“Hey, Barbara. This is Arne Duncan. I just wanted to congratulate you on your election victory.”

In 2014, as an insurgent candidate from the Educators for a Democratic Union caucus, I won the presidency of the Massachusetts Teachers Association. Duncan, then Obama’s Secretary of Education, was one of the first congratulation calls I got. The message he left on my phone provoked lots of astonished laughter when I shared it at meetings and in bars.

I won on a platform that called out the Obama-era education reforms for undermining public education in the name of privatization. Duncan, who once called Hurricane Katrina “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans” (because it opened the door to charter schools and privatization), was the man who implemented the policies I was planning to lead the MTA in fighting against.