Join the Caucus

If you agree with our Points of Unity below, please join our caucus! For more detail on our vision and politics, see the Caucus Program here.

Points of Unity

Why Do We Need a Radical Caucus?

For decades, the official leadership of OEA has defined the scope, methods, and structure of how political action and education get disseminated to the rank and file. A rank-and-file caucus is needed, regardless of who is in the union’s upper leadership, to support a “bottom-up union,” with power derived from the rank and file through democratic processes.

Internal Group Accountability

We actively cultivate a positive internal culture, and prioritize conflict mediation and resolution. We recognize that the strength, number, and variety of connections between us determine our sustainability.

Class Independence

We envision a union that fights from our power as workers, not through a primarily electoral strategy. We will fight for our local and state/national affiliates (CTA/NEA) to abandon collaboration with the Democratic Party.

Worker Solidarity

We will fight for all OUSD education workers. We recognize that divisions of workers are intentional and racist, allowing the marginalization of classified coworkers by salary, benefits, job security, and collective power. We support legal and extra-legal actions to promote solidarity among coworkers.

Transforming the Material Conditions of Teaching

We strategize and organize around a vision for what high-quality, liberatory education for all requires, especially for Black, Brown, and working-class students: high-quality learning conditions, including class size at least as small as in elite private schools, far more individual and small-group student support, far more teacher prep time and other material advancements within and beyond schools.

Militant Methods

Our caucus encourages a diversity of tactics to promote educational equity including legally sanctioned and wildcat rank-and-file actions, including work stoppages and nonviolent direct action alongside other unions and community members and groups.

Liberatory Pedagogy

As education workers, we center our pedagogy around principles for social transformation through education based on consciousness-raising and engagement with oppressive forces. We aim to execute a teaching praxis that disrupts the system’s disempowerment of working-class students—particularly students of color—and to address their multifaceted needs and cultivate their abilities to think critically, protect each other and fight for liberation.

Popular Struggles and Anti-Oppression Politics

Our work is part of building the broader class struggle against all systems of oppression. We are committed to personally and collectively challenging racism, sexism, capitalism, imperialism, homophobia, ableism, and ageism. Involvement in social movements and supporting other workers’ struggle is central to our mission.

Union Democracy

Union strength depends on analyses, tactics, and strategies that are developed, supported and carried out by rank-and-file members at individual sites and beyond the union. Our caucus will develop a critique of bureaucratic unionism and a model of democratic practice in our union.

Enacting Democracy In Our Union

Democratic unions must commit to and uphold transparency in every area of work: organizing, grievances, governance bodies, committees, bargaining, and all communications with the district and elsewhere. All committee chairs, cluster leads, and bargaining team members should be elected, all meetings of union bodies, including meetings of cluster leads, bargaining teams, and committees should be open to all members and announced well in advance on the OEA website.