A Little BAT History from Notorious Phd

Now that the Badass Teachers Association has become a non profit organization, I wanted to review a little BAT history so that my own involvement and disengagement can be more easily understood

1. As the excerpt below indicates, I came up with the idea for the Badass Teachers Association as a fundraising device for a Bronx organization called the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective in early spring 2012, All we did was produce tee shirts for sale. No organization was created:

Rebel Diaz
March 27, 2012 •
You know about the BTA???? FInd out. Its The Badass Teachers Association!!! Here's Dr. Mark Naison explaining it.
BTA t-shirts on sale now help raise funds for The RDACBX

2. The Badass Teachers Association was created as a Facebook page on June 14 2013 by me and Priscilla Sanstead. I certainly had no idea that it would turn into an actual organization. Credit for creating the organization goes to Priscilla and to Marla Kilfoyle who developed the entire organizational structure which allowed BATS to grow precipitously over the next year. I did a lot of the writing for the group, but they were the ones who ran the day to day operations and put countless hours into building it. I could never in a million years have done what they did.

3. I left the BATS voluntarily in the Fall of 2014 after a group of internal disagreements with the other founders. I do not regret leaving the group as it gave me more freedom to work on other issues which were and still are important to me. I DO regret some of the bad feeling which led to my departure and still persists with some people in the organization.

4. The current group of leaders DESERVE to be leading BATS. They did the grunt work to build the group. Moreover, most of them are public school teachers and they are the ones who should be leading an organization which seeks to empower teachers.

5. Even if I had remained in BATS, I would have had to leave when it became a non profit organization because I had some bad experiences with activist organizations which became non-profits. This is a personal judgment rather than a political one. I wish BATS well in its current manifestation and support many of their initiatives,

That's it. I am very happy with where I am! And hope that the hard feelings that occurred when I left BATS will fade over time.