Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the MTA has been a statewide leader not only on advocating for health and safety in our schools and colleges, but also on fighting for policies that advance the common good. We do not plan to let up now.
Our locals learned what health and safety measures to fight for, thanks to MTA members and public health experts who brought their deep understanding to bear through the union’s Environmental Health and Safety Committee. Because of their work, we were able to give our locals and chapters the tools they needed to achieve the most vital COVID-19 mitigation strategies in education settings throughout the Commonwealth. You fought hard and made significant gains.
You and your co-workers have laid the groundwork for returning to schools and higher education campuses that are far healthier and safer than they would have been without your activism.
As the year begins, despite some trepidation about the threat of the delta variant, I know that you are joyful about getting back to in-person learning with your students. I also know they feel excited to be together again — with you and with their peers. Moreover, we are fully aware that for some students, school is the safest place in their lives.
Tremendous challenges — but also incredible opportunities — lie ahead as the new year moves forward. Our continued rank-and-file organizing and collective action for public education and for our communities are key to our victories.
You have been heroes since the start of the pandemic, and the public’s appreciation of that fact is clear. Though it sometimes didn’t feel this way, the MTA’s polling of the public shows that educators are widely appreciated, with eight in 10 Massachusetts residents having a favorable or very favorable impression of their work. And 64 percent of those surveyed believe your jobs have become even harder because of the COVID-19 crisis.
Over the summer, MTA Vice President Max Page and I held a Listening Tour covering each of the MTA regions of the state so that we could hear directly from you and your colleagues about what you have experienced and what you need for your students and yourselves.
MTA members told us of the challenges they faced, working harder than ever before with insufficient support and resources and little empathy shown by school and college administrators. They were constantly trying to overcome the struggle of supporting students who — for a variety of reasons — weren’t connected or engaged. Some educators said they remain anxious and feel like they’re always in a state of emergency.
Tremendous challenges — but also incredible opportunities — lie ahead as the new year moves forward.
At the same time, members talked about the joy of finding new and creative education tools and techniques, learning from each other, and having opportunities for more one-to-one and small-group contact. They also discussed the resilience and compassion that their students demonstrated.
Crucially, they said that the pandemic has reinforced the importance of being active at all levels of the union. And it has redoubled your sense of urgency about the need to end the structural racism that has always hit Massachusetts communities of color so hard.
Here are just a few of the victories we have achieved over the last year:
◼ In coalition with other public-sector unions and allies, the MTA went to Beacon Hill and called for investments in communities of color and low-income communities; now our challenge is to ensure that ARPA funding will supplement the resources promised by the Student Opportunity Act.
◼ Locals continued to move forward on open, coordinated and coalition bargaining, with a new model emerging across MTA and AFT Massachusetts locals in the Merrimack Valley.
◼ MTA members organized to bring back full in-person learning by making strategic and specific demands — for vaccinations, for ventilation systems that meet appropriate standards and produce better indoor air quality, and for adherence to CDC guidelines on masking.
◼ For the first time, more than 50 "conscientious objectors," clustered in Cambridge and on the South Shore, refused to proctor the high-stakes MCAS tests, while hundreds upon hundreds of families opted their children out — a scale we haven’t seen before in Massachusetts.
But we still have plenty of work in front of us. The fights ahead — from passing the Fair Share Amendment to winning funding for public higher education and playing a key role in the upcoming gubernatorial race — will be tough. Yet they are winnable.
One critical issue the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed is how systemic racism is linked to decades of wholesale austerity and disinvestment in the public good. All communities are harmed by such policies, but communities of color are hurt by far the most. Affordable housing is in impossibly short supply. Public transportation is starved for funds. Quality health care and child care are inaccessible to huge numbers of people. Our students bring the stress and trauma from these living conditions into the classroom, which impacts their learning conditions.
And many students — especially students of color — are being pushed out of public higher education, in part because of the rising debt loads they must take on. Climate change brings the specter of a dystopian future.
And so, we need to fight forward!
We need to help our students, from preK through college, find their way through the trauma they have experienced as a result of racism and poverty, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic.
We must build empathy toward each other, our students and their families, and we must ensure that the need for the common good is the foundation of our activism on all fronts, including our bargaining and political campaigns.
We must ensure that the Fair Share Amendment passes, re-engaging with families along the way about a vision for how public funding should be used.
Local by local, we must continue to endorse and bring to the bargaining table the PreK-12 Bill of Rights for Education Support Professionals and ensure that all ESPs gain better pay, respect and educational opportunities. Then we must move on to lobby cities and towns to endorse the Bill of Rights and act on it.
We need to support longtime teachers through legislation allowing those who want to retire early to do so with economic security and dignity.
We need to win the Cherish Act or a substantially similar measure that will greatly increase funding for our public colleges and universities, help achieve fairness for adjunct faculty, and reduce student debt.
And now is the time to transform education so that our curriculum, pedagogy, instruction and practice uplift students of all races and ethnicities while teaching history through a more truthful, diverse and critical lens. With that also comes the continued organizing to end high-stakes testing.
All of these things and more are within our reach through organizing, union and community solidarity, and collective action.
Continue your activism and stay safe, and let’s keep winning the big fights for students, educators and public education.
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MTA Today welcomes letters to the editor from MTA members. Letters should be no longer than 200 words. Each letter submitted for publication must address a topic covered in MTA Today, must be signed and must include the writer’s telephone number for confirmation purposes. Opinions must be clearly identified as belonging to the letter-writer. We reserve the right to edit for length, clarity and style. To submit a letter, mail it to MTA Today, 2 Heritage Drive, 8th floor, Quincy, MA 02171-2119, or email it to mtatodayletters@massteacher.org. For additional information, please refer to the guidelines posted on www.massteacher.org.
