Becky Pringle took the reins of the nation’s largest teachers’ union six years ago, in the teeth of the pandemic.
“She touched people’s lives at a time when we couldn’t touch each other,” said Kim Anderson, the 2.8 million member National Education Association’s executive director, who credited Pringle with ramping up the national union’s support and training for local leaders in advocacy and teacher healthcare.
Pringle joined the NEA in 1981 as an 8th grade science teacher, and has worked with the national union for 30 years. During her tenure, the union has fought to build membership amid increasing state restrictions on unions following a 2018 Supreme Court ruling barring unions from collecting fees from nonmembers covered in collective bargaining.
As she nears the end of her second and final three-year term as president of the NEA at the end of August, Pringle called for teachers to persevere in a “season of cruelty and chaos, division, and despair.”
Pringle spoke exclusively with Education Week to discuss how her union and the teaching profession have changed during her tenure.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your tenure started during school disruptions, and ends amid broad legislative change and dismantling of the federal Education Department. How has this affected your leadership?
The change has been constant. We couldn’t anticipate the compounding impact of the pandemic. Society is splintering; divisions didn’t just happen in our schools, they happened everywhere: offices, churches, everywhere. We’re conscious about unity and reaching across [divisions] and having conversations about even difficult matters, the inequities that are built into every system that affect our kids.
Everything is changing every day, every second. During the Biden administration, when we had a partner, we knew what we needed to ask for. ... And then when Trump came in, ... now there’s so much that we have to fight against. We have to literally protect kids, literally protect LGBTQ+ kids. We find ourselves fighting back against all of these things, filing lawsuits, getting in the rooms. But we can’t just fight against, we have to fight for them. So we know we have to change tactics.
How have you adjusted to the diminished support at the federal level?
That’s an understatement. They are attacking us. Under [President Joe] Biden, we did all that work to address the student loan situation ... and predatory lenders, where [teachers] owed more after paying on their loan for 10 years than they started with ... and then when Trump came in, all those resources [through now-defunct loan forgiveness programs] went away.
We’re doing the best we can to work with Congress, ... to try to get some legislation passed.
We’ve focused on the state and the local levels, where we have state legislatures and governors who work with us. We’re trying to help them fill the [federal funding] gap and make sure they don’t buy in to the federal voucher programs where even more money is being taken out of public schools.
That’s where our focus is right now—even as we’re focused on winning the election, because at the end of the day, we have to change what’s happening at the federal room. And it’s going to take a while.
You have said the NEA needs to move from ‘mobilizing to continuous organizing.’ How does the union’s structure need to change to do that?
We had to change. We are the largest labor union in the country: 14,000 locals, 51 state affiliates, and almost 3 million members. We have a lot of power, but it’s not what it needs to be for us to not just to fight off, but to fight for. We’ve got to align resources.
It’s not that national doesn’t have a big role to play, but as we’ve adopted our new budget and made changes in our existing work, we have made sure that our resources, money, time, and people are going to the local level. As a national union, that is a change that we need.
We are making sure that we have union leaders in every building, and we’re meeting them in whatever their passion is, whether it’s racial and social justice, professional issues, or whether it is traditional union and community work.
You’ve pointed to NEA’s work on artificial intelligence policies as an example of this.
When we started our AI work, we knew we needed to partner with folks who were deep into that work. This is technology; it’s not going away, so we need to impact it. We had to train teachers. We set up a suite of micro-credentials on AI for our teachers to get certified.
We are an organization steeped in the North star of racial and social justice. We know that ... all the algorithms that are created that we know have biases built in because the people developing them are not representative of our kids. ... In every conversation I have, I lift that we have to address the fact that there’re inequities built into this system, let alone how you’re deploying the resources.
What needs to happen to increase the supply of future teachers?
The educator shortage is not only that we’re not getting college students to go [into teaching]; in some places and in some groups retention is the largest piece of the problem. I’ve talked with aspiring educators throughout the convention, and they’re so excited to go into teaching ... [but] they get in and then they realize, ‘I love it, but I can’t start a family and I can’t get [childcare] at home.’ I can’t do any of those things [because they don’t earn enough]. And so the pipeline is going out of the door again.
And, as always, it disproportionately affects our teachers of color. Our Black teachers are leaving at a higher rate because they come into the profession with higher debt.
Many teachers have become deeply concerned about immigration enforcement in and around schools. How do you help teachers navigate this safely?
We started with teachers knowing their own rights. [Teachers] need to know what to do, how to navigate all the things, but it starts with that protection. So we’ve been doing trainings for two years, ... [on] knowing your rights, how you can intervene or what’s protected in terms of how you behave and interact with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], and how you get help right away.
I spoke about this with our state leaders and one of the teachers who got detained, early on, and ... the first call he made was to the union president. bbecause he knew his union had the connections and knew what to do to help. We’ve built networks all over the country because we didn’t know how to do this; we’ve had to learn from each other.
