Sí Se Puede: Hispanic woman from Utah to lead the National Education Association

Sí Se Puede: Hispanic woman from Utah to lead the National Education Association


This Labor Day a Hispanic organizer and former teacher from Utah will take control of the nation’s largest union.

Lily Eskelsen Garcia, a teacher for 16 years and longtime union organizer, became the new president of the National Education Association (NEA), which boasts a membership of three million members.

Based in Washington, D.C., the NEA will step up efforts to limit the high number of standardized tests teachers are forced to administer each year to students across the country.

Eskelsen Garcia, who was vice president of the NEA before being elected president last July, said the NEA is worried about excessive “toxic testing” which ties the teachers’ to “teach to the test” for weeks on end each year.

Among other issues Eskelsen Garcia said teacher tenure and seniority are other issues that are important to the membership. Recent efforts in California have tried to stripped teachers of gains made by teachers’ unions in the past.

She also sees a threat to public education by the increase in charter school across the country. Charter schools use public funds but the schools are administered as private entities and provide no public accountability.

“Many studies have shown that charter schools are no better than public schools, “said Eskelsen Garcia in a previous interview. “Every community should have a good public school.”

In what appears as a change in attitude in the NEA, it called last July on Education Secretary Arnie Duncan to resign for promoting policies that undermine public education.

Eskelsen Garcia, born to an American father and a Panamanian mother, is seeing as a more vocal and direct leader that in the coming months might intensify the union’s defense of public education.

The new union president’s life itself seems like a script out of a Frank Capra movie and which if it was made into a movie, it could well be called “Lily Goes to Washington”.

Just out of high school she got a job at a Colorado public school working in the cafeteria.

“I was the salad girl,” she says proudly.

She later went to work assisting a kindergarten teacher who saw in her the promise of becoming an educator. The teacher told Eskelsen Garcia to consider going to college to become a teacher.

She later graduated with honors from the University of Utah and worked as teacher for 16 years. In 1989 she was selected as the Teacher of the Year in Utah.

While attended the University of Utah, she paid her tuition with loans and scholarships but she also had to work as a folksinger at local cafes.

At the same time she and her husband, Ruel Eskelsen, who was also attending classes, took care of their first born son Jeremy.

The media in Utah have compared her voice to that of Joni Mitchell and the union leader also has composed songs to help her in the fight for union rights.

In 1998 she took time from teaching to run for Congress against Merrill Cook, a republican. Although she lost the race, she got 45 percent of the vote and statewide name recognition.

It was while teaching in Utah that her organizing skills came to the front. At a school where she taught, another teacher asked the school district to give her time to care for her son who had leukemia. The district wouldn’t budge because it was not in the contract.

It was then that Eskelsen Garcia organized the other teachers to give up their free days so that the teacher could stay home to care for her son.

“One doesn’t wake up one day and say I’m going to become a union organizer,” she told the press about falling into her job.

The Granite (Utah) Education Association saw her skills and asked her to become a volunteer organizer with them. She then took the fight for teacher’s rights and funding for education right up the governor’s steps.

In 1996 she joined the executive committee of the NEA and in 2002 she was elected its secretary-treasurer. Six years later, in 2008, she was elected vice president and its new president this year.

“I was able to make my dream come true because I never gave up on my education, “she told me in a previous interview. “I never gave up, I saw education as the key.”

Along her climb up the career ladder, tragedy struck this talented Hispanic leader. Her husband Ruel Eskelsen committed suicide in 2011 at their Washington, D.C. home while she was away attending an education conference.

Depression was the cause of death, just as it was for comic Robin Williams. They had been married for 38 years.

Later while preparing her bilingual book “Rabble Rousers/Agitadores,” she met Alberto Garcia, an artist, in Tijuana, Mexico. He collaborated with her doing the illustrations for the book.

The book contains the biographies of various leaders that have had an impact in people’s lives such as Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Jones, Rigoberta Menchu, Frieda Zames, Harvey Milk and others. Dolores Huerta wrote the introduction to the book.

Last year Lily Eskelsen married Garcia but because his tourist visa had expired he had to return to Mexico until his immigration status is adjusted.

Eskelsen Garcia also has a blog in the Internet called “Lily’s Blackboard” and up to recently wrote a family column that appeared in 22 newspapers across the country.

I interviewed Ms. Eskelsen Garcia two weeks prior to her taking over as president of the NEA. She was at the time on a “Return to School’ tour of several cities. Here is that interview.

Eskelsen Garcia: Mother Jones still has lessons for us to learn

Zavala: What is the most urgent issue you will tackle first as NEA president?

Eskelsen Garcia: “As folks are getting ready and doing lesson plans and making sure they’ve got their entire materials ready for the kids, they’re all talking about the toxic testing that is still being required in so many places this country. The use of testing data for high-stakes decisions, usually high-stakes punishments, for students or for their teachers is wrong. Teachers want to be able to use student assessments for what they were designed to be used for. Very competent, caring teachers want to bring their kids to the next level. We are so worried about that increase in toxic testing, and we are making sure that we do everything we can to get rid of all toxic testing so that those schools actually are places where kids can have a positive experience and a positive learning experience.”

Zavala: What should people do to defend public education?

Eskelsen Garcia: You know, the public, the parents and the people in each community are so essential to making sure that their voices are heard. They’re the folks who really care about that school, and that school is the center of that community.

The first thing that people need to do is really pay attention to things like school board races. Show up to a school board meeting every now and then. That’s something that a lot of folks don’t even know they can do. But you can call a district office and find out when a school board meeting is. You can also call your local teachers’ association. Call that education association. Tell them that you’re someone who really cares about what’s going on in the schools and ask them how you can help. There are often petition drives for things that are better for schools. There are messages that you can send to the governor, the legislature, Congress — even the president of the United States — to let your opinion be heard of what should be going on schools. You can also go to NEA.org, where you will find all kinds of information and current events on what’s happening in schools today and ways that you can contact your Congressman and the president of the United States to weigh in on what you want to see in your public school.

Zavala: What will go through your mind when you take over your new job as president of the NEA on September 1st?

Eskelsen Garcia: I’ve wanted to have this opportunity to serve for so long because I can see what I was fighting for when I was in my classroom in 1980, when I started teaching, is still important. And that is, we are given the professional authority as educators to do what we need to do to personalize education for our kids. That we be given the condition and tools to do our jobs. And I also know that it’s more important than ever before that we have the support of parents and the community who trusts us and want us to be successful so that their students can be successful. More and more educators have given up waiting for politicians to come up with the right answers. They’re taking power into their own hands on the building level to involve the community, the parents and their colleagues. And we are going to take off like a rocket as people see what we can accomplish in a public school — sometimes without anyone’s permission just because we have a better idea.

We’re on the cusp of doing something very, very different with our schools. We’re moving away from that corporate model of privatize, de-professionalize, standardize — hit your cut score or else. We’re actually moving towards what we always should have been — a very personalized, humanized process of education where deeply committed professionals are given the authority to make sure kids have what they need to learn and we have what we need to teach.

Zavala: What historical figures inspire you; I know you wrote Rabble Rousers which includes many social fighters for justice?

Eskelsen Garcia: I started my book because I would go to schools and I would routinely ask kids about their heroes. I would usually hear about rock stars and sport stars, and I wanted students to know about real heroes. The first hero in the book is Mother Jones. I love Mother Jones. Mary Jones from the 1800s, at the very beginning of the union movement in the United States, had been a teacher at one time and was someone who was as outspoken and blunt as it was possible to be. No one ever misunderstood her. And her fight was often a fight for children, especially for children who were stuck working in horrible, dangerous conditions because their parents were so underpaid that they had to put their children to work instead of sending them to school. We still have places like that in the world today. And maybe there are even places that have whispers of that in this country. So I think Mother Jones still speaks to me, and still has lessons for us all to learn.

Antonio Zavala. Journalist, lives in Pilsen. He studied journalism at University of California, Berkeley, and in Roosevelt University, Chicago.

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