New Leader Pushes Teachers’ Union to Take On Social Justice Role
Becky Pringle, the country’s top Black labor leader, has plunged the National Education Association into the reckoning unfolding in public schools.
Dec. 12, 2021
PHILADELPHIA — Becky Pringle was racing through her hometown to her fourth event one day in September when her staff alerted her to a looming controversy.
Fox News was preparing to publish emails between the White House and officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, showing that the C.D.C. had continued to advise masking in schools last spring out of fear of a public showdown with Ms. Pringle, the head of the nation’s largest teachers’ union and the highest-ranking Black labor leader in the country.
The story seemed to affirm the most fervent criticism of her union, the National Education Association, in recent months — that it had too much control over school reopening decisions during the coronavirus pandemic and was wielding outsize influence in the Biden administration. Ms. Pringle shrugged it off with a single-sentence tweet: “It’s no secret we want to keep our students and schools safe.”
Under President Biden, teachers’ unions have re-emerged as power players in shaping federal education policy after largely being sidelined during the Trump administration. The N.E.A., in particular, has enjoyed increased visibility: Jill Biden, the first lady and a longtime educator, is a member. On the same day the Fox story published, Mr. Biden, during remarks honoring labor unions, slipped in a joke that in the minds of critics has taken on a double meaning: “I sleep with an N.E.A. member every night,” he said.
Ms. Pringle’s favor in the White House reflects a turning point for the N.E.A. The three-million-member organization is normally overshadowed by its counterpart, the American Federation of Teachers, even though it has nearly twice as many members. Because the A.F.T. represents many of the nation’s large, urban school districts, it has long wielded considerable power in Washington. At the same time, its lack of term limits has made its high-profile leaders more like monarchs — its current president, Randi Weingarten, has served for 13 years.
Ms. Pringle quietly ascended via Zoom in September 2020 to her three-year term as president of the N.E.A. Since then, she has been unapologetic about the fact that she has “leaned into” the union’s new spotlight. She has often proclaimed that Mr. Biden has drawn from the “N.E.A. playbook” to shape policy goals, like prioritizing teachers for vaccination and securing record levels of school funding in Covid relief legislation.
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Ms. Pringle, left, during a tour of the Philadelphia High School for Girls, her alma mater. When she was a student, her counselor cautioned her that math and science might be “really hard” majors.Credit...Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York Times
And she has no regrets about the union’s influence in conditioning school reopenings on more safety measures, including the C.D.C. guidance, and resources that would stretch beyond the pandemic. “There’s no way to know how many lives were saved,” Ms. Pringle said, “but I do know this for sure: The things that we have now, we would not have if we hadn’t fought for it.”
But some political observers predict that Mr. Biden’s close relationship with the teachers’ unions could backfire.
“I don’t think the unions are playing well when we’re seeing urban and suburban parents not particularly happy about what’s been happening in schools the last 18 months,” said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.
What motivates Ms. Pringle, she said, is a longtime need that is ever more pressing now: to “reclaim public education as a common good, and transform it into something it was never designed to be: racially and socially just, and equitable.”
She sees both the pandemic, which exposed gross inequities that have plagued the nation’s education system for decades, and the presidency of Mr. Biden, who has pledged to make equity a cornerstone of his policymaking, as opportunities to achieve that goal.
