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| Lee speaks with Earth School student Jamir Geidi and his mother Fatima Geidi about their positive experiences at her school in contrast to the treatment they received at Success Academy. photo credit: Julia Neusner |
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 24, 2015
Contacts:
Megan Moskop (252)
367-0908
John Antush (917)
734-3907
Jia Lee voted in as Movement of Rank-and-File Educators
Presidential Challenger to Michael Mulgrew and his Passive Unity Caucus
As
NYC School Crisis Continues, Jia Lee Leads Teachers and Community to Challenge
Unaccountable Union Leadership and Defend Public Education
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 the U.S. senate hearing on ESEA.
Educators and 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
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