Brian Chidester, a member of the Bristol-Warren (Rhode Island) Education Association, looks at the background to the latest in a series of Washington-driven attacks on teachers' unions.
(Note: This has some information that DU posters had already tracked down, & some new info as well. Interesting that the mainstream media has ignored most of it, though it's apparently easy enough to figure out by talking to educators or doing a little digging.)
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The district receives no local funding, because it's too small and too poor for property taxes to amount to anything. As a result, it gets 88 percent of its funding from the state of Rhode Island, and the rest from the federal government.
(Note: it was taken over by the state in 1991 when the city officially went bankrupt.)
Gallo justified the mass firing on the basis that the Central Falls Teachers Union had supposedly refused to cooperate with another reform model known as "transformation."
The "transformation" plan placed all of the burden on teachers and would have forced them to perform significantly more labor for free. This is despite the fact that all CFHS teachers have been evaluated in the last two years, and not one received a bad evaluation.
The reform cheerleaders also ignore the fact that Central Falls schools have tremendous administrative turnover, particularly in the last five years: there have been three different administrations at CFHS alone, not to mention numerous reshufflings at lower grade levels. According to one Central Falls teacher, another school in the district has seen 18 different administrations in the last five years.
Even so, the teachers' union accepted the transformation model--but insisted that changes to teachers' working conditions in the plan be negotiated. The fact that the CFTU rejected the notion that the standing contract could be violated unilaterally by the administration meant, according to Gallo, that the teachers could not be "reliable partners" in the transformation of the school. Thus, according to her logic, the "transformation" was impossible, and the "turnaround" model was the only alternative.
Rhode Island has been shocked into the new era of education deform by the arrival last year of the new state education commission Gist.
The previous commissioner, Peter McWalters, was a liberal by comparison. He spent his long tenure avoiding the worst aspects of the Bush program--opting for a "proficiency-based" high school diploma over high-stakes tests. For this, he often butted heads with Republican Gov. Don Carcieri, a nasty conservative and staunch Bush supporter who has been pushing the testing model for some years now. Carcieri appointed Gist to replace the retiring McWalters, and the attacks have been steady ever since.
Even before the announcement of RTTT, Gist came out with a new attack on teachers all the time. She wanted to end seniority in teacher placements, increase funding for charters while decreasing education funding overall, have all teachers in the state evaluated on a yearly basis, and TIE TEACHER CERTIFICATION (NOT SIMPLY SALARY) TO INCREASES IN STUDENT TEST SCORES.
Race to the Top gave her the opportunity to bundle all her proposed reforms into the Rhode Island application--and even demand that the teachers' unions approve the application. However, union leaders were only given parts of the state's RTTT application to read before its submission. They weren't allowed to leave the Department of Education premises with any copies of the document and were given no chance to give input on the application.
When union leaders denounced the application publicly--which, it was presumed, would destroy the viability of the application--they were blamed for "depriving Rhode Island of badly needed education dollars."
This, DESPITE THE FACT THAT THE CARCIERI ADMINISTRATION HAS FAILED TO SPEND MOST OF THE STIMULUS MONEY RHODE ISLAND HAS RECEIVED FOR EDUCATION.
Gist's assault on the unions took on new momentum in January with the announcement...of the "School Improvement Grants (SIG)...Under the new program (Duncan's new rules), any high school with a graduation rate below 60 percent may be eligible for a SIG--but it must be willing to implement one of four reform models....
With these new weapons provided by the federal government, Gist has gone on a major offensive in Rhode Island...At the February 23 rally, teachers from all over the state shared stories of how their own emboldened administrations have gone after them...
Thus far, the leadership of the CFTU and the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers (RIFT) have claimed that the actions of Gist and Gallo in Central Falls are illegal because they violate state and federal laws guaranteeing the integrity of collective bargaining and contractual agreements.
While this may be true, it's also clear that their actions are perfectly acceptable--even encouraged--under the new federal education programs.
...The teachers' unions find themselves in a position similar to that of the United Auto Workers, which was pressured by the Obama administration to agree to massive concessions as part of the federal government's bailout of General Motors.
IT ISN'T hard to understand why Rhode Island teachers are being singled out. Teachers here are among the best paid in the country, largely due to the residual strength of unions in the state...
But the tide has been turning for some time. In the case of teachers' unions, a bad precedent was set last January by the 5 percent pay cut unilaterally imposed on East Providence teachers.
Now the state budget crisis is worsening, with Carcieri announcing a massive cut in state aid to cities and towns for the current fiscal year--and more cuts certain for the coming year... All school districts should cut teacher pay by at least 3 percent this year, he said.
...Thus far, the leaderships of the RIFT and the National Education Association of Rhode Island (NEARI) have denounced the attacks unambiguously, but have not really mobilized the membership in their own defense.
Almost all the locals refused to endorse Gist's RTTT application--but the Providence Teachers' Union (PTU) inexplicably broke ranks on this. Even more ominously, the PTU presence at the Central Falls rally was weak--
(Note: Providence is the district headed by another Broad Superintendent Graduate, the former commander of Ft. Belvoir, HQ of US Army Intelligence. Providence also employs three other Broad minions.)
Most frustrating of all for rank-and-file activists, state unions have thus far refused to call a united rally against the cuts and the "reforms." Instead, they claim, we need to lobby friendly politicians in the General Assembly and focus on working through the collective bargaining process.
The problem is that collective bargaining on the local level is clearly insufficient in the context of the current crisis. The attack in Central Falls provides the clear proof of this.
While teachers are embattled... the fightback in Central Falls is a good sign--and the February 23 rally was the largest labor rally in Rhode Island in years. Teacher unions and labor activists need to build on this struggle to generalize resistance to these attacks.
The California-based March 4 Day of Action to defend public education passed with relatively little notice in Rhode Island. Now we need to learn the lessons of California and take a lead from the other coast to wage real fightback in the Ocean State.
http://socialistworker.org/2010/03/08/axed-at-central-falls
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