“I’m probably the only person in the room who was actually at the negotiating table in the mid-1960s when the first collective bargaining laws were being passed.” So said Ray Spear, former superintendent in Coventry and now a member of the Coventry School Committee, addressing the Board of Regents.

Recently, the Regents held a series of public meetings to hear creative ideas about how to prevent teacher strikes in strike-prone Rhode Island. The hearing I attended was packed to the gills with school administrators, school committee members and union officials.

Spear went on to wholeheartedly endorse “the granting of the initial bargaining rights for teachers.” Later, in an interview, he elaborated. “I was sympathetic with teachers because at the time they were not being paid at a scale comparable to other workers. I personally researched what other B.A.-level workers were being paid. Teachers weren’t even close. And they weren’t getting any benefits, no personal leave, maternity leave....”

But now, this elder statesman of the Rhode Island education community told the Regents, “It is my sincere belief that the teacher negotiation process has worn out its welcome and gone far beyond the purpose and intent which it was to serve.”

Currently, Rhode Island’s teachers’ unions are monolithically powerful forces that “fail to regard the needs of students,” according to Spear. These unions protect bad teachers, make a principal’s job nearly impossible, slow or stop educational reforms, and critically, in this fiscal climate, drive the cost of doing business through the roof.

The current problem is the result of flawed thinking back in the 1960s.

Spear was “just a young kid of a superintendent” in Michigan when that state’s collective-bargaining law passed in 1965. “When I sat down at the bargaining table for the first time, their contract proposal looked more like a General Motors contract than an education contract. They’d gone to the automotive industry for advice. Those are the roots of the situation we’re in now.”

Rhode Island, too, had robust textile and jewelry factories back then, and blue-collar unions to turn to. In an unfortunate accident of history, the labor contracts that won decent pay for teachers also cemented into place a factory-model design for schooling. Blue-collar labor contracts spell out and limit a worker’s obligations on the factory floor, or in this case a classroom, as if teachers were as interchangeable as die-press operators.

States reacted differently to the advent of collective bargaining. Connecticut’s law limited what could be negotiated, so school administrators never lost powers such as the right to hire and evaluate teachers. In its 1993 Education Reform Act, Massachusetts shifted key rights, such as hiring, back to management.

Rhode Island’s 1966 law, called the Michaelson Act, put “working conditions” on the table, which is to say everything that happens at a school. Spear echoed many of the speakers at the Regents hearing: “Our legislature should decide what’s out of bounds for the negotiation, and limit the scope of bargaining.” As it is, any administrative change can be a bone of contention, for which the union wants extra compensation, ever driving up costs.

Spear says, “So we’ve gotten way out of whack. The top-step teachers are getting $70,000, $80,000 a year. But the people paying the bills make $30,000 or $40,000. We need to find out what someone else, with a similar background, with a bachelor’s or master’s is getting.”

According to the Education Intelligence Agency, the average teacher’s salary nationally exceeds the average worker’s salary by about 25 percent. Rhode Island teachers are number one in the nation, by this measure, exceeding their average fellow worker by 47 percent.

Spear growls, “The unions are running this state into the ground. In fact, they’re running the whole country into the ground because they can’t get it through their heads that the reason for our financial problems is at least in part due to us trying to keep up with their demands. If you go out into the streets, you see a lot of foreign cars because they’re cheaper. They’re even better. I love the state of Michigan, but it’s going under because they’re in the same rut as Rhode Island.”

Those were the only two states to lose population last year.

The administrators at the Regents hearing were poker-faced through Spear’s tirade, probably because Rhode Island administrators are flat-out scared of the unions. Unions can make their lives miserable. If unions don’t get what they want, they call strikes, bury administration in grievances or, most perniciously, implement work-to-rule, which is when teachers do only what’s in the contract — as if a professional’s job could be described by a contract.

Spear was the only one at the hearing who had the nerve to say that the whole negotiating process, using a model designed for blue-collar jobs, is painfully obsolete, seriously impeding academic improvement and, most importantly, stealing resources from the kids.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.