UFT Elections – High Schools
It was a bad election for my caucus, New Action. And in the high schools, it was a bad election for the UFT. Vote totals were down across the board.
Unity can claim a victory – they took an absolute majority of the high school votes for the first time since I’ve been a teacher… but with their second lowest vote total in years, perhaps ever.
I’ve seen speculation about who came in second overall. These results make me think Unity came in second – and those with an interest in promoting distance between the members and the union – our enemies – came in first.
And who’s next? High schools are the only (for now) winnable division, and no one was remotely close.
Anyways, here’s the numbers (I used the minimum candidate vote in the division for each slate as the slate vote. I could be off by a dozen or so)
JD2718 
New Action? More like Old Inaction or Old Irrelevance. Maybe just both. My school only knows New Action as the “creepy caucus” that jumps out of bushes to leave text filled leaflets that no one reads.
As a UFT wonk these numbers are fascinating to parse. Don’t forget that in 2004, ICE-TJC won the high schools because Unity didn’t run candidates. Unity vote went up very little. Total opposition vote went down drastically. The reason? Has to be the split in the opposition. Longtime anti-Unity voters just sat it out. The MORE drop from 2013 is stark. 60 or so people who signed up to run on the Solidarity ticket including a people who are respected in the UFT. Portelos played so much of smaller role this time — if he had played a bigger role they might have gotten more votes. The pattern of 30 years was broken not by Unity but by decisions made by the opposition caucuses. The so called Portelos clique which was considered marginal was given life by the MORE disaster. Also the idea that Arthur and Mike brought votes to Unity might be valid when you look at Unity’s 2013 totals – or not valid when comparing to 2016. The 50 extra votes this time could be from Arthur’s school plus some from Mike’s. Both schools had voted heavy for MORE/NA last time.