Injustice in NY’s teacher union elections as “poll tax” suppresses turnout

A major union election was decided this weekend in NY but hardly anybody knows about it, including the members of the union.

If you don’t know about New York state’s teacher union elections, it’s okay because neither do many — I daresay most — of the teachers in the union. I didn’t know much about them myself, but upon learning recently about the process — and the subterfuge — I knew this needs to be shared.

Perhaps the main reason teachers are so uninvolved with the triennial elections of the New York State United Teachers is because we cannot vote. If it seems odd that dues-paying members of a union bigger than the population of Wyoming don’t directly elect their leaders, wait till you learn about the hurdles put before the delegates who do vote.

As a public education activist, I met Mike Lillis and Bianca Tanis in forums with state legislators and education officials. As leading voices in New York’s opt-out movement, both are experts in unpacking complex technical policies, but as concerned public school teachers and parents, they got involved in union politics in a caucus called Stronger Together (and yes, they had the name before Hillary).

My wife and I joined the ST Caucus in 2016 after witnessing the harm and waste of New York’s Common Core tests. Then, just weeks ago, I learned Mike and Bianca were running for president and vice president of NYSUT against the long dominant Unity slate. I noticed they got some press attention in Politico and other local papers, so I asked Mike what his chances were. That’s when I learned about NYSUT’s curious voting practices.

First off, they require school district delegates to vote in person at the two-day Representative Assembly, being held April 7 — 8 in Manhattan, meaning teachers have to travel from all over the state no matter how distant, and be there not at 8:00 PM like the last election, but 8:30 AM. This clearly necessitates a hotel stay, which costs $300 per day minimally, on top of transportation costs, and weekend time with family lost. This, folks, is a poll tax.

Some districts raise money for delegates to travel and stay in NYC, while others ask delegates to bear the expense themselves. Michelle Enser from Jamestown in the Buffalo area told me her tiny union (less than 50 teachers) had to raise over a thousand dollars to cover airfare, lodging and taxis to participate last time. Another upstate district delegate said she won’t be going because she has young children and cannot be away for days on end.

The date chosen for the election? The weekend before spring break, which is also the week many teachers are entering end-of-marking period grades.

In 2014, Stronger Together tried organizing ridesharing and bus pick ups to increase turnout, but only 30% of eligible voting delegates made the trek, leaving the local NYC contingent to enjoy an insurmountable size advantage, with 100% bloc voting for the Unity slate. Though the NYC delegates are already in the metro area, Unity provides free hotel accommodations — so they can vote in style.

For over sixty years, this same NYC-based caucus has controlled NYSUT, with disillusioned upstate union locals lamenting top-down, backroom leadership. Front runner for President this year is NYSUT’s current Executive Vice President, Andy Pallotta, expected to cruise to victory.

Under Unity’s leadership, high stakes standardized tests, invalid teacher evaluations and Common Core were ushered in over the protests of teachers, parents and students. Unity also negotiated a tax cap limiting school spending and state receivership for schools with low test scores. The decision to have NYSUT make campaign donations to Republican candidates this year has ruffled feathers as well.

Were there any public debates for this election? Multiple NYSUT candidate forums were hosted in recent weeks by various stakeholders but the Unity slate pulled no-shows. As to the burning question of state testing boycotts, Andy Pallotta has recently begun tweeting pictures of NYSUT billboards that promote a parent’s right to refuse, but stopped short of calling for NYSUT members to refuse testing for their children, even though the delegates already approved just such a resolution.

I contacted Mr. Pallotta by email for comment but have not received a reply.

This election process leads to a state union heavily influenced by NYC-based officers who support high stakes testing and “establishment” candidates like Hillary Clinton, irrespective of the views of membership.

Common shorthand for this is “the UFT controls NYSUT”, but the United Federation of Teachers, NYC’s enormous local chapter itself sees fit to allow it’s own full membership of over 75,000 members to vote using convenient mail-in ballots. Yet again, with only slightly more than 20% of member teachers actually voting, this largely flies under the radar, giving entrenched insiders a fairly free hand.

NYSUT teachers passed an anti-testing resolution in 2015 but it was not acted upon. This led to another resolution in 2016 declaring NY’s “proficiency” benchmarks scientifically unsound. The lack of follow through by leadership is expected to prompt yet another year of anti-testing arguments by rank and file members.

Proxy voting is permitted for larger NY state districts with more than one delegate, but only for the elections, not the 40 or so resolutions, (one of which proposes convenient voting at regional union offices).

One supporter of the current voting process called it “tough love”, noting locals have three years to plan ahead, pass the hat and dispatch a union rep — but even those who do so cannot always find a delegate willing to give up a whole weekend to go vote against the inevitable Unity dynasty.

When I explain this to teachers in my building, I get reactions like “boy, is that undemocratic”. Particularly the younger members, learning that they cannot vote and that the current NYSUT leadership helped create Tiers 5 and 6 which decreased benefits for new teachers.

As more people wake up to the realities of politics in the Trump era, major opportunities are being lost by non-involvement in professional unions, from endorsements, to get-out-the-vote actions or influencing legislation, NYSUT should be leading the charge against school privatization, corruption and social and economic injustice.

We need look no further than the comments made in private by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten to John Podesta, whose emails were leaked online. A central figure known to be pulling strings behind the UFT and NYSUT, Weingarten was called out in multiple articles as teachers were outraged by the AFT’s unusually early endorsement of Hillary Clinton, claiming the large national union “bypassed democracy”.

After all the press accounts, petitions and a mass rebuke on the AFT’s own Facebook page, Randi responded by telling Podesta “frankly I thought it would be alot worse”.