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The National Education Association just shared its 2026-2027 Read Across America calendar, and if you still believe the union’s agenda is about teaching kids to love reading, you’re sorely mistaken.

NEA’s own words leave no room for doubt. The reading program is designed to “celebrate a nation of diverse readers” with “12 months of recommended titles, authors, and teaching resources that promote diversity and inclusion.”

Every month features three books — one elementary, one middle grade, one young adult — “that explore a topic related to diversity and inclusion.”

The NEA’s explicit goal is to ensure every student sees books that “show they are reflected and respected.” The book choices focus on identity, immigrant experiences, body positivity, neurodiversity-as-identity, and activism, while traditional American culture, Western heritage, and the shared stories that actually built this country are practically treated like “wrongthink” — ideas to be “diversified” away from.

The themes highlighted by the union include, for instance: Celebrate Every Body. Create Room for All Voices. Build Belonging. Be Seen. Redefine What’s Possible. This is the same language promoted by the DEI industry, not an actual literacy program.

Let's look at some example recommendations.

August 2026 – Celebrate Every Body

• Elementary: Everybelly by Thao Lam – a brown-skinned child at the community pool surveying bodies of every shape and size. Classic body-positivity messaging.
• Middle grade: The Blue Dress by Rebecca Morrison – an Iranian American girl navigating body image, her immigrant mother’s expectations, and disordered eating.
• Young adult: Ambrosia Lee Drops the Mic by Patricia Park – a Korean American former child actress discarded by Hollywood for weight gain, fighting Asian stereotypes through stand-up comedy.

February 2027 – Put Passions to Work

• Elementary: Seven Million Steps – the story of Black comedian and activist Dick Gregory’s 1976 cross-country run against hunger and poverty.
• Young adult: King of the Neuro Verse by Idris Goodwin – a Black teen with ADHD competing to become “Cypher King” of the lunchroom rap circles.

Prior years followed a similar template: heavy on Asian American, Latino, Indigenous, multiracial, immigrant, and neurodiverse protagonists, plus explicit tie-ins to Rainbow Book Month, African American lists, and “social justice/activism” titles.

The pattern is not subtle.

“Diversity” for the NEA means non-majority identities. Mainstream American experiences, classical children’s literature without an identity overlay, European heritage, or straightforward civic stories are systematically de-emphasized.

This is the same NEA that fights any parental or legislative effort to remove sexually explicit or ideological material from school libraries.

Why is a national teachers’ union that claims to care about literacy organizing an entire year of recommended reading around progressive identity politics instead of the best books ever written for children?

Why the relentless spotlight on immigrant narratives and minority cultures while the American story itself — the one every child in this country actually shares and the one that presumably drives immigrants to come to this country in pursuit of the American dream — is treated as optional or secondary?

This is not accidental.

The NEA operates more like the educational wing of the democrat party, similarly prioritizing group identity over individual achievement, social justice over gratitude, and selective “inclusion” over a common American culture.

Children who grow up hearing a steady stream of “be seen,” “hear all voices,” and “redefine what’s possible” are being trained to view America through the lens of what divides us rather than what unites us.

Teaching children to love books is a noble cause for sure.

But turning a national literacy campaign into a vehicle to promote progressive cultural priorities is not.

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