Tag: MORE

Summer Musings, Part I

Last school year was a particularly taxing year, for a number of reasons, both professionally and otherwise.  It left me wiped out and completely fried by the time we reached the last day of school.  So I took the first two weeks of my summer to pretty much disconnect from the education world.  No blog reading, public ed tweeting, or conversations with Beth Dimino.  Outside of fishing with a couple of my PJSTA brothers, I was totally disconnected from my normal work, which is very rare for me.

Two weeks ago, however, I had lunch (Korean BBQ for those of you wondering) with a couple of my friends from MORE, Jia Lee and Mike Schirtzer and it helped to re-energize my passion for the organizing work that we do.  Part of the overwhelming feelings that I had at the end of the school year dealt with the feelings that there were battles being waged on so many different fronts and it can become really exhausting.  There are the opt-out battles, the battles for democracy within NYSUT, the work to try and build STCaucus into a more member centered caucus, the importance of the November elections on both a state and national level, the work that came with being a member of the PJSTA negotiating team that settled our contract in June, along with the many other issues that we deal with.

So upon arriving at lunch with Jia and Mike, I declared to them that I had given very little thought to public ed and unions over the previous two weeks.  Fortunately they are two of the more remarkable unionists and teachers that I know and spending a few hours with them helped to center me and give me an idea of what direction to head in from there.  That has become more clear to me in the time since our meeting as I have had time to contemplate some ideas and as I watched the AFT Convention in Minnesota unfold from afar (for a few good reports on that convention check out Norm Scott’s blog over at Ed Notes, along with the other blogs he links to).  What I am speaking of is the idea of elevating teacher voice.  Giving a louder voice to the actual teachers working in the classrooms.

This entire concept is a very important one for me.  One of the largest problems that we have faced in recent years has been the lack of teacher voice when it comes to the decisions that shape our public school system.  That shouldn’t be any secret to readers of this blog.  While we have made some strides in the pushback against ed deform in recent years, I am not so sure we have made much, if any, progress in terms of raising teacher voice.  We have some tremendous allies who have done incredible work alongside us in bettering public education.  Still, when it comes to the issues that impact our students and teachers most, the voices that we typically hear from are not those of the teachers who are in the classroom every day.  We hear from elected officials, parents, union leaders, authors, caucuses, coalitions, and groups, all of whom have contributed immensely to some real progress over the past few years.  But rarely, if ever, do we hear from actual classroom teachers.  On the rare occasion it is a teacher who we hear from, it is often because they are first identified as the head of one of the aforementioned groups.  There are some very real reasons for this, of course.  But ultimately, as long as teachers allow themselves to be regularly pushed to the sidelines when the issues that impact them so greatly are discussed, we, along with the students we serve, will continue to be at the mercy of others.

As I begin to wrap my head around the idea of the 2016-2017 school year, I do so with the question in mind of how do we raise teacher voice across New York State and beyond?  How do we empower our members at the very grassroots level?  How do we better engage our membership at the local, state, and national levels in a way that allows the members to drive the union agendas?  How do we create union cultures that encourage membership participation and what exactly does that participation look like?  How do we create times and places to facilitate discussions among the rank and file about what our unions are vs. what they actually should be?  How do we build more democratic unions and how do we overcome the obstacles that stand in the path of union democracy?  How do we turn our unions from passive unions or unions who simply mobilize around top down mandates into unions who have rank and file organizing at the very heart of their operation?

I’ll be using this blog throughout the remainder of the summer to explore some of these ideas and more.  Additionally there will be a few new ideas to present to you before the start of the school year that I believe will help to raise teacher voice.  I strongly encourage you, whether you are a member of the PJSTA or any other local for that matter, to use the comment section below to share your feelings on the questions posed above.  I honestly have no idea what the best answers to those questions are (though I have plenty of ideas, lol), so I welcome the thoughts of others.  You can also reach me via email at pjsta1vp@gmail.com or @Sashammy on Twitter.

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UFT Election Results Coming Today

The United Federation of Teachers, the country’s largest teacher union local, has wrapped up their 2016 elections and results are due back today.  President Michael Mulgrew, who infamously threatened Common Core opponents with violence, was being opposed by opt-out activist Jia Lee.  Though a victory for Lee would seem to be a no-brainer to most outsiders, those who know the UFT’s rigged system of democracy will tell you that it is anything but.  It is expected that Mulgrew and Unity Caucus will be victorious, however the MORE Caucus, of which Lee is a member, is expecting to seriously challenge for several executive board seats.  Winning executive board seats would represent an enormous victory for MORE, the social justice caucus of the UFT.

Early election results are showing an increase in voter turnout by about 10,000 according to James Eterno at the ICE UFT Blog…

Camille Eterno and Norm Scott are reporting from the American Arbitration Association where votes are being counted in the UFT Election. Here are the latest numbers from Norm:

53,000 voted, that is up 10,000 from 2013.

Only 1000 of that increase came from retirees who in 2016 make up 46% of the voters. In 2013, retirees made up 52% of the voters.

Where did those new voters go? Mulgrew is the known commodity. The conventional wisdom guess would be the majority went to Unity but we shall see.

We will try to be back later with updated results.

Courageous MORE Teachers Defy Gag Order

Three courageous members of the United Federation of Teachers are defying the city’s gag order on speaking out against the state tests.  Lauren Cohen, Jia Lee, and Kristin Taylor, all of whom are running for positions in the upcoming UFT election with the Movement of Rank and File Educators Caucus, spoke to NBC 4 New York and encouraged parents to opt their children out of the rigged Common Core exams that New York State students in grades 3-8 are in the midst of now.

Click here to watch the video with the three courageous teachers.

Contribute to Defeat Mulgrew

I have written in great detail about the harm that Michael Mulgrew and his Unity Caucus inflict not only upon their local union, the United Federation of Teachers, but upon unionized teachers across New York State and beyond.  Fortunately this is an election year for the UFT and Mulgrew has a very formidable challenger in noted public education activist Jia Lee.

Lee needs no introduction to most advocates of public education.  She has been on the front lines of the fight against high stakes testing, junk science teacher evaluations, and the struggle for more democratic unions at all levels.  In 2015 she travelled on her own dime to Washington DC and she quite eloquently represented public school teachers in the United States Senate.  PJSTA members will remember her as our keynote speaker at the PJSTA Conference Day last year.  She was one of the first conscientious objectors in New York State when she began refusing to administer the rigged New York State assessments in 2014 and she is one of the authors of the Teachers of Conscience Position Paper.  As someone who is fortunate enough to call Jia a friend, I can share that she is the real deal when it comes to public education advocacy.  She breathes activism.  In addition to the tireless efforts she has put into the opt-out campaigns and working for union democracy, Jia is a dynamic teacher at New York City’s Earth School and she has been a tremendous professional resource to me, sharing countless things from her classroom that my students have then been able to benefit from.  If such a thing as an education superhero exists that person is Jia Lee.  You can click here to access one of Jia’s flyers to share widely with your public ed allies.

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Beth Dimino, Jia Lee, Brian St. Pierre. Lee is running against Michael Mulgrew for UFT President.

This election is about more than just Jia, however.  Jia is simply running at the top of a slate of candidates being put forth by two UFT Caucuses.  Those two caucuses (MORE and New Action) are tired of seeing their union compromise and collaborate with reformers bent on destroying us.  They are ready to transform the UFT into a member driven union that represents the teachers in the classroom rather than the union “leaders” with personal agendas.  While that sort of transformation would certainly benefit New York City’s classroom teachers, it’s benefits would stretch far beyond that as well.  It would significantly alter the direction of our statewide union, NYSUT, and our national union, the AFT.  As the local that is by far the largest in the country (several times larger than the second biggest), the UFT’s leadership wields extraordinary power within the teacher union landscape.  They impact virtually every unionized teacher in the United States.  The leadership of the UFT is the largest reason why unions have supported the Common Core and test based teacher evaluations.  They were the ones urging state legislators to vote in favor of the Education Transformation Act last year!  As a matter of fact, much of Unity Caucus’ (the caucus representing the UFT leadership) campaign in this year’s election has even centered upon their support for the evaluation plan in which 50% is made up of test scores.

Clearly anyone who supports public education has a stake in this year’s UFT election.  Nobody can ignore it and think that it only impacts teachers in the five boroughs.  This election will impact every teacher, student, and parent across the state.  With that in mind I will ask that all of you head on over right now to make a donation to the MORE Caucus and their election fund.  Unseating the biggest bully on the public education landscape can’t be done by simply “liking” something on Facebook or retweeting a link on Twitter.  It will take money too.  So give what you can, even if it is only a small amount.  Finally, be sure to ask your friends who support public education to do the same.

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Inept NYSUT Leadership Attacks Own Members

Yesterday  I came across a couple of tweets from the NYSUT Unity Caucus, the caucus that has been the controlling caucus of the statewide union since NYSUT’s inception.  The caucus of Randi Weingarten, Mike Mulgrew, Andy Pallotta, and the army of Unity hacks who vote however they are told to vote. The tweets were directed at MORE Caucus, the primary opposition to Unity at UFT level…

 

 

MORE’s response…

 

 

The second Unity tweet..

 

 

It’s simply unbelievable to me that Unity Caucus, synonymous with top down unionism, who over time has benefited from a disengaged and slumbering membership, would call out MORE for “all talk, no action”.  Especially given the fact that MORE has a well earned reputation for organizing and agitating with the best of them.  The very fact that they have built such a formidable opposition to Unity Caucus is an indication of how active they have been.  People like Mike Schirtzer, Jia Lee, Megan Moskop, Lauren Cohen, James Eterno, and so many others are the very definition of union activists.

This, of course, isn’t the first time we have seen NYSUT’s Unity caucus launch these sorts of nonsensical barbs.  Only two months ago they used the same tactics to smear PJSTA President Beth Dimino.   It’s just a shame that during the very week the Friedrichs case was heard in the Supreme Court our feckless and inept union leaders focus was on attacking their own members.

 

Let’s End Top Down Unionism

I have to thank my friend Norm Scott over at Ed Notes Online for the piece he recently wrote on the demise of the UFT’s blog Edwize.  I’ll admit that I had never even heard of Edwize.  But then again I don’t typically spend time reading Unity Caucus propaganda, so maybe that explains it.

Anyways, tucked into Norm’s piece was a real gem that he had from Mike Antonucci’s Intercepts blog…

Back in 2002, three NEA staffers wrote an article for the Journal of Labor Research on the union’s experiments in cyberspace. They concluded, “With modern cyber software, in short, content creation can be decentralized and democratized. Members can be empowered. But first, of course, members need to be trusted. A top-down union, comfortable with command-and-control internal information-sharing processes, might be unnerved by this prospect. A top-down union, uncomfortable with anything but command-and-control, will likely never succeed in cyberspace.”

At the time, I felt this was an encouraging view, but didn’t go far enough.

Sigh. All NEA can think about is how cyberspace will help it get members to do something. Completely unexamined (perhaps even unimagined) is what if cyberspace helps members to get NEA to do something? What if members share internal information not previously filtered through the communications staff? What if they decide to support or reject legislation not included in the union’s legislative program? What if they become unhappy meeting once a year in a group of 9,000 and would prefer a different arrangement? A membership truly engaged in NEA’s workings might make it a stronger union, but it would be a fundamentally different union from the one that exists now, and in ways utterly unpredictable to those who hope to harness that power.

Even 13 years later we haven’t reached that point, but we’re closer to it than we have ever been.

That passage gets to the heart of what I think is the biggest problem with our unions and that is the top down nature of them in which our leaders insist on.  “Command-and-control” as Antonucci calls it.  For as long as I have been a teacher (14 years) I have seen the leadership of NYSUT/AFT/NEA decide on what we are supporting, what positions to take, what needs to be done and then simply command the membership to pledge support to those positions.  To some extent this also happens in individual locals, though I think that is less the case in smaller locals.  Like most people in power, union leaders often act with their own best interests in mind, with the goal being to retain power over all else.

The decentralizing and democratizing of unions that those NEA staffers saw as a possibility in 2002 has started to take place in many unions across the country, only it hasn’t been with the consent of the union leadership, but more as a thorn in the leadership’s side.  Rank and file members are found utilizing social media to organize everyday in support of causes that their unions haven’t supported.  Opt-out campaigns are the perfect example of this.  Classroom teachers were organizing around that long before NYSUT did.  It’s why every day classroom teachers like Beth Dimino, Jia Lee, Kevin Glynn, and dozens of others are viewed as the real teacher leaders while the likes of Andy Pallotta, Mike Mulgrew, and Randi Weingarten are looked upon with disdain.

In 2014, when NYSUT refused to oppose Governor Cuomo, the PJSTA harnessed the power of social media to endorse and support his primary challenger Zephyr Teachout.  Teachout was a guest at the PJSTA Conference Day and held a press conference at Comsewogue High School with hundreds of our members at her backs.  We recorded her speech and spread it via YouTube so that teachers across the state could hear her pro-public education stance, giving her a chance to illustrate just how different she was than the incumbent Cuomo.  While falling short, Teachout reached nearly 35% of the primary voters and left us wondering what would have happened if our parent unions had worked for her in the ways that we had.

In other places around the country caucuses favoring a more democratic brand of unionism have either won control of their unions (Chicago, LA) or are mounting serious challenges (Philadelphia).  Of course right here in New York, the MORE Caucus is mounting a growing threat to Unity Caucus at the UFT level and STCaucus is becoming a force to be reckoned with inside of NYSUT.

One thing that I have often claimed and believe deeply is that union leadership of UFT/NYSUT/AFT value power above all else and will stop at nothing to retain that power.  This is even more noticeable with the Friedrichs threat looming.  At a time when unions should be doing more than ever to empower their members and allow the voice of the rank and file to drive their agendas, our leadership’s strategy has been to ask for more VOTE-COPE money all while attacking classroom teachers, issuing and early endorsement for former WalMart board member Hillary Clinton, cavort with our enemies in support of #TeachStrong, and  celebrate “momentous” victories that aren’t actual victories.

There is a member driven movement for a more democratic union that is coming.  How much it transforms our union remains to be seen, but the more rank and file teachers get informed, become engaged, and take back their unions the better off our profession, our students, and our communities will be.

If you haven’t already registered for the “Restoring Power to the Teacher” conference hosted by STCaucus do so right now!  Be sure to bring a friend you work with or one from another district.  this is your opportunity to have your voice heard and move your union in the direction you want it to go!

MORE Announces Jia Lee Will Oppose Michael Mulgrew in 2016 UFT Election

Beth Dimino, Jia Lee, Brian St. Pierre. Lee will be running against Michael Mulgrew for UFT President.
Beth Dimino, Jia Lee, Brian St. Pierre. Lee will be running against Michael Mulgrew for UFT President.

Jia Lee, the well known teacher activist from New York City who was the guest speaker at the 2015 PJSTA Conference Day, will be running in opposition to Michael Mulgrew for president of the United Federation of Teachers in this spring 2016 UFT election.

Mulgrew, whose position as the president of the largest local in the country, makes him the most influential teacher unionist in the country, in regards to influencing the direction of our statewide and national unions.  He famously defended the Common Core at the 2014 AFT Convention by threatening anyone who “took them away” from him with violence.  Additionally he marched with Governor Cuomo during the 2014 Labor Day Parade.

Lee’s record shows her to be quite a different candidate than Mulgrew.  A current special education teacher, Lee has been one of the most visible opponents of high stakes testing in the state.  She has worked diligently to build the opt-out movement in New York City and has traveled to other parts of the state as well to help the movement in those regions.  She spoke at a Students Not Scores event in Port Jefferson last spring.  Lee is also the face of the conscientious objector movement as she has refused to administer the New York State tests the past two years and helped to pen the Teachers of Conscience position paper.  Lee, a member of the MORE Caucus within the UFT will be at the head of a joint slate put forth by MORE and New Action.  At the statewide level, Lee is a member of the Stronger Together Caucus.

Via MORE Caucus…

NEW YORK: Educators, parents, and community members cheered the announcement of Jia Lee as their choice for UFT presidential nominee at the State of Our Union, State of Our Schools Conference on Saturday. Fed up with overcrowding, underfunding, and overtesting, educators are coming together with the community to take back their union, and bring change to their schools through the 2016 UFT elections.

“Our schools are in crisis, in large part part because our current union leadership is complicit in bad policy and continues to tell us that this is the best they can do. It’s not the time for us to re-negotiate what has already proven to be disastrous. It’s time for teachers to come together with the community and chart a new course for our union. We are going to take back our union and lead a fight for the schools our children deserve,” said Ms. Lee.

Saturday’s conference, organized by the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) in coalition with a host of community organizations, was the first step in defining a platform for the upcoming UFT election and 2018 contract negotiations to defend and enhance New York City’s public schools. The conference  featured discussions ranging from “Bringing Democracy to the UFT” to “Making Black Lives Matter in Education.”

In the upcoming UFT election, Lee will head a joint slate of teachers representing a united front of MORE and the New Action caucus. As a parent and a teacher since 2001, Jia Lee is at the forefront of the growing movement to opt-out of high stakes testing. She has served as a UFT Chapter Leader for the past 8 years, and is a conscientious objector who has steadfastly refused to administer tests that reduce her students to test score. Last year, she brought this testimony to theU.S. senate hearing on ESEA.

Educators have lost patience with Michael Mulgrew and the Unity caucus’ leadership of the United Federation of Teachers and are joining the community to continue building a movement for change– in their union and in our schools. Mulgrew has been president of the UFT since 2009 but has been unable and unwilling to effectively challenge the corporate onslaught against public education. He has agreed to high stakes-test based teacher evaluations and a contract that delayed earned pay raises for teachers.

In the last union election, in which 75% of working educators did not vote and the majority of ballots came from retirees, the MORE caucus earned 40% of the vote in the high school division and 23% of the active teacher vote overall. This year, in partnership with the New Action caucus, MORE seeks to increase voter turnout as active teachers reclaim their union.

ABOUT MORE: The Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE), is the social justice caucus of the UFT and largest force for change within the teachers union. In the upcoming elections, MORE has formed a united front with New Action Caucus  to challenge Unity Caucus, the bureaucratic political machine that has dominated New York’s teachers’ union for the past 50 years. Over the past decade, Unity has led the UFT into crisis, signing off on harmful policies such as overuse of standardized testing and pay increases that fail to keep pace with inflation, while using union funds to pay UFT President Michael Mulgrew over $260,000 per year and dole out salaries of over $100,000 per year to over 100 Unity Caucus political operatives on UFT staff.

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The Movement of Rank and File Educators is the Social Justice Caucus of the United Federation of Teachers.  To learn MORE, visit www.morecaucusnyc.org

Lee’s keynote at this weekend’s MORE Caucus Conference…

Some Union News

Phil Rumore won re-election in Buffalo.

Some interesting teacher union tidbits coming in this week…

  • One of the largest NYSUT locals, the Buffalo Teachers Federation, concluded a contested election for it’s leadership.  President Phil Rumore, won re-election with 707 votes.  Challengers Pat Foster and Marc Bruno had 344 and 299 votes respectively.  What is interesting is that Rumore had about 52% of the vote.  Had he not received 51% or more a runoff would have been forced between he and Foster.  Had Bruno supporters decided to back the other challenger in Foster there could have been a real threat to Rumore.  Some rumors suggest Rumore would have retired rather than try to win in the runoff.
  • While Rumore has shown to be a Unity Caucus supporter at the state level, Stronger Together member Kevin Gibson won re-election on the BTF’s executive committee.  He was joined by Teresa Leatherbarrow, a member of the same Renew slate that Gibson ran on, and Sean Crowley, writer of the always entertaining B-LoEdScene blog.  How this election impacts things at the NYSUT and AFT levels remains to be seen.
  • Out in Hawaii, a slate of opposition candidates called Hawaii Teachers for Change challenged for the leadership of their statewide union.  After they won the president and secretary treasurer seats, the incumbents voted not to certify the election yet have failed to provide any reason for doing so, other than citing “irregularities.”  It’s the old “If you lose, just keep having elections until you win!” trick.  Norm Scott says that it reminds him of the UFT circa 1985.
  • The above mentioned Scott and Mike Schirtzer, both of MORE, held a debate in a Manhattan diner over whether or not it was worth it for MORE to run a slate of candidates in the 2016 UFT elections.  My favorite part was also James Eterno’s…

via ICEUFT Blog…

It was a healthy exchange of ideas but the best part of the evening for me was passing the application sheets around and having almost everyone there fill out the form and pay the fee to join the new statewide opposition to Michael Mulgrew’s Unity Caucus called Stronger Together.

A Few Links on State of the State Day

Governor Cuomo, who yesterday said that public education, “Probably has been the single greatest failure in the state,” gives his state of the state address today at 1:30 pm.  I am sure there will be plenty of reaction afterward as Cuomo launches his plan to eviscerate public education.  While we wait for that a few links from the past few days…

  • Shoreham-Wading River Superintendent Steven Cohen writes about Cuomo and Tisch’s plan to remove local control from districts and replace it with “state control.”  Via the Riverhead News-Review…

So, what does “state,” as opposed to “local,” control mean? First, as a result of previous legislative action, namely the 2 percent cap on tax levy increases, democracy is out the window because a minority of residents has more power than the majority when it comes to deciding how much money will be spent in a given district.

Now comes the chancellor’s suggestions that locally elected school boards should no longer have control over determining whether teachers and principals do a good job and that all teachers and principals who do not meet the state’s standard of successful teaching or supervising two years in a row must lose their jobs.

Chancellor Tisch suggests that the content all children must learn and the methods teachers must use to teach that content will be determined by the state, not local residents in accord with professional educators, acting through democratically elected school board members. She suggests that charter schools, over which local residents have little if any control, would be completely free to flourish (or not!) and to replace democratically run local schools.

These charters, it should be emphasized, do not have to serve all children the way local, democratic and free schools must. And, as we all know by now, the education department will use tests purchased from private companies as the principal tool to determine whether kids are thriving, and thus whether their teachers ought to remain in the classroom.

So the non-elected chancellor and the current governor believe local control of education has failed. The great experiment is dead. What will take its place is a technocratic process so complex that it is almost impossible for parents, residents and educators to understand — much less embrace.

This opaque and exceedingly cumbersome and expensive process will be orchestrated from Albany. Education department bureaucrats in charge of this new system have little useful knowledge of the institution they will operate.

Local school boards, residents and parents and the staffs hired by the school boards will no longer play a central role in educating the young. This radical change, sadly, rests more on the arrogant self-regard of the chancellor, the governor and their allies than it does on any realistic assessment of the problems facing children around the state.

Poor children, regardless of race, suffer the ill effects of an education system that fails them, and has failed them for generations. But replacing democratic, local control of education with state technocratic education being pushed by a group of wealthy, non-elected reformers whose plans to improve education make sense to few people other than themselves and their paid acolytes, and whose concrete proposals come largely from for-profit companies hungry to profit off public funds, is deeply anti-democratic, not to mention foolhardy. Ms. Tisch and Gov. Cuomo have lost faith in democracy.

They would rather rely on people whom they regard as smart and well-connected — whether or not they know anything about schooling — rather than on parents, residents, experienced educators, scholars and students. To them, education must be taken out of the hands of teachers, principals and superintendents chosen by parents and residents, and instead be entrusted to companies that know one thing very well: how to make profits.

Labor Notes Book Party

Thank you to all of the PJSTA members who attended tonight’s Labor Notes Book Party about the book How to Jump-Start Your Union: Lessons from the Chicago Teachers.  Joining a healthy representation of PJSTA members were teachers from districts such as Mount Sinai, Patchogue-Medford, Port Jefferson, Levittown, and Shoreham-Wading River.

We were joined tonight by Mark Brenner and Samantha Winslow of Labor Notes.  Brenner and Winslow were also two of the authors of the book.  Brenner spoke about his unique experiences as a teacher and now writer for Labor Notes.  He provided valuable insights into what has been effective in Chicago and other areas of the country where teachers are fighting back against harmful education reforms.

We were also joined by Brian Jones who has experience in trying to build a more member drive union from his work helping to build the MORE Caucus in the UFT.  Jones is currently the Green Party’s candidate for Lieutenant Governor.  Jones and running mate Howie Hawkins, who is running for governor, have been formally endorsed by the PJSTA.

Labor Notes logo.