Two years ago a group of educators from several East Bay districts met to talk about how we could work toward action by educators wider than one district at a time, and toward the kind of local unions that would support that action. Some of us met out of the efforts in the spring of 2019 to bring the energy of the statewide Red-for-Ed strikes in West Virginia and Arizona to California. These strikes were statewide, ‘illegal’ and successful (with setbacks since)— and they changed how the public thought about schools in their state in a way that press conferences and local strikes never could.  State-wide networks with radical educators at their core and representative at every district or school site were the organizational structures of the West Virginia and Arizona strikes.

We think that it will take coordinated statewide action by educators and parents to make get the schools we want and need— schools with smaller class sizes, adequate student support, decently paid employees and close relationships with parents and community. We will need local unions that are militant and democratic and willing to push on the legal walls that enclose them. But local collective bargaining, strong or weak, will not get us there. A statewide problem requires state-wide strategies— and a legal framework that prohibits our unions from acting together will require more than militant local unions.  We will need statewide networks that are outside those legal boxes and can call for ‘illegal’ actions like statewide strikes or sickouts, or community school occupations.  We need educators to act in solidarity with educators in other districts, in small ways to start and later in large ones.  We need educators to support the needs of their communities and of their students’ parents for housing, medical care and more— it can’t just be about schools. And we need to convince educators that statewide action is both possible and necessary.

What could we do to promote and work toward this goal? We had many ideas about what to do. Some were non-starters during a pandemic. Some required more people in more locals.  We decided on a local newsletter promoting solidarity across locals, democracy and militancy within locals, and the necessity of statewide action.  We wanted it in print so that could be handed to people at meetings, or left in lunchrooms, or slipped into mailboxes. More readers across more locals, and more articles from more locals, can build a network of radical union educators— a network that could initiate campaigns across our locals and work toward state-wide action.

If this sounds to you like something educators need, then we need your help.

We’ve gotten more subscribers and readers with every issue— but we need many more. Please forward it to your personal networks and hand it to people you know. Ask them to subscribe. 

We like what we’ve published— but we need more articles from more locals, short and long. if you or someone you know has a story that people need to hear— about their classroom, their school, their local union, or the larger issues facing educators— let us know. Give us a draft and we’ll edit. It’s also possible to write up an interview.  You will see the final version before it is published.

We need more people to join our ‘editorial board’.  We meet every 2-3 weeks on Zoom for a little over an hour.  First we hear reports on what’s happening in our locals and beyond them. Then we talk about articles: what do we have or should we have for the next issue, who will do an interview, what’s our timeline for the issue. Some people are at every meeting, others are too busy in their locals and in their lives and only make it sometimes. Several of us are retired educators with more time to take on research and editing and production– we’d like more of those too!