Thank You, Lily!

Thousands of fed-up West Virginia teachers lit the #RedForEd spark in early 2018, when educators from every county in the state encircled the State Capitol for almost two weeks, demanding better pay and teaching conditions. Then, the union-led movement spread to Arizona, Oklahoma, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Colorado, winning salary improvements, smaller class sizes, and investments in new textbooks, classroom technology, and more. “You showed up, and it’s made a difference. You’ve changed the narrative,” Eskelsen García told NEA Representative Assembly delegates in 2019.

Lily Eskelsen García marches with members of the St. Paul Federation of Educators, who went on strike for four days in March, winning $4.7 million for mental-health staff.

When Betsy DeVos was appointed secretary of education in 2017, despite a total lack of experience in public education, she met an enormous obstacle in her anti-public school, pro-privatization agenda—namely NEA President Lily Eskelsen García. From the beginning, Eskelsen García has stood in the way of DeVos’ every effort to damage public schools and the opportunities of public school students. DeVos’ cruelty, reflected in her proposed budgets, has been named, shamed, and stopped by Eskelsen García. (Here, Eskelsen García speaks at a 2017 rally opposing DeVos’ nomination.) “She is so obviously unqualified, unprepared, and has no interest in doing anything except corrupt education programs that were developed to help our most vulnerable, marginalized students, and to take that money and give it to private schools,” said Eskelsen García. “She doesn’t even try to disguise it. And folks actually do like their public schools.”

In December 2015, former President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) into law, ending the 14-year reign of No Child Left Behind and its obsessive fixation on standardized test scores. For many years as an NEA leader, Eskelsen García fought for better federal legislation, and ESSA delivered, providing more opportunities for all students and a stronger voice for educators in policy decisions. “It’s all about voice, your voice,” explained Eskelsen García in 2017. “Talk to each other. Partner with each other. Together, we can design the schools of our dreams. What would the school of your dreams look like? Kids would smile. Parents would show up. … Once you’re working on your dreams, you won’t let anyone stop you.”

In 2015, under Eskelsen García’s direction, the NEA Representative Assembly voted to formally acknowledge the existence of institutional racism and committed NEA to stopping it. But their vote wasn’t the beginning or the end of Eskelsen García’s work to stop racism and its brutal effect on Black children’s opportunities in the U.S. (Here, Eskelsen García visits an elementary school in Abbeville, La., in 2015.) For years, she has connected the dots for NEA members repeatedly stating that we work in a “system purposely designed to advantage some and to hold others in an oppressed and inferior place, sorted by the color of their skin. By race.” More recently, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Eskelsen García urged educators not to “look away.” Eskelsen García also has been a fierce advocate for Dreamers and other U.S. immigrants: “They’re ours and we love them,” she says simply.