Why I Left the UFT Opposition to Join Unity – And Why It Still Matters Today

If UFTers recognize my name, it is as a longtime activist and leader in the union: fourteen years as a rank-and-file teacher, including a decade as the Clara Barton HS chapter leader; a dozen years as a high school staffer and UFT Vice President for Academic High Schools; another decade as the director of the AFT’s strategic think tank, the Shanker Institute; and then a stint as an assistant to AFT President Randi Weingarten, working on democracy issues. It is generally assumed – and correctly so – that I am a member of the Unity Caucus.

But what is not generally known about me is that when I first became a New York City high school teacher, forty years ago, I joined the UFT opposition. There are important lessons, I believe, in why I left the opposition and joined Unity, and why I continue to be in Unity decades later, now as a retiree.

I am a person of the democratic left, having acquired my politics in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the Sixties. I consider myself a democratic socialist in the tradition of the great leaders of the labor and civil rights movement – A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, Walter Reuther, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King. Layle Lane, a New York City teacher unionist and democratic socialist who led the historic fight to expel segregated locals from the AFT, has served as a model for my own union activism.

When I became a NYC public school teacher in 1984, I knew that I had had strong disagreements with Al Shanker’s approach to the Vietnam War, and I was critical of the UFT’s role in the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville strikes. (Both of my parents were NYC public school teachers in 1968, so I had had a close up view of that strike.) I assumed that my natural political home would be in the opposition, and I ran with the New Action slate in the UFT elections.

My politics told me that the heart and soul of unionism was collective action, and that if I was going to be able to advance the causes that I cared deeply about – the empowerment and professional autonomy of educators, the education and well-being of my inner city students, civil and human rights, and the common good of working people – participation in the UFT would be the best way to do it.

But as I became more involved in the UFT, it became apparent to me that the opposition and I just didn’t see eye to eye on how the union should be organizing its members and fighting for what is important to us.

The year I began teaching, the Board of Education (as it was then called) decided to modernize and renovate our school building, with us inside of it. For two years, we were choking on dust and debris that filled our school, while our classes and school activities were constantly disrupted by construction. We appealed to our Vice President (from the opposition New Action caucus, today running as the ARISE candidate for UFT Secretary Treasurer) and our District Rep (from Unity caucus) for assistance, but received no meaningful help on either front. Finally, to get action, I had to go outside of the union, involve the White Lung Association, and obtain a court order to close the school for testing. The tests would reveal that large amounts of loose, friable asbestos were present in the school as a result of unsafe, illegal construction work. Our building had to be closed for months for a top to bottom asbestos abatement. (I recounted our experience here.)

The UFT can make mistakes, and for those of us in Clara Barton HS, this was a big one, that had put the health and safety of both adults and students in our school at risk. New Action and Unity shared in the responsibility for what had gone wrong, but their response could not have been more different. New Action just washed their hands and walked away, while the Unity leadership of the UFT recognized the error and rolled up their sleeves to make sure it was never repeated. Randi Weingarten, then UFT counsel, worked with me to establish a protocol that governed the completion of the modernization of our building. Construction work was now done outside of regular school hours, and strict safety requirements were put in place for handling hazardous materials. Our code became the basis for a protocol that today governs all work on NYC school buildings, so that no other school will experience what Clara Barton did. To ensure that it would be prepared for the next crisis, the UFT developed a Health and Safety Department with professional staff. It would be the front line protection of UFTers in the years to come, as we grappled with a citywide asbestos crisis, the challenges of teaching and caring for medically fragile students during the HIV epidemic, and more recently, the COVID pandemic.

The more I was active in the UFT – first as a delegate, then as a chapter leader – the more I found the that the UFT opposition functioned as a party of ‘No.’ It didn’t really matter if the UFT leadership had a good idea or was promoting positive changes; if it looked like there might be political advantage in saying ‘No’ and obstructing change, that there might be a vote to pick up here and there, the opposition would attempt to do precisely that. I saw this firsthand when my good friend, the noted educator Deborah Meier, organized the educational experiment that is today the widely acclaimed Julia Richman Educational Complex (JREC), with six innovative and progressive small schools. Sandy Feldman was then the President of the UFT, and she supported the establishment of JREC; the UFT negotiated a phase-out plan that allowed the staff of the old school to find positions that suited them in other schools. A strong program from the old school, Talent Unlimited, evolved into one of the small schools that is now housed in JREC. I became involved in the UFT’s work to support that transformation.

When the leaders of the opposition stood on the floor of the UFT Delegate Assembly attacking the union leadership for its support of JREC’s founding, I decided that I had had enough. The complete lack of educational vision, the knee-jerk antagonism to an experiment which empowered teachers in progressive, student-centered schools, was the final straw. I joined Unity Caucus, where I could advocate for a teacher unionism which saw educational change and innovation as central to its mission.

Unity is a diverse caucus, with different views inside it: as Walt Whitman would say, we contain multitudes. There are members whose view of unionism and labor politics are close to mine, and members with a different worldview. Over the decades that I have been a member of Unity, we have had our debates over what the UFT should do on this or that question. I can’t say that my vision of teacher unionism – one that takes the education work we do and the welfare of our students as seriously as the bread and butter issues of our salaries, health care and pensions – prevailed in all of the debates, but most of the time it won the day.

It's election season in the UFT, and a lot of people think that the way to campaign for office is to claim infallibility, that you never made a mistake in the past or you will never make one in the future. But I have a different view, for two reasons. First, my own involvement in the UFT began with a big mistake on the part of the union, and I am not inclined to dissemble about such matters. Second, I know from my years as a UFT Vice President that the challenges of leading a 200,000 person union in New York City are immense and far reaching, and the best laid plans can and will go awry. Anyone that tells you otherwise doesn’t understand the work.

What I look for in UFT leadership is the character to be willing to admit when they have made a mistake, the fortitude to fix it, and the willingness to reflect on why it happened, so they don’t make the same mistake twice. That’s what first impressed me about Unity decades ago, when it fixed the UFT’s mistake at Clara Barton HS and took steps to ensure it didn’t happen to another school. It’s what I see today, when the UFT made a major mistake in working with New York City over its plan to shift retirees to Medicare Advantage. Unity leaders stand up and say “we made a mistake,” here’s why we were wrong, and we won’t make that mistake again.

At a time when the UFT is heading into the greatest challenges in our history, given the election of Trump and a Republican majority Congress, that’s the leadership I want at the helm of my union.