New Jersey Education Association hosting “Drag is Not a Crime: The Past, Present, and Future of Drag” in upcoming Consortium; says “Drag is what education is all about”

The New Jersey Education Association (NJEA)–the union representing 200,000 New Jersey educators–will host an event titled “Drag is not a Crime: The Past, Present and Future of Drag” in its upcoming NJEA Consortium. This Consortium is set to take place November 6-7, 2025.

A post about the event from the NJEA read, “Teachers, learning goes beyond classrooms!…Get inspired to challenge norms & ignite creativity in the classroom.” The post continued, “Drag is what education is all about.”

The Consortium, supported by an NEA grant, aims to “put diversity and representation at the forefront of curriculum development.” Other talks in the Consortium include: Teaching Palestine, Beyond Awareness: Cultivating Equity Centered Schools through Action, NJDOE Commissions in Conversation on Inclusive Curriculum, and more.

This Consortium is part of a three-year NEA Great Public Schools grant hoping to “revolutionize the integration of representative curricula into K-12 teaching” as well as “infuse historically marginalized identities into K-12 teaching and learning.”

This includes “mandated topics” such as “LGBTQIA+” as well as other “marginalized communities.”

The first year of the NEA Great Public Schools grant, in 2022, NJEA held its first Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Committee as well as a Drag Queen Story Hour, during which two drag queens read and answered questions about “queer-affirming children’s books”, books which “help kids who are beginning to understand themselves as LGBTQIA+”.