We respect teachers. We respect the administration of the school system. We respect especially the free flow of ideas, and we even respect the recent vote of the local schoolteachers union endorsing the mayor’s re-election.
While we respect this decision, we absolutely disagree with it.
Also, we suspect the rank and file didn’t have much to do with this endorsement.
Rather, it was likely something conceived by the leadership and sold as the right thing to do to gain the mayor’s acquiescence to an upcoming contract.
At its worst, the union’s endorsement of the mayor is the endorsement of a fraud.
The mayor does not care about public school education any more than he cares about integrity and intuitive intelligence.
This is a mayor who has proudly said he never passed a library he didn’t want to step into.
He doesn’t read books. He knows nothing about the English language. He understands precious little about what it takes to teach, to lead educators, to maneuver the state education hierarchy, and to provide for more than 7,000 Everett Public School students.
The mayor perceives the EPS as a pool of jobs he can ultimately have influence over.
The endorsement of his re-election effort by the teachers’ union leadership gives him an added boost to that end – but at what cost? We understand more than most that the teacher’s union endorsement is a slap on the face for School Superintendent Priya Tahiliani by the union leadership (more than the rank and file).
Let’s face it, she’s just too smart, too savvy, too hip, too straight, and too tuned in to public school education to be welcome by the teachers’ union in Everett.
The teachers union is now under the sway of the mayor’s imprimatur.
Trading Tahiliani for the mayor’s desire to manage the public schools is like putting Dr. Anthony Fauci in charge of the school’s janitorial services instead of relying upon his wisdom to protect our children from the virus.
The day before the city shut down and the schools closed last year because of the pandemic, the mayor left for a vacation in Aruba.
How and why the local leadership of the schoolteachers union is now supporting the mayor should be the subject of an investigation – not into Priya Tahiliani – but rather – into Carlo DeMaria and how he has managed to blind the teachers union to his form of ignorance, injustice for kids of color and ethnicity, and the teachers themselves who he cares for not an ounce.
His racism alone should make the teachers union shudder.
The school population is about 80% Black, Brown, and Hispanic.
How strange a racist mayor should be endorsed by the teachers union.
The teachers union should seriously reexamine its support for the mayor.
Such support runs contrary to the most important demands and concerns, not only of the teachers and administrators of the EPS but of the student body of the EPS as well.
That’s the truth. The whole truth and nothing but the truth.