John Perilli: Teachers Win Big in Session’s Final Days

John Perilli: Teachers Win Big in Session’s Final Days

The slow grinding down of America’s public union membership has been one of the saddest trends of the last thirty years. At their height, our unions claimed the membership of a third of the American labor force, but now they only organize around twelve percent of workers, and they are being stepped on at State Houses around the country.

I can tell you about a couple unions, though, who aren’t going down without a fight.

The National Education Association of Rhode Island (NEA-RI) and the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals (RIFTHP) had an extraordinarily successful last week at the Rhode Island State House. In the frenzied final days of the 2014 General Assembly session, they won the passage of two important education bills: a delay of the NECAP standardized test graduation requirement until 2017, and an easing of the frequency of teacher evaluations.

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In an era where unions are being pushed so far back, this is a welcome step forward. It was unclear for some time if even one of these bills would pass, but in the end the teachers put up two big points on the board. Could this embolden them to take on an uncooperative executive branch, including an unfriendly school board, or perhaps even become a brazen counterexample to the gloomy narrative of union decline?

Sweeping Up the House Floor

It is rare for any one interest group to take a pair of flagship bills on their issue and see them through in the same year. The General Assembly is infamously viscous, with some issues filtering their way through over a number of years, and others not going through at all. Therefore, the passage of bills to both delay the high-stakes graduation requirement and restructure teacher evaluations is a back-to-back win that the NEA-RI and the RIFTHP should be proud of.

The problem with the NECAP and its coming replacement, the PARCC, is that they are primarily designed to rank students. As I’ve written before, making such a test a graduation requirement mathematically ensures that a certain number of students will fail. This grievously damages the graduation plans of otherwise worthy students, and since it artificially limits these students’ earning prospects, it hurts the economy as well. Not to mention the fact that the companies that write the tests make a killing. The end result is an arbitrary lottery deciding who succeeds and who doesn’t.

Teacher evaluations have more upside, but are a similarly delicate topic. Specifically, the issue at hand during this legislative session was whether teachers rated “effective” and “highly effective” should be evaluated every year. Ultimately, a compromise was struck, allowing “highly effective” teachers to be evaluated every third year and “effective” teachers every two years. This creates a teacher-friendly balance between maintaining accountability and ensuring that the evaluations, more binding than any “performance review,” don’t escalate to an invasive and demeaning frequency.

Both of these bills, of course, are unofficial until Governor Chafee signs them, but nothing indicates that he will not. Teachers ought to celebrate these victories, but not for too long––they will have more business with the Governor’s office soon.

Breaking the Board

With these legislative successes, teachers’ unions may have the momentum and clout to tackle what have been their greatest obstacles since the beginning of the Chafee years: an intransigent Board of Education and a hostile Education Commissioner in Deborah Gist. While Chafee crucially carried union support in his 2010 victory, his appointments to Rhode Island’s top education offices have not reflected that at all.

This poses two problems for the NEA-RI and the RIFTHP. The first, most obvious one is that Rhode Island’s highest educational governing body is actively working against them. The second is more ominous: No matter who is elected Governor in November, there is no guarantee of union success. If Lincoln Chafee, the union hero, could turn on his 2010 allies, then no gubernatorial candidate is safe. Who is to say that Clay Pell, should he be elected with his current union support, won’t do the same?

Whoever our next Governor is, the NEA-RI and the RIFTHP must make it clear that they mean to fight. They already have a foot in the door with the Board of Education––NEA-RI president Larry Purtill is one of the eleven Board members––but lobbying for more union representation would be worth their effort. As would disrupting unfriendly nominations. In 2013, the Board of Education appointees breezed through the Senate. Why not try to change that? Ultimately, the most important task is making sure than when Deborah Gist’s contract expires, a friendlier replacement is found.

A Re-Unionized America?

But let’s say that Rhode Island teachers’ unions can string a few successes together after their victories this year. They get another couple members on the Board of Education, and an Education Commissioner they can work with. Rhode Island’s unions would be reenergized and held up as national models. Could they possibly become part of a counter-trend that would lead to the revitalization of America’s unions?

This is a much murkier––and quite frankly, distant––prospect. Many more professions and trades would have to unionize, including high-profile ones like college athletes, to make the idea of organized labor tasteful to the American palate again. But as President Obama put it so well, “The cornerstones of middle-class security all bear the union label.” In the post-war years, unions helped create a thriving middle class. Can Ocean State unions build on their legislative victories this year and do the same in Rhode Island?

John Perilli is a native of Cumberland, RI and a rising senior at Brown University who consults for state and local Democratic candidates. The opinions presented in this piece do not represent the opinions of any organizations John Perilli is affiliated with.