Where I’m Coming From
Until last summer, I had always taken the Massachusetts Teachers Association as a sort of necessary annoyance. I was an MTA Political Action Leader and a building representative for several years and still couldn’t tell you what our dues paid for beyond legal and negotiation services. I came to learn how ineffectual, and frankly, powerless the MTA has become. When Brian Fitzgerald, one of my old Blue Mass Group friends reached out to me and invited me to join Massachusetts Union Strong Educators (MUSE), I leaped at the chance.
Gaining knowledge, as Plato shows in “The Allegory of the Cave,” often comes with suffering. And suffer I did. I spent a few weeks last summer in a dark mood, angry at the MTA’s failure to lead during the pandemic, angry at the abject cluelessness of the leadership, but most angry at the fact that the MTA lacked the power the size of their membership seemed to imply. The time had come for the MTA to exert some political pressure, and in spite of some tough talk and fruitless direct actions, nothing happened.
Aside from teaching for the last 28 years, I was a town selectman, a public servant, in Granby for nine years, and I worked on political campaigns for the last 20 years. I continue to run a Facebook group focused on town politics and governance for my town. In short, I have witnessed democracy and governance in the first person. I chaired the select board for most of my tenure. I chaired the school building committee that delivered an addition/renovation to our schools after our town voted down a previous project. Working in local government and regional politics, I’ve come to see things from a democratic point of view. Governments are supposed to represent and serve their citizens. The MTA does not do so. As the pandemic has shown, the Massachusetts Teachers Association is literally and figuratively out of touch with its members. The current regime has its own agenda (one I mostly agree with), but it is not committed to serving or representing us. In spite of their hostility to democracy (and in spite of their name), the MTA was in trouble long before they arrived on the scene. No organization can be said to govern democratically when the voters cannot know their representatives without great difficulty, and their representatives have no way of being held accountable at the ballot box.
I grew up with the MTA and learned about unionism and not crossing picket lines from my parents, both of whom were public school educators. My mother, a teacher in Granby, MA, was an MTA member for 25 years and served as vice president of the Granby Education Association during the Proposition 2.5 era — the biggest crisis to hit public education in Massachusetts until the pandemic. Granby’s local came close to striking during this time, which could have meant jail time for my mom. The MTA advised against a strike. Instead, the Granby teachers went door-to-door talking to everyone in town about the school committee, which refused to bargain in good faith. The public response was overwhelmingly positive and the school committee changed course. My father began his educational career as an elementary school teacher, eventually becoming a school psychologist and finally director of special education in Ludlow, MA. He tells the story of how he learned the ultimate value of his union when his school committee wanted to fire him and the Ludlow Education Association turned out 80 teachers at a school committee meeting and saved his job.
For the last year or so, I’ve made a study of the MTA. This is easier said than done. Very little has been written about our union or how it works, and although the internet has been around for quite a while now, our website is not particularly helpful. To understand MTA governance, you have to find someone who is involved in MTA governance and attends the Annual Meeting. And then, you’d have to ask people questions, often just to know what to ask questions about. How many members know, for example, that the MTA has a parliamentarian? Perhaps even fewer that know the MTA president and vice president are elected by the Annual Meeting? And that representation at the Annual Meeting is proportional to locals and chapters? Members are equal in the MTA. Some are just more equal than others.
“It is the task of the enlightened,” Plato wrote, “not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honors, whether they are worth having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death.” I don’t know how enlightened I am, and I’m certainly not risking death by writing about the MTA. But I’ve learned a few things in the last year. And in the four years I have left before retirement, I plan to do my best to leave our union better than I found it during this pandemic year.