedom Foundation brought in canvassers,” Beightol says. “They did the same thing when they brought in Chicago teachers and union canvassers. This is a political campaign, and it boils down to having troops on the ground knocking on doors and having a PR budget. If you don’t have that, you don’t have a shot.”

Furthermore, UTD officials are allowed to speak at faculty meetings and are able to place campaign literature in staff mailboxes, while he and his coalition compatriots are barred from discussing anything about the union election with fellow employees when they are at work, Beightol says.

“The district put a filter in place so any emails about the coalition are funneled into spam,” he complains. “When we’ve offered to have breakfast or lunch and meet with teachers to explain our position, we have been told no. We have it in writing.”

The coalition’s odds of defeating UTD don’t appear favorable. To appear on the ballot, each group had to submit letters-of-interest cards from 10 percent of the workforce.

MDEC took more than five months to collect the bare minimum of 2,400 cards. UTD turned in 11,000 cards in a mere three weeks.