Posted on 09/10/2001 2:11:06 AM PDT by 2Trievers
Why R.I. seems to have so many teacher strikes
• Though the work stoppages are illegal, school districts still must prove in court that they cause irreparable harm.
The scene is so common in Rhode Island that we forget how rare it is across the United States. Just next door, in Connecticut, entire generations of children have never seen their teachers on the picket line.
In New Hampshire, Department of Education lawyer Sarah Browning can't remember the last time teachers went on strike there. Massachusetts hasn't been quite so lucky, but despite being many times larger than Rhode Island, it often has fewer walkouts. This year there are none.
Teacher strikes are illegal in those states, but they're illegal in Rhode Island, too. And even in places where walkouts are legal -- Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin -- school districts don't struggle with September pickets as often as they do here.
Why must Rhode Island endure this annual ritual?
The short answer is jurisprudence. Although Rhode Island's laws are clear -- teachers are public employees, and public employees can't strike -- decades of state court decisions have required school officials to show that a teacher strike will cause immediate and irreparable harm.
Invariably, districts meet the requirement, and the strikes end. Few unions are willing to defy a court order, though in 1992, 18 Warwick teachers disobeyed a judge and went to jail.
The lost days are made up at the end of the year, so teachers don't lose money. And unlike Massachusetts, which fines unions for strikes, and New York, where teachers are penalized individually, Rhode Island has been reluctant to punish teachers for their work stoppages.
Angry parents in Middletown and Narragansett can surely relate to the school officials who for years have lobbied to change this system, to eliminate the requirement to show that strikes do harm and to impose harsh penalties that would dissuade teachers from walking out.
But not everyone agrees that children are suffering under the current law, or that the law is the heart of the problem. Interviews with union representatives, other states' officials, and state Rep. Paul W. Crowley, D-Newport, one of the General Assembly's leading voices on education issues, suggest that there is no simple answer to Rhode Island's teacher-strike woes.
FOR WHAT it's worth, Rhode Island's teacher strikes are short, generally delaying the school year by about a week -- though in Bristol-Warren two years ago, summer vacation stretched an extra two weeks.
Jennifer Wood, legal counsel to the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said the department generally stays out of labor disputes and hasn't lobbied for changes in the law.
What officials care about most, Wood said, is ensuring that students get their 180-day minimum school year, or more if that's what their district guarantees. That always happens, she said, so children don't suffer.
James A. Paresi, lobbyist for the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, presses that point to argue that teacher strikes should, in fact, be legal.
Teachers shouldn't be denied the basic labor rights given to other workers, Paresi said, and strikes are "an honest and straightforward means to resolve disputes that can't be resolved" through negotiations. Making the law harsher against teachers wouldn't end the disputes that lead them to walk out, Paresi added, but it would leave teachers powerless.
Sandra Quinn, staff counsel to the Massachusetts Teachers Association, said that's how teachers feel in the Bay State.
"Our feeling is, we do not have a level playing field," Quinn said. If school officials engage in "bad-faith bargaining," teachers must choose between acquiescing to their demands or risking jail, she said. School officials, she argued, know they have nothing to lose.
"They put the hammer down pretty hard in Massachusetts," Quinn said.
There is a compromise, and Lawrence E. Purtill, president of the National Education Association-Rhode Island, has been urging officials here to consider it for years, with little success.
Purtill points to Connecticut, where teacher strikes have been avoided for decades not by threatening teachers, but by giving them what Rhode Island already gives police and firefighters: the right to seek binding arbitration when talks and mediation have failed.
Adopted in 1969, Connecticut's Teacher Negotiation Act bans strikes but also requires binding arbitration when a deal can't be struck within a certain timeline. Each side prepares a final best offer, and a three-member arbitration panel -- one person chosen by each side, plus a neutral party -- picks one side's position on each issue.
The resulting contract might include the school board's salary scale, the union's medical package, the board's extra school day, and the union's daily lesson-planning period. There is an appeal process, but ultimately, both sides are bound by the arbitrators' choices.
Rhode Island law allows teachers to seek arbitration, but makes the decisions binding only in matters not involving money. That makes the process essentially useless in most cases.
Purtill, who could not be reached for this story, has lobbied to extend the full binding arbitration option to teachers; a bill before the General Assembly this year would have allowed judges to order binding arbitration when they issue injunctions to stop teacher strikes.
But as strongly as Purtill's union supports the concept, the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers vigorously opposes it, saying it would take away both sides' power to decide their own fates.
Timothy Duffy, executive director of the Rhode Island Association of School Committees, said school and town officials can't abdicate their responsibility to represent the taxpayers' interest. He also argued that both the mediation process and arbitration tend to favor unions.
What about Connecticut's success in ending teacher strikes?
"They don't have them, but they also have the second-highest teacher salaries in the nation," Duffy said. A much more effective approach is New York's, he argued, where teachers are fined two days' pay for each day they miss from work.
Tom Murphy, spokesman for the Connecticut Department of Education, acknowledged that districts have bitterly objected to arbitration awards over the years, but said few contracts end up at that stage these days, and the system is considered a success.
"There are no strikes, so what price do you pay for having students in school, in a productive setting?" Murphy argued. And as for the teachers' salaries, "Yes, we do pay our teachers well, and therefore we can recruit the best and the brightest in the nation."
CROWLEY, for his part, isn't ready to follow Connecticut's or New York's examples -- though he said he will continue to push to end the "irreparable harm" requirement by specifying in the law that no such finding is needed.
But after years of watching districts fight it out with their teachers, Crowley has come to believe the law isn't the real problem. It's that Rhode Island relies too heavily on local property taxes to finance its schools, and with taxpayers pushing them to be frugal, school committees have no choice but to stand tough.
"I often describe it as two seagulls fighting over an empty lobster shell," Crowley said. "Most communities are strapped."
Labor disputes also waste everyone's time and energy, Crowley argued. Caught up in negotiations, in setting teachers' salaries and benefits, school committees are too busy to work on education reforms. Working on such a small scale, disputes also become personal and nasty.
"The fundamental issue is having all these separate school districts with separate contracts," Crowley said.
This year, the General Assembly set aside $50,000 to study the feasibility of offering a statewide benefits package for teachers, as has been done in Pennsylvania. Crowley said the goal would be to save money while reducing the number of contentious issues at the bargaining table.
"This is a first step," Crowley said. "We should be working on a statewide teacher contract and get rid of the acrimony."
Legislation from congressmen of the RNC? DNC? You are such a jokester, LL.
It might take a while to bring it down.
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