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Thursday, February 18, 2016

Random Thoughts. Teacher unions aren’t all white. | Fred Klonsky

Random Thoughts. Teacher unions aren’t all white. | Fred Klonsky:

Random Thoughts. Teacher unions aren’t all white.

RANDOM


 A couple of years ago Lily Eskelson Garcia was running for president of the National Education Association and I was an Illinois IEA Retired delegate to the national Representative Assembly. Lily came and spoke to our Retired Conference that precedes the RA.

During the Q&A that followed Lily’s talk I asked her about the decline in the number of public school teachers of color and what our union was going to do about it.

Garcia never gave an action response, although she agreed that the decline in teachers of color was a scandal.

In Chicago the number of African American teachers in CPS has gone from nearly 70% of the teaching staff to under 20% over the past decade or so.

That doesn’t mean that public school teachers are now all white.

I posted yesterday about the few faces of teachers of color among those selected as excellent by the NEA Foundation. We have over three million members in the NEA. They are not all white.

Excellent teachers are not just the Random Thoughts. Teacher unions aren’t all white. | Fred Klonsky: