Earlier, I mentioned Julia Steiny’s contribution to the belated march of red flags throughout the Providence Journal. Steiny’s piece is interesting because she attempts to draw a line through the ranks of teachers:

… in the shrill, righteous rhetoric, sometimes screamed by both the left and the right, teachers are lumped together as if they are a homogenous group, with the same interests. Good teachers deserve far better. Academically, they’re the best allies of the kids. Fiscally, they’re our best buy.

Steiny elides the fact that the teachers have effectively assented to this treatment by, first, joining together into a collective and, second, failing to exhibit deep differences of opinion among themselves. It isn’t really fair to fault the “righteous rhetoric” when educators present a unified face.
To be sure, Steiny notes that in “pay-to-play states, teachers can refuse to join” unions, but “payback for bucking the union can be ferocious.” How much more ferocious things must be in states, like Rhode Island, in which union membership is compulsory. Indeed, I wonder whether it’s possible to go from there to a “right to work” scenario in which teachers have a right to form unions but also a right not to participate in them, as Steiny suggests. In Rhode Island, the unions are already formed, which means that teachers would have to break away one by one. That sounds like a recipe for a divided workforce devoting far too much behind-the-scenes energy to the labor battle.
It’s actually surprising that Steiny doesn’t agree, given other observations in her article:

Unions are private-sector businesses with leaders that make fat six-figure salaries. If they do not give their teachers good customer service, state laws should not keep them in business. A pot of compulsory dues allows unions to ignore dissenting rank and file and use the money to, for example, fight much-needed reforms to professionalize hiring, or to weed out bad teachers, or to extend the school day (which every charter school has already done). Unions cling to hiring by seniority with a death grip, even though it is clearly detrimental to education.

Surely, Steiny has had some taste of the tactics that such vested interests will use against those who speak against them. Is that a battle that we want to impose on our best educators?
For their part, they’ve arguably already proven their disinclination for the fight by failing to speak out already.