This week, in “The Radical Teachers’ Movement Comes to Baltimore,” The Nation tells the story behind the Baltimore Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (BMORE), the social justice-oriented caucus of teachers that surprised many when its leader, Diamonté Brown, defeated nine-time incumbent Marrietta English in an election to determine who would lead the Baltimore Teachers Union.
As Baltimore native Rachel Cohen reports in the Nation, “BMORE’s story begins with Natalia Bacchus.” Bacchus founded BMORE when she was a fellow with local education advocacy group Teachers Democracy Project (TDP), a current OSI-Baltimore grantee led by Executive Director Rebecca Yenawine, a 1999 OSI-Baltimore Community Fellow and 2012 Alumni grant recipient.
The story goes on to describe how Bacchus and TDP Advisor and former Executive Director Helen Atkinson “started traveling to different cities to learn from activist teachers. In August 2015, they went to Newark, New Jersey, for the annual United Caucus of Rank and File Educators conference, and began asking more practical questions about what launching a union caucus might look like. ‘I was like this could be big, and Chicago’s social-justice caucus was called CORE and New York’s was MORE—we should call ours BMORE!’ Bacchus said.”
