My name is Deb McCarthy, and I am an educator. My mother was an educator, my sister was an educator, my daughter is an educator, and my daughter-in-law is an educator. The fierce women in the photo for Deb and Dean represent more than 125 years of experience and dedication to public education. As public school educators, the women in my family provide first-hand testimonials around the truths behind our campaigns for the working conditions all educators deserve. My mom, widowed at the age of 44, raised five children on the salary of an educator and reflects the fight for a dignified retirement for all educators. My sister, denied RetirementPlus because she was out on a maternity leave, was also one of the educators whose bold fightback against the punitive evaluation system in 2007, known as the Hull Case, reaffirms the legal framework governing the contractual evaluation protections for non-tenured teachers. My daughter and daughter-in-law experience the fiscal realities of student loans, child care, health care and affordable housing, when teaching in public schools that fail to meet the mandates of fully funded safe spaces for the academic, physical and emotional needs of all our students and staff. As highly educated professionals we have been devalued, disrespected and denied agency and autonomy in a gendered workforce by systems of patriarchy that offer up our best practices and pedagogies to the altar of profit for the education privateer. As a leader, in a family of educators, I intimately understand your truths as educators and have a proven track record as a warrior who has championed your rights for years.
Additionally, I am driven by the moral imperative that, as a leader my actions must speak louder than my words: actions that must center the betterment of the common good. At the local level, I brought democratized bargaining to my local union more than a decade ago. I formed the South Shore Justice Alliance, organizing educators, parents and community members in a public campaign for safe and healthy schools, in a campaign against austerity budgets, and in a community campaign to support the Student Opportunity Act. I organized an Opt-Out movement that would become a foundational pillar in the overwhelming passage of Question 2, and I refused to administer the MCAS after the COVID pandemic, because of the collective harm happening to students.
The MTA has a rich history of militancy, with more than 45 strikes happening between 1969 and 2007, and I am proud of my solidarity on the lines with striking educators. In 2007, my first year as a union president, I joined striking educators in Quincy. I stood in solidarity with the striking educators in Dedham, Brookline, Haverhill, Malden, Woburn, Andover, Newton, Beverly, Gloucester and in Marblehead, because an injury to one is an injury to all. Likewise, I was there when locals like Fall River, Hingham, Braintree and Quincy achieved significant wins at the bargaining table because their members were strike ready. Driven by a moral imperative to campaign on my truths as a leader, I will continue to speak truth to power about the toolkits necessary after a strike vote has been taken, and my deep commitment as an organizer around the work still needed with parents, community members and elected officials when we withhold our labor for the schools all communities deserve. These times demand bold actions, and we cannot afford the unintended consequences from a linear strike agenda that ignores the expansive horizon of what it is possible to be, both militant and strategic, in our fight against the privatization of our public goods.
These times demand a leader whose experience and expertise allows them to lead for the betterment of ALL of our members on day one. I am that leader. I was on the Board of Directors, an NEA Director, the chair of the Government Relations Committee, on the Board Negotiating Team, am an Executive Council member of the AFL-CIO, and have served two terms as the vice president of the MTA. I am widely respected for my coalition work with Citizens for Public Schools, MEJA, Women2Women and Raising Multicultural Kids. I was front and center as a leader on the Fair Share campaign and my leadership, tenacity and organizing capacity for the overwhelming passage of Question 2 are unmatched.
As the vice president of the MTA, I understand the internal machinations of the MTA’s Bylaws that actually prevent us from being a union that is member-driven — Bylaws that reinforce patriarchy and actually create barriers for the power of a member-driven body of governance that effectuate the power we seek. Our governance structures concede power to rest in the hands of an individual, rather than in the hands of the collective. As the next president of the MTA, I intend to bring forward Bylaw changes that will extract this power from the governance of one, and instead create a governance structure that places power into the hands of the collective. For example, the Advisory Budget Committee and Public Relations Committee need to reflect our regional and representative constituencies so that decisions are reflective of our representative body. We must also bring the work of the large locals into our decision-making processes, and we must also create decision-making spaces for the leaders in small locals. I brought forward a co-model structure of governance as a local president, and I will do the same as the next president of the MTA. We don’t need Bylaw changes that place more power into the hands of the president; we need Bylaw changes that allow for a more inclusive and representative distribution of power for our members.
Avote for Deb and Dean will invigorate a rank-and-file union that creates power paradigms for the voice of members in our governance structures — power that happens with a campaign for a single-payer health care system that replaces locals struggling in silos with the collective power from a campaign that benefits us all. Power that happens with a Deb and Dean vote. T
