For the Pennsylvania families who live in school districts where there have been teacher strikes in the past 50 years, it may not be surprising to hear that the state led the nation in such strikes between 1968 and 2012, according to the Commonwealth Foundation.
What may be surprising, however, is that of all the strikes in the U.S. during that time frame, 90 percent of them occurred in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania’s Senate Education Committee recently held a hearing to look into the issue, and while they heard that Act 88 of 1992 went some way toward decreasing the incidence of educators striking in the state, work stoppages remain a serious, intractable issue for many districts and parents.
The committee’s chairman, Sen. John Eichelberger, R-Hollidaysburg, was particularly interested in hearing from testifiers if they thought that introducing mandatory, binding arbitration into the union contract process would have a positive outcome.
“One of the thoughts we have to look at this issue is to change the system to a binding arbitration process like we do with police and firefighters in Pennsylvania, except we would make it fair, unlike the process for police and firefighters that's skewed toward the unions,” Eichelberger said. “We would fix that system and put it in place for schools and ... if you don't have a contract by a certain date ... you go into binding arbitration, and there would be no more strikes.”
Elements of Eichelberger’s suggestions to fix the arbitration process would include a coin toss to see which party picks the neutral arbitrator and instructions to limit the scope of what is being considered in arbitration.
Vito DeLuca, solicitor for the Dallas School District, which saw contentious teacher strikes the last two school years, reacted favorably to the concept.
“I was chief solicitor for Luzerne County, we had that process with our prison guards, with our county detectives, with our court personnel,” DeLuca said. “I would totally be in favor of interest arbitration for teachers.”
But Jeffrey Sultanik, chairman of the Education Law Group at the Fox Rothschild legal practice, was concerned that even with Eichelberger’s suggestions for the arbitration process, school districts might not be comfortable putting their fiscal future in someone else’s hands.
“If a school district is facing a monetary shortfall, would you as an elected official want to relegate that authority to a third party?” Sultanik asked. “To have a binding decision done by a third party, it sounds convenient, but in practice I don't think it's going to result in something that you would want to see, and I think it's going to mean additional costs for most of our school employers under the circumstances.”
Sultanik said the committee needed to look not only at the issue of strikes, but the practice of “work-to-rule” strategies by teachers unions.
“Work-to-rule is where the teachers association, upon the expiration of the contract, says ‘we're only going to work to the literal wording of the contract, and we're not going to do an ounce more. So if you want us to go on the fourth-grade camping trip, we're not going. If you want us to be the director of the middle school or the high school play, we're not going to volunteer.’” Sultanik said. “The issue of work to rule … is very difficult to deal with and is often as disruptive as the issue of the strike.”
Sultanik also was skeptical that outlawing strikes, as 38 states do, would have a large impact since strikes still occur in states where they’re supposed to be illegal, as was recently seen in West Virginia. His suggestion to address the issue was that the state give school districts the power to implement their “last best offer.”
“That's the simplest change you can make, to grant the authority to a school entity to implement its final best offer if you reach impasse in the process,” he said. “The playing field gets leveled, the prospect of a work stoppage decreases, and the likelihood to have an amicable resolution improves.”
Nathan Benefield, vice president and chief operating officer of the Commonwealth Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group, sought to highlight for senators just how serious the issue remains despite the reductions in strikes seen after Act 88’s implementation.
“There have been 131 teacher strikes since 1999, according to the administration, which is an average of seven teacher strikes every year,” he said. “There are more threats on the horizon and potential for more strikes coming up. We currently have identified 38 school districts that have expired contracts as of right now, with more than 8,000 teachers and 115,000 students in those districts without contracts.”
Benefield’s suggestions included increasing transparency, so that taxpayers can see the terms of suggested contracts; setting a statewide healthcare plan for teachers, to prevent it from being a point of contention; and instituting some sort of financial penalty, as some other states do, so that teachers don’t feel free to strike with impunity.
The committee’s minority chairman, Sen. Andrew Dinniman, D-West Chester, didn’t commit to any particular course of action but signaled a willingness to look at methods to incentivize teachers not to strike, though he emphasized positive reinforcement rather than negative.
“It's going to be very hard to ever pass a piece of legislation in Pennsylvania that would deny the right to strike for teachers, that's essentially a given,” Dinniman said. “But on the other hand, the victim in all this is the student, whether it be management's fault or whether it be teachers’ fault, you have the student who's caught in the middle, almost as a hostage.”