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  • Lily Eskelsen García, Attorney General candidate Felicia Rottelini, AEA President Andrew Morrill

You know that 6th grade teacher, the one who makes it onto people’s “all-time favorite teacher” lists because she wants nothing more than for you to be the best “you” you can be? The teacher you can’t take your eyes off of, because maybe she’s about to say something or do something great, and you don’t want to miss it?

That’s how the new National Education Association president, Lily Eskelsen García, comes across, probably because she was a teacher for 20 years. Now she’s turned that energy and enthusiasm, coupled with a thorough grasp of educational issues, toward making the country’s largest teachers union as effective an advocate for students and teachers as it can be.

Eskelsen García was in Tucson Thursday attending a fundraiser for Felecia Rotellini at a local home and a Get-out-the-vote rally at Tucson Magnet High School, her first stop on a multi-state GOTV tour. I had a chance to talk with her for what was supposed to be 10 minutes but stretched to 25, and it would have continued if the people whose job it is to keep her on schedule hadn’t pulled her away. She doesn’t believe in short answers when she’s talking about tough issues — and all issues pertaining to education are tough these days. She’s direct, plainspoken and opinionated, and she wants everyone, including President Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, both of whom she’s had face-to-face meetings with, to know what she means in no uncertain terms.

Eskelsen García is not your typical teachers union president, or your typical teacher for that matter. Her first school job was as a lunch lady in the cafeteria. She went on to become the first college graduate in her family (she sang in bars and coffehouses to supplement her student loans), then earned a masters degree before beginning her teaching career in Utah, where she was named Teacher of the Year and went on to become president of the Utah Education Association. She took the helm of the NEA in September of this year.

Full disclosure: I was a loyal NEA member during my 30-plus year teaching career. My main complaint then was, I wanted the union to stand up for students and teachers more strongly than it did, not be so cautious. Now, in the face of constant assaults on public education, the union’s caution is being replaced by a greater assertiveness, and Eskelsen García is the kind of fresh voice it needs at a time when the stakes in education are so high. At its national convention this year, the NEA called for Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, to resign. And in her meetings with Duncan and Obama, Eskelsen García let them know how strongly she objects to our current regimen of high stakes testing.

High stakes testing, or “toxic testing” as she likes to call it, is one of Eskelsen García’s go-to issues. She’s not against standardized testing. “We teachers invented the test,” she said. But she objects strongly to the use of the tests “that were generally developed to give you broad trend lines” to decide if a student moves on to the next grade or graduates, if a teacher keeps his or her job or if a school stays open. “That’s not what they were designed to do,” she maintains.

“We now have a federal law that was a punchline on Prairie Home Companion,” she said, “that all kids will be above average. You’re supposed to laugh when you get to that part. We have a federal law that says on standardized testing you will have a rigorous standard — that means above average — and all kids will hit it. We always looked at that and said, you have in federal law a statistical impossibility. We are bound to look like failures.”

“Too much testing is part of the problem,” she continued, “but that’s not what makes it obscene. You could narrow it down to one test, it could even be a really good test, but then some politician says, ‘And here’s the cut score, and here’s the kid who doesn’t go to third grade if they don’t hit it, and here’s the senior who doesn’t graduate because they don’t hit it, and here’s the teacher who loses their job if they don’t hit it.’ You can turn even a good test toxic by misusing the data.”

Eskelsen García has met with both President Obama and Arne Duncan and expressed her concerns. “I was on my toxic testing bandwagon with the President. The security guards probably didn’t want to let me get as close as I got.” Obama and Duncan have both said they understand there’s too much testing, but she’s not convinced they’re planning to change things any time soon.

I asked her about Common Core standards, which is a contentious issue in Arizona and around the country. “I’ve had wonderful debates with my colleagues who I know and love,” she said. “I talked to Sue, and she said, ‘I hate these things, I wish they would go away, they’re totally age inappropriate.’ And then I talked to Angie, and she says, ‘This has transformed the way I teach. This was the best thing that ever happened.’ And the two of them teach the same grade level!” She believes the standards have a number of worthwhile components. “I looked at the 6th grade standards, and they say to the children, ‘Give an opinion.’ I love that, you can’t put that on a bubble test. ‘Give the reason and evidence in a persuasive speech.’ I loved the standards that I could pull out and say, ‘You can’t do this on a bubble test.’” She believes, “The high stakes are what we have to focus on. It’s not the standards, it’s the tests and how the data is used.”

I asked her if she thinks there’s a place for charter schools in our education system. “The short answer is yes, but …,” she replied. She went back to Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers who suggested the idea of charters in the 1980s. What Shanker recommended was “something that could create schools run by teachers who could experiment with some great idea and inform the larger system. Charters were meant to be an incubator. They were not meant to be a separate, private school system run by a corporation, where basically they don’t empower their teachers, they give them a script. I’ve seen some good charters,” she continued, describing a few started by innovative teachers which have the support of the local teachers unions. But she has no respect for charters which are run directly or indirectly by for-profit corporations. “You’ll never hear from me that charter schools are bad. But charter schools that are there for a profit will never put kids first.”

Eskelsen García is working to forge a relationship with the American Federation of Teachers. The two unions have traditionally been at odds, with the AFT the smaller and more radical of the two. Recently, she sat down with AFT president Randi Weingarten, and the two found lots of common ground. The meeting resulted in Eskelsen García being invited to speak at the AFT convention, which was a first. “I got a standing ovation when I said, ‘The AFT is not my enemy. The Koch Brothers are my enemy, they’re your enemy too.’”

The battles over education are being fought in political and educational arenas across the country. I can’t remember a time when the stakes were this high. The NEA, by electing Lily Eskelsen García as its president and demonstrating its willingness to challenge bad ideas no matter where they come from, has shown it wants to be a visible, active participant in the fight.

This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2014.

13 replies on “Interview With Lily Eskelsen García, President Of The National Education Association”

  1. She’s wrong. The NEA is the enemy. We’ve known it for years.

    Ask your teachers to get out of the union.

  2. from The Huffington Post, quoting The Wall St Journal:

    Both the NEA and AFT partner with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual groups when it comes to anti-bullying efforts in schools and equality issues. They also gave hundreds of thousands to groups that lobbied for Obama’s health care overhaul.

    The NEA was the top combined state and federal contributor to 2008 races with $45 million — more than 90 percent of which went to Democratic campaigns, according to the Journal. At last year’s convention, it became the first large national union to endorse Obama’s 2012 campaign.

    …and they want you to hate the Koch Bros. All money buys influence. Let’s be honest.

  3. High stakes testing, or “toxic testing” as she likes to call it, is one of Eskelsen García’s go-to issues. She’s not against standardized testing…..“that were generally developed to give you broad trend lines” to decide if a student moves on to the next grade or graduates, if a teacher keeps his or her job or if a school stays open. “That’s not what they were designed to do,” she maintains.”

    A Standardized Assessment Examinations at each Grade Level is an essential component for providing information regarding the effectiveness of the Instructional Program of the Classroom Teacher and should be used, along with other criteria, in deciding salary and retention.

    It provides a measure of accountability for the Classroom Teacher which, unfortunately, the National Education Association and the Tucson Education Association oppose!!!

  4. I was at the “rally” at Tucson High and it was a pretty depressing event. The crowd was as sparse as they come. How can Ron Barber, Raul Grijalva, the president of NEA, multiple TUSD governing board members and candidates, TUSD leadership, and many others only manage to draw a crowd of about 50 people during such an important election year? That auditorium should have been packed.

    What was worse was the way Andrew Morrill and Lily Eskelson Garcia spoke. I wasn’t sure if I was at an education rally or a comedy show. The lack of seriousness and substance was insulting and there wasn’t even a single mention of the Cave Creek decision. To put the icing on the cake, Francis Banales made the entire crowd sing “Happy Birthday” to Adelita Grijalva–the candidate she chose to give TEA’s endorsement to. This rally was a farce.

    The irony of having speakers on stage railing against standardized testing, while TUSD leadership and the governing board members sat there nodding in agreement after they spent $200,000 on an audit to tell them they need to focus on teaching to the test, was pretty amazing. There is more standardized testing and preparation than ever in TUSD classrooms, and more money being spent on them.

    David is right about one thing. NEA, AEA, and TEA are milquetoast and do not do enough. They have dropped the ball on education in this state and city and they are continuing to lose members because of it. Teachers do not feel even the slightest bit represented by these folks and just because they are slightly more outspoken in some arenas lately does not mean they have quit the cautious behavior of the past.

    It’s a shame because teachers in this city want to stand up and have their voices heard. They are sick and tired of being sick and tired. AEA and TEA would understand that if they stopped talking to teachers and started talking with them.

  5. Fanny, when you have traitors like Raul Grijalva and his daughter Adelita, both members of La Raza, supporting something, as a true American, you want to get as far away from that as you can! Both adhere to the belief that the SW. U.S. (Calif., Az., New Mex.) were stolen from Mex. and thru La Raza, they will get it back, even tho’ it may take a violent overthrow of the U.S. govt. Raul G. was also responsible for getting millions of $ to the Taliban in Afghan., to purchase medical supplies so that they could help many of the wounded enemy to get back to the battlefield so that they could continue killing American G.I.s. And then there’s that nagging rumor that he is on the Mex. cartel payroll (Sinaloan), as he has been trying to get legislation to make a buffer zone along the Mex. border where law enf./Border Patrol cannot patrol but that the cartels use extensively for their drug and illegal alien traffic.

  6. Lily makes some very good points about the purpose and origin of charter schools. Public schools are not designed to make a profit, but rather to further both public and individual goals. There is no crime in the “public good.” There have been many crimes in the for-profit rackets that spawn many charter schools. A few are good, but not nearly the majority or even the norm. An apt comparison would be saying that University High is the only school with excellent students as it has an “A” rating. Then what about Palo Verde High, which also has an “A” rating but also has some poorly performing students? The difference is what the school does about the poorly performing student. This is where the rubber meets the road, in my opinion.

  7. Francis Saitta says, “A Standardized Assessment Examinations at each Grade Level is an essential component for providing information regarding the effectiveness of the Instructional Program of the Classroom Teacher and should be used, along with other criteria, in deciding salary and retention.

    The reality is that the use of standardized student test scores in teacher evaluations is a flawed exercise. Here is a link to a Washington Post column about an award winning teacher who is suing the state of New York for deliberately misusing student test results in her evaluation.

    Anyone who reads that column will understand that using test scores to evaluate teachers only serves the needs of politicians to appear to be doing something about improving public education and does nothing to improve teacher performance or student learning. Additionally, standardized test scores are much less a reflection of the quality of the student’s teachers than of the student’s parents, neighborhood conditions, and quality of life…in short the student’s demographics.

  8. Fannie Lou Hamer (not the real Fannie Lou Hamer of Democratic National Convention fame) says: “David is right about one thing. NEA, AEA, and TEA are milquetoast and do not do enough. They have dropped the ball on education in this state and city and they are continuing to lose members because of it. Teachers do not feel even the slightest bit represented by these folks and just because they are slightly more outspoken in some arenas lately does not mean they have quit the cautious behavior of the past.”

    I agree with part of this statement. The Tucson Education Association has failed in its duty to represent its members. They have allied themselves with political hacks and failed to protest the failures of TUSD’s leadership to properly fund TUSD classrooms, protect the interests of their members, or address the learning needs of students. That is why they have “gained” so many “former members” over the past few years.

    The NEA is a big organization…the largest union in the country. It has affiliates in every state. Some of those affiliates have a good deal of clout while others…like the Arizona Education Association…are very weak. Interestingly enough… those states with the strongest NEA affiliates also have the highest student performance. People who hate unions…and teacher unions in particular…don’t like to hear that, but it is pretty easy to check. Look at student test scores in the right to work states like Mississippi and Louisiana and compare them with the test scores of students in states like Minnesota and Massachusetts that have very strong teacher unions.

  11. The New York State System of Teacher Evaluation may, in fact, be flawed. We are in Arizona…and…it is the School District that determines Teacher’s Salaries and Retention NOT the State of Arizona.

    Standardized Testing, at every Grade Level/Subject, in our Public School System is necessary because of the heterogeneity of Instructional Programs of Schools and Classroom Teachers. We need an Objective Measure that indicates that our Students are being taught properly. This is the sole function of Standardized Testing and the necessity for their existence.

    The Common Core Standards will highlight those States/School Systems/ Schools that have a viable/productive Public Secondary System and those that do not so that corrective measures can be taken; if necessary via a complete reorganization of the Administrative and Instructional Staff

  12. The New York State System of Teacher Evaluation may, in fact, be flawed. We are in Arizona..and… it is the School District that determines Teacher Salaries and Retention.

    Standardized Testing, at every Grade Level/Subject, in our Public School System is necessary because of the heterogeneity of Instructional Programs of Schools and Classroom Teachers. We need an objective measure that indicates that our Students are being taught properly. This is the sole function of Standardized Testing and the necessity for their existence.

    The Common Core Standards will highlight those States/School Systems/ Schools that have a viable/productive Public Secondary System and those that do not so that corrective measures can be taken; if necessary via a complete reorganization of the Administrative and Instructional Staff

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