A couple of years back, I got a rash of angry, irate mail from teachers and a few principals alerting me to the newest “unfunded mandate.”

The Rhode Island Board of Regents had passed a regulation asking the schools to create Personal Literacy Programs for students who read significantly below their grade level. The Regents were insisting schools actually map out strategies to correct each individual student’s reading issues. The complainers complained that the individualized plans ate up a lot of valuable time with useless, bureaucratic paperwork.

After collecting my thoughts and temper, I wrote back. It seemed to me that teaching a child to read was the principal mission of any school and was, therefore, funded. Rhode Island has one of the highest per-pupil expenditures in the nation. If not to teach reading, what is it going to the schools for? The Regents were only trying to get children actual help, instead of letting them be subjected to Jurassic practices like being put in the dumb-kids’ reading group or passed on for the next teacher to deal with. That help seemed well funded already, at least to me.

More recently, a school-committee member from a comfortable suburb pounded our table at a local banquet hall and declared that the solution to the current budget crisis was to eliminate unfunded mandates. When I asked which he meant, he announced, with exasperated triumph, “Like the new Rhode Island diploma system.”

Again, I found myself asking what the purpose of a school system is, if not to equip kids to earn a meaningful diploma? If the school committee really wants to save money, it should merge with another district. But put off work on a creating a viable diploma system?

Fortunately, that school committee member pulled back, thought a moment, and finally nodded. He had momentarily forgotten why the taxes pay for schools. But happily, he was not so stuck in our state’s weird mindset that he couldn’t regain perspective.

Too many people in Rhode Island are in the habit of thinking that the schools have the right to do whatever it is they’re already doing, effective or not, and expect that anything better has to be paid for as an extra. When research and experience in other states identify an educational best practice — for example, tailoring strategies to each struggling reader — our state’s taxpayers have to pay extra to implement it.

This habit stems from our 1967 collective bargaining law which, unlike other states’ laws, withholds nothing from the bargaining table. So every improvement, every extra moment of class time, change in schedule or effort to help the kids, becomes a negotiable item for which the unions will want more pay. We can’t change that law to restrict what is negotiable until we shake free of this ludicrous mindset.

To my mind, the big “unfunded mandate” is the one the unions demand, asking to be constantly paid more and more, for the status quo as well as the “extras,” no matter what the academic outcome for the kids.

So for example, these days at the State House all sorts of public service employees wear buttons demanding “Keep the Promise.” Here’s the promise they want kept:

In the past, unscrupulous politicians curried favor and votes by promising, via laws they wrote, to give Rhode Island’s public servants such generous benefits that now the bill is crushing the state’s ability to serve the public. Recently the legislature made a few necessary and appreciated tweaks to pension benefits, but the pensions are still arguably the best in the nation. I’m all for happy, well-compensated teachers, but the state’s economy can’t possibly support the current burden, which doesn’t even result in particularly happy or grateful teachers. And the legislature has decided it will let the recent tweaks stand as “pension reform” for the foreseeable future.

In the meantime, many urban children have antiquated textbooks, if they have textbooks at all. School buildings crumble around them. Kids all over the state are losing art, music, librarians, support services and sports. Less and less of that generous taxpayer money gets to the actual students for whom it was supposed to have been collected. Badly needed reforms and improvements will have to wait until there’s more money on the bargaining table to buy them as extras.

And the Regents have no real power to enforce any of their regulations, however wise.

As a result, the existing resources continue to shift away from kids to support benefits for adults. The Educational Intelligence Agency, a national watchdog, reports that Rhode Island’s public school population has dropped 4.6 percent since 2000-’01, while compensation to teachers went up 37 percent. Nationally, the average state enrollment has increased 2.5 percent since 2000-’01 while compensation went up 24.5 percent.

The important promise at hand is the state’s promise to educate the kids. In this budget crisis, the intensely powerful labor unions need to join forces with the larger community for our mutual survival. They need to accept change. They need to urge schools to use existing resources to get the improvements in place immediately. Yes, redeploying the resources will naturally involve some uncomfortable sacrifice.

But, honestly, there’s plenty of money already running through the Rhode Island schools to buy far better results. We squander oceans of dollars by trying to buy ever-illusive peace between labor and management. Clearly it can’t be bought. There’s never enough money. By promising to concentrate on educating the kids — at last! — we’ll surely find the courage to do those things that will make our endless labor-management war just go away.

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.