Fiery teachers union president wins re-election
Madeloni vows to press fight against testing, charters
Delegates listen to Barbara Madeloni's re-election pitch on Friday at the annual Massachusetts Teachers Association convention. To those "unsettled" by the union's new, more aggressive posture, her message: Get used to it.
A DIVIDED MASSACHUSETTS TEACHERS ASSOCIATION re-elected its firebrand president, Barbara Madeloni, at the organization’s annual meeting on Saturday, ensuring a continuation of the sharp critique of education reform efforts from the top teachers union official in the state.
Delegates to the annual gathering of the 110,000-member organization also voted to spend $9.2 million to defeat a November ballot question that would raise the cap on charter schools.
Madeloni, whose insurgent campaign two years ago knocked off the heir apparent to the MTA presidency, easily outpolled her two challengers at the union’s annual meeting at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Madeloni won votes from 805 of the 1,575 convention delegates who cast ballots, while the union’s current vice president, Janet Anderson, garnered 479 votes, and former MTA vice president Tim Sullivan, whom Madeloni defeated two years ago, got 291 votes.
Madeloni has called for a moratorium on all high-stakes testing, vigorously opposes charter schools, and has been broadly critical of education reform measures. “My message was about speaking back to the corporate predatory reform that has really worked to undermine public education,” she said two years following her election.
Too much of the education agenda for low-performing schools serving children in poverty has been driven by “big money and elitists,” she said at the time. “I think it’s an important conversation to have with the parents of those children, but it’s not a conversation to have with rich white men who are deciding the course of public education for black and brown children.”Madeloni’s victory was much closer than the numbers might suggest. MTA rules require a candidate to win more than 50 percent of all votes cast to be elected. Otherwise, the top the two finishers in the first round of balloting go head-to-head in a runoff round. Madeloni won with 51 percent of the first-ballot votes.
Not only did nearly half the delegates support another candidate, both Anderson and Sullivan had voiced similar criticisms of Madeloni’s combative, uncompromising approach, and supporters of Sullivan, the third-place finisher, would likely have cast their votes for Fiery teachers union president wins re-election - CommonWealth Magazine:
Supporters of Massachusetts Teachers Association president Barbara Madeloni gather at their candidate’s campaign table on Friday afternoon at the Hynes Convention Center. Madeloni was re-elected on Saturday to a second two-year term.