https://morecaucusnyc.org/

The Movement of Rank-And-File Educators (MORE) is an organization that has been at the forefront of the fight for educational equity and safety in the midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic. This section provides background on MORE in order to lead into the contextualization of its organizational strategies and practices within the theoretical frameworks of Paulo Freire and Ella Baker.

MORE is the rank-and-file caucus of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the union that represents over a hundred thousand educators in New York City and is the largest local teachers union in the United States. MORE was created in 2012 by a collection of teacher activist organizations within the UFT in response to the limitations of those existing organizations, which lacked the proper structure and goals to tackle broader socialist, antiracist, or social justice issues. It is worth noting that MORE’s organizational strategy and methods were initially closely modeled after the success of the Caucus of Rank-And-File Educators in Chicago and its subsequent transformation of the Chicago Teachers Union. The educators that came together to form MORE looked to CORE’s example, a membership-controlled teachers’ union that was mobilized and transformed to fight corporate agendas in public education and promote social justice. This aim has resulted in MORE identifying itself as “the social justice caucus” of the UFT (Brogan, 2016, pg. 434).