A big change in the S.F. teachers union
, a high school teacher and activist in United Educators of San Francisco, analyzes the unexpected outcome of elections for the union's top offices.
June 8, 2015
From left to right: Claudia Haas, Lita Blanc and Rose Curreri celebrate the EDU victoryA NEW era is coming to United Educators of San Francisco (UESF), the teachers union in the San Francisco public schools.
In a surprise upset, Dennis Kelly, the longtime president of the union and leader of the Progressive Leadership Caucus (PLC), was narrowly defeated by Lita Blanc of the reform caucus Educators for a Democratic Union (EDU). The popular incumbent Vice President Susan Solomon of PLC kept her position.
In all, 14 of 16 EDU candidates won the positions they were running for. But EDU didn't field enough candidates to win a majority of the 40 seats on the executive board. This outcome will force the two caucuses of the union that have often been at odds to share power.
Kelly, a San Francisco teacher and labor activist since the 1960s, had been president of the union since 2003. While some were impressed by his decades of advocacy and the moderate gains for teachers in an age of austerity, many others have been turned off by his aloof, backroom leadership style and lack of vision for a district and city in midst of extreme gentrification.
Most recently, he was criticized for accepting a gag order imposed by a mediator duringcontract negotiations in late 2014--which kept members in the dark about what was happening and crippled attempts to build a campaign for a better contract.
Kelly is also a leader in the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and their state affiliates in California. He is currently a vice president of the AFT and a member of AFT President Randi Weingarten's Progressive Caucus--a formation that has led the union in a direction that many teacher activists are critical of, including collaboration with corporate school "reform."
Kelly has come under fire for other issues, as well. Prominent Palestinian activist Ali Abunimah recently criticized him, Weingarten and other AFT leaders for strengthening the union's ties with apartheid Israel--including traveling to Israel earlier this year on a junket arranged by the liberal Zionist lobbying organization J Street--and undermining the Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign.
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KELLY AND the Progressive Leadership Caucus barely ran a campaign for the internal election, confident that they would be re-elected after the last contract achieved one of the largest raises for teachers in the state. The 12 percent raise over three years in San Francisco seems to stand out compared to pay increases for teachers elsewhere. But it falls far short of the extreme cost-of-living increases in the city, and overall wages remain below many neighboring suburban districts.
The union of approximately 6,200 members has seen 4,000 members leave the San Francisco Unified School District in the last 12 years. This hemorrhaging of membership is clearly tied to the extreme gentrification of San Francisco, but also to burdensome dependent health care costs, lack of secondary class size caps and an expanding program of standardized testing and top-down directives. None of these were addressed in the contract struggle.
In response to the enormous pressures on San Francisco educators and to the union leadership's inability to address the situation, the EDU caucus organized a small grassroots campaign during the pre-election period, by organizing small events at many schools, distributing leaflets to dozens of district schools and facilities, and developing a large base on Facebook. EDU also had the public support of the prominent and well-respected San Francisco-based grassroots professional development organizationTeachers 4 Social Justice.
All of these factors, along with EDU's reputation as opponents of the recent contract settlement and critics of standardized testing, raised its candidates' popularity.
Low voter turnout, which traditionally benefits incumbents, may have helped EDU this time. An archaic and confusing voting process not based at worksites, along with general membership apathy, resulted in only 13 percent of union members voting in the election--though the turnout was still approximately 100 votes higher than in the last election three years ago. The offer by EDU members to collect ballots from teachers and drive them A big change in the S.F. teachers union | SocialistWorker.org:
