Jeff Bryant:
For years, politicians and policy leaders have been
running the nation’s public education system basically by the seat of the
pants, drafting and passing legislative doctrine that mostly ignores the input
from classroom teachers, research experts and public school parents.
What’s got teachers stirred up? How real and potent
is this upsurge of their activism? Why should people who identify with
progressive causes care? Salon recently posed those questions, and others, to
Lily Eskelsen García, the new president-elect of the National Education
Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, at the recent Netroots
Nation conference in Detroit.
First of all, congratulations on becoming the new
NEA president.
Still president-elect. I take office Sept. 1. We
have an incredible president, Dennis Van Roekel, who basically said a
transition period should be a transition period, not go stand in the corner. So
he gave me the president-elect title and told me I would take the press calls,
go to Netroots, meet with Arne Duncan, start establishing where you want to go
and be as vocal and as visible as you can possibly be. Our members have asked
NEA to step up and take things to another level. There’s too much at stake for
us. There are policies that need addressing and we have some of the best policy
expertise in the nation, but those ideas need a face to the NEA, a face for the
American teacher that is channeling the voices of these 3 million educators,
and when you hear the words come out of her mouth it’s not just her opinion — it’s
a whole lot of teachers and support staff who are saying here’s an important
thing for the American people to hear and an important thing for Arne Duncan
and President Obama to hear. So he told me to start being that voice today.
The voices of these teachers are important, aren’t
they? And too often we don’t really hear their stories about what it’s really
like to teach in American schools, do we? For instance, I was just at a meeting
of the American Federation of Teachers, where a teacher told us about showing
up to school one morning and finding a man had been shot to death in front of
the building the night before. The body was still on the sidewalk as the kids
were coming to school, and the teachers had to decide how they were going to
handle this with the children. So many of our teachers are really serving as
first responders for kids, aren’t they?
