MTA President Max Page at Rally for Protecting Massachusetts Communities
MTA President Max Page at Rally for Protecting Massachusetts Communities
MTA President Max Page delivered the following remarks at the Rally for Protecting Massachusetts Communities at the State House on Tuesday, Nov. 25:
Good morning, fighters for justice!
I am Max Page, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association. We represent 117,000 educators across the Commonwealth, from early education through public higher education. And yesterday we celebrated our 180th birthday.
One hundred and eighty years from now, Massachusetts activists – yes, there will still be battles for justice, you can be sure! – will look back with respect and thanks for the Protecting Massachusetts Communities coalition. I am honored and proud to stand with you.
I cannot say that for our entire history our members or our union have always defended immigrants in our community, but I can say that in recent history protecting our students has been front and center in our work. The MTA and I go way back with the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, better known as MIRA, to the early 2000s, in the fight for in-state tuition for all our residents. And we finally won it. Justice always takes too long to achieve. But it is sweet when we win it.
We in the MTA, and I think everyone in this room, call public education the foundation of democracy. No public education, no democracy. No place for young people to learn to read and write, to learn math and science, to know truthful history, to become future citizens and good parents, friends, and colleagues – then no democracy.
And the foundation of democracy is this, our most precious value and commitment: Every young person is welcome in our schools, as a right of their humanity and their residence in our Commonwealth. Every child. Not the ones who can pay. Not the ones who have a certain skin color. Not the ones who can show a passport or green card when they walk in. Every child.
That is why the kidnapping of our children and their parents – as has happened in Milford, and in Everett, and in Worcester, and in dozens of communities across the Commonwealth – is so cruel and repulsive.
Many in this room may know of the all-important Plyler Supreme Court decision from 1982, which established a federal guarantee of the right of education for immigrant students.
The court said something remarkable. It said that “public education is not a luxury, but a cornerstone of our society, and its denial to any group of innocent children is a grave injustice.” And furthermore, denying education takes an “inestimable toll on the social, economic, intellectual, and psychological well-being of the individual, and poses an obstacle to individual achievement.”
If a person consciously chose to deny a child access to food and water, medical care, and shelter, you would call that unacceptable cruelty. Child abuse.
What the court said, and what we say loud and clear here, is that denying a child access to their right to a public education is unacceptable cruelty. And child abuse.
We will always fight for better quality public education. But today we are forced to defend this most basic of rights – the right to a public education. Because of the deportations, because of the kidnapping of our children, because of the fear, thousands of young people are forced, for their physical safety and freedom, not to attend school.
That is why we – and I mean your beloved educators, and this powerful union – will stand with you to win this coalition’s priorities:
- Massachusetts: Do not assist ICE in making civil immigration arrests.
- Massachusetts: Do not turn police into ICE agents.
- Massachusetts: Do help prevent deportations by passing the Legal Defense Act so that immigrants have the legal help they need to fight in courts.