Meet the candidate/teachers working to bring needed energy to the Providence Teachers' Union
"We have a vision for mobilizing the rank and file and capitalizing on our collective power to put pressure on the district so that we can get better teaching and learning conditions."
The Providence Teachers’ Union (PTU) is holding a special election on May 14 to fill four positions. PVD CORE (Providence Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators)1, a caucus of PTU members with a social justice focus seeking to improve working and learning conditions in Providence Schools, has candidates in the race for three open seats.
The candidates have committed to a platform of:
Amplifying teacher voice by developing more opportunities for members to connect and communicate directly with one another while elevating member input in decision-making;
Strengthening committees by revitalizing and strengthening existing union committees and expanding committee work to serve our members’ needs
Developing and providing robust training for ILT (Instructional Leadership Teams), SIT (School Improvement Teams), and delegates so that teachers are equipped to improve working conditions at their school sites and district-wide; and,
Leading contract teach-ins so that every rank-and-file member has deep and comprehensive knowledge of their contract and grievance procedures.
To better understand PVD CORE and their campaign, I sat down with teachers Lindsay Paiva, who is running for Vice-President at Large, and Anna Kuperman, who is running for PTU Secretary. Roberta Engel, running for Vice President of Middle Schools, could not be present.
Lindsay Paiva is an antiracist educator and community organizer in Providence with over a decade of teaching and organizing experience. She teaches third-grade multilingual learners at Webster Avenue Elementary School and fiercely advocates for students, families, and educators in Providence and beyond. Lindsay was named the 2022-2023 Providence Teacher of the Year and was a finalist that same year for Rhode Island State Teacher of the Year.
Anna Kuperman has taught in Providence schools for 24 years, currently at Classical High School. She has consistently stood up for students’ and teachers’ rights. Her organizing began in 1997, demanding air quality tests in old school buildings, and speaking out against school closures and the teacher firings in 2012 when she led the Teachers for a Democratic Union caucus. She’s an active member of PVD CORE and has been organizing to democratize the Providence Teachers Union for many years. She is a National Board Certified Teacher. Her children attend Providence Public Schools.
Here’s the interview:
Steve Ahlquist: PVD CORE is running candidates in the Providence Teachers’ Union (PTU) Special Election on May 14. Can you explain what you’re doing?
Lindsay Paiva: PVD CORE, a caucus within the Providence Teachers’ Union, is running a slate for the special election. We thought there would only be a vice president position open because Maribeth Calabro is moving on to be the President of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, but other vacancies were opened due to some movement of board members.
Steve Ahlquist: How many positions are open?
Lindsay Paiva: Four. The Vice President of Special Populations was uncontested. The three other open positions are Secretary, Vice President of Middle Schools, and Vice President at Large.
Steve Ahlquist: And the people in this room are running for these positions?
Lindsay Paiva: Yes. I’m running for Vice President at Large and...
Anna Kuperman: I’m running for secretary.
Steve Ahlquist: Who‘s running for the Vice President of Middle Schools?
Lindsay Paiva: Roberta Engel, but she couldn’t be here tonight.
Steve Ahlquist: What is your motivation for running?
Lindsay Paiva: We have been engaged members of the PTU for a long time, and have been doing a lot of work, through committees, as building reps, and in other ways, but this election felt like an opportunity to shift some of the focus of union leadership. We have a vision for mobilizing the rank and file and capitalizing on our collective power to put pressure on the district so that we can get better teaching and learning conditions.
Right now, we’re in this transitional period where we don’t know what will happen with the return of Providence Schools to local control.2 We were teachers in Providence before the takeover, experienced the effects of the takeover, and have seen how Providence teachers have been silenced and ignored, and we’re tired of that. We want to build a union that fights back and says, “No” to the scarcity narrative that says there aren’t enough resources for our kids. We believe in a movement of rank-and-file educators. When people are engaged and know their contracts and rights, we can fight for better conditions.
Steve Ahlquist: When you say you’re being silenced, who is silencing you?
Lindsay Paiva: It’s a joint effort. Since the takeover, I have felt that administrators have been more emboldened to ignore the contract or push aside collaborative decision-making. We have a lot of excellent structures built into our contract, such as School Improvement Teams and the Instructional Leadership Teams, but those structures aren’t being utilized to their full extent in most schools, and when we try to build those structures out at schools individually, there’s been a lot of silencing and pushback from the district.
I’ll speak for myself, but I don’t feel that there’s been a collective response from the union leadership that we would all say “no” to this kind of behavior from the boss.
I have been pushing for district-wide grievances for a long time, and the union leadership hasn’t had much interest in pursuing that. That creates a dynamic where individual teachers or schools push for change and become easier to target because there isn’t this collective approach. I’m sure that the School Improvement Teams are not operating according to state law at most schools. I’m sure that the Instructional Leadership Teams are not functioning the way they are meant to, as is laid out in the contract.
Anna Kuperman: Teachers are scared to speak up.
Steve Ahlquist: In the past, the union negotiated to have these things in your contract, and then, when you attempt to use them, you get pushback, even though they’re contractually obligated.
Anna Kuperman: People don’t understand them very well.
Steve Ahlquist: What would implementing these things do?
Anna Kuperman: An Instructional Leadership Team (ILT) is supposed to be made up of a majority of teachers. If it had voting rights, you could bring schoolwide issues to that team, vote on them, and win if you had teacher support. But nothing can happen if you don’t have the ILT set up as a voting body. Many don’t have themselves set up as voting bodies because administrators say, “We don’t need that, right? We’re all good here,” and people agree, “Yeah, we’re good.” You need to push it, and very few people want to do that.
Steve Ahlquist: Because they think management is their friend.
Anna Kuperman: What worries people is getting on the boss’s bad side, to see what happens when the boss acts out in unfriendly ways.
Lindsay Paiva: We’re pushing for more contract teach-ins for the rank and file so folks will know their contracts deeply and can spot violations quickly and address them in the moment. The way things are set up right now is that it’s more of an industrial model, where you go to your field rep with a grievance, they file it, and no one hears about it, or they read the grievance report later, or it takes months. We want to move in a direction where we’re doing fewer grievances, coming together, and making demands as a collective body because it’s faster and more effective. We’re interested in more of an organizing union where we’re connecting with folks and helping them to know their rights.
For ILTs, particularly, that’s the one body where the delegate, the building rep, and the principal have equal power because they are co-chairs of that entity. You can get a lot done if delegates are trained and hold the line on principals. But when the delegates aren’t trained, there’s a lot of fear and ignorance, and folks don’t know what is possible.
Also, when you start to push, you’re often isolated, harassed, or threatened, so it’s easy to back down. We want to create an environment where you don’t have to back down because you’re not alone in the fight. We want more members to understand our power.
The main challenge is that people don’t realize that we have so much power as workers beyond the letter of the contract.
Steve Ahlquist: That sounds like a hard message to bring to voters. If they don’t know they have power, and you’re saying you do, you need to convince them.
Anna Kuperman: We need to get into union leadership positions. Being a good speaker, a good arguer, with good ideas will NOT get you a good contract, like you went in there and told Brett Smiley off and were tough in negotiations. Negotiations don’t work like that. Negotiations work because you have 2000 teachers behind you and they’re organized, speaking up, coming out, and participating in work actions.
Our union leadership is scared and unwilling to do that. They think we will lose more of our rights if we fight back too hard. Part of that is because it’s against the law for us to strike. But we’ve seen, around the country, that people have done work actions and won much better contracts and pay. That’s not to say that we’re ready to do that - we’re not. What we need to do is organize and get to that point. But the idea that you’ll get a good contract if you’re a tough talker is ridiculous. Who thinks that? At what historical point has that ever happened, where a good speaker has turned the bosses around through the power of their argument alone?
Steve Ahlquist: Like Mr. Smith goes to Washington.
Anna Kuperman: That’s not how it works. If you look at any teachers’ union that has won a better contract and pay, it’s not through negotiations alone. Looking at all of labor history, you see that you have to stop things from running smoothly, collectively, all together, for the boss to pay you any mind.
Lindsay Paiva: We hope to get to a point where we have a clear, coherent campaign so every member knows what we’re fighting for in negotiations and feels they have a voice and an avenue to bring their perspective. We want more skill sharing and member-to-member support because there are so many incredible teachers in our district, and we could be building off of what folks already know. There’s a ton of institutional knowledge in the union, but also a lot of fresh ideas and folks with a ton of organizing experience in the community and other spheres.
Every member should know the contract. You should be able to ask, “What are we fighting for in negotiations right now?” The reality is that folks have no idea. I’m active, and I have no idea. We want to get to a point where we have a cohesive and coherent member-driven campaign.
Steve Ahlquist: Maybe you need an employee handbook.
Anna Kuperman: We do have something like that. It’s called our contract.
Steve Ahlquist: Maybe the contract is too complicated, and you need something simpler?
Anna Kuperman: It’s not complicated. What is not encouraged is the idea that you should be an active member in your union, know your contract, and share it with the new teacher who just started last week. That is not encouraged.
Steve Ahlquist: That seems like something that would be automatic when onboarding new teachers.
Anna Kuperman: It’s horrible when new members say, “I still don’t receive the union’s emails.” And union leadership responds, “Why don’t you call the union? What’s wrong with you?”
Lindsay Paiva: There are different models of unionism. What we have is an industrial union where the union is a service. You call your field rep, they help you file a grievance, and your grievance gets resolved - or not. Then we move on.
Our vision is for a social justice union where we have targeted campaigns, but eventually become strong enough to fight for a contract that serves the common good and better supports our students. Our contract already has decent language, but it could be better. We have the language to fight for better conditions in our schools, but we don’t have the training or the knowledge to use it. Also, the culture and climate of fear and division are real.
Steve Ahlquist: What is the fear? What’s the worst-case scenario? I don’t understand what they do if you have a contract.
Anna Kuperman: We had some PVD CORE teachers who were non-renewed,3 right? That’s one thing they can do if you are non-tenured.
Steve Ahlquist: For the first three years as a teacher, that’s a real problem. After that, though?
Anna Kuperman: You can be harassed by your administrator, which is what’s happening to us. They can move your classroom to a basement with no windows. They can come into your room, observe you daily, and bring in four other people...
Lindsay Paiva: ...which is what has happened to me in the past. When you push back, even if you’re active - I’ve shared this a few times, but often when I speak at a Providence School Board meeting, I have been pulled into the principal’s office, or I get a classroom walkthrough, or something else happens soon after. In the past, district employees have called my personal cell phone and asked me not to testify before the school board. When you show up and push back, negative tangible things happen and that makes some members uncomfortable and unwilling to advocate for change. That is why we need more folks to join in this movement so that they cannot target individual teachers or schools and we can move collectively.
Anna Kuperman: We spoke at the school board last Wednesday, and on Thursday and Friday, I got emails inviting me to speak to my principal about various infractions.
Steve Ahlquist: And the union doesn’t help you on these?
Anna Kuperman: I called my union rep, and he came with me, but I was stressed out all day.
Lindsay Paiva: I had four classroom walkthroughs in four days in one week after a work action we took at my school. I feel that we need to take bold, unapologetic action against this kind of behavior, which is part of why I decided to run for a leadership position in the union.
It’s difficult because we want an unapologetic show of collective support, and it feels tempered and discouraged.
Anna Kuperman: There’s laziness in our union. I don’t understand why we don’t have organizers. Instead, we stop organizers. They’ll file a grievance for you, but they don’t go out and try to get the new members to become active members.
Lindsay Paiva: They could survey to see if 10 other schools have the same grievance, and then we could do a group action. I think the union is set up for an impossible task. There are two field reps to represent around 1700 teachers. It’s not feasible. But if we build an organizing base where people already know their rights and they’re proactively acting before it gets to the point of grievance, or if five teachers march on the boss and say, “We’re not doing this because this is against the contract.” It doesn’t even get to a grievance, and we don’t need the paperwork, and we don’t need to involve HR.
We know that HR is on the boss’s side - they won’t side with teachers, especially in this climate. So many of us have been in hearings, and we’re not given a fair shake because of this bias. We hope to move into more action-based work and proactive approaches, and build a campaign that teachers care about.
What we’ve been doing on the campaign trail is making space to talk to people and hear what they care about and the issues. I Zoomed with a pre-K team, and they shared all of this information I had no idea about because we’re so siloed - we don’t know. That’s part of it, too, because we have such a different experience as a high school teacher versus a pre-K teacher, and we don’t always know. But suppose we can start to tell more of the story and map the behavior patterns? In that case, we can take collective action to stop much of the inequality, because between the contract and state law, we have so much power and so much on our side that we’re just wasting and not utilizing it.
Steve Ahlquist: What would be the next step? When is the election?
Lindsay Paiva: May 14. It’s coming up pretty quickly.
Steve Ahlquist: How do you feel about the campaign?
Anna Kuperman: It’s hard to get people to show up on the day of the election because there’s a sense that nothing changes, and that feeling that you can’t fight city hall, even though city hall is just our union.
But I think people are ready for change. It’s a question of whether they believe they can make it possible. There is that sense of that’s not up to us, that it’s not our role somehow.
Lindsay Paiva: Many people said that before I talked to them, they were not going to vote. They didn’t think it mattered. I’ve tried to have as many conversations as possible to help folks know it is possible. You don’t have to give up. We can make a change. It might not be immediate - it’s going to be gradual. Turnout is a little tricky. The election takes place over three hours in person and one day only.
The election is at the Juanita Sanchez Educational Complex from 3-6 pm on Wednesday, May 14th.
Steve Ahlquist: Is there enough parking? If 1600 people were to show up for the election, that would be tough...
Lindsay Paiva: That would be great. Eighty-eight people voted in the last election.
Steve Ahlquist: Wow.
Lindsay Paiva: And there is no minimum.
Steve Ahlquist: That’s about 5% of members...
Anna Kuperman: We need people to come out.
Lindsay Paiva: The hope is that we can get a good turnout.
Anna Kuperman: People don’t think there’s space for change.
Lindsay Paiva: Current leadership has said that folks are tired, so we shouldn’t pressure them to be in more spaces or to do more. We think folks would be less tired if we had more rights, and if we fight a little bit harder right now, we can get better conditions. Then people won’t be as exhausted.
Steve Ahlquist: Maybe they’re not tired, just uninvolved because they don’t believe.
Lindsay Paiva: Getting involved or seeing a pathway forward is hard.
Anna Kuperman: We are discouraged from getting involved because leading a larger organization of people and more voices is harder.
Lindsay Paiva: That’s not to say it’s easy work to engage more folks. It isn’t easy, but overall, that will make us stronger. And we’ve seen wins in other spaces. The more involved the rank and file are, the better the contracts and the bigger the wins. There’s so much possibility in Providence. People must see a path toward what could work and believe it’s possible.
That’s our hope. Regardless of how things go, this election isn’t the end-all be-all. We will keep organizing and collectively pushing for what we know is right. We hope that if we can get a few voices onto a board, we can bring some of that to the leadership space and flip some of the approaches because we believe more is possible.
As the administration builds more top-down structures to intimidate and threaten us and create more administrative positions to hold us accountable, our vision is to build more collective power to push back from the grassroots.
Principals are under a lot of pressure; they are fearful and intimidated, which trickles down to teachers. We have to meet that with a wave of defense.
Steve Ahlquist: You have a union. You should be able to be somewhat less fearful because you have the protections of a union to say, "You just can’t fire me without cause. I’m a good teacher. I can be mouthy outside the classroom."
Lindsay Paiva: What is happening to the union, too, is that there’s been an uptick in administrative leaves. They’re doubling down on writing teachers up and burying the union in paperwork. We’re not unsympathetic, but we need to double down and inundate them with paperwork from the bottom up - grievances and other documentation, but, most importantly, coordinated and member-driven action.
We hope to match that energy in a collective, action-oriented way.
PVD CORE is united around
the principles of member-driven unionism;
transparency & accountability;
community control of public schools;
a strong contract; and
equitable education for all students, including: students of color, multilingual learners, LGBTQ+ students, and students receiving special education services.