Abstract
Teacher unions — also known as federations, associations, and teachers’ professional organizations — are part of the educational landscape of many countries. The extent to which they have made substantive contributions to educational policy-making corresponds to the authority teachers have had, historically, to shape the terms of their own practice. Recently, as public educational governance has been radically altered in many jurisdictions, teachers’ organizations — and teachers themselves — have been further sidelined from influencing educational policy directions (Bascia, 1999; MacLellan, 2002). In Britain and New Zealand, for example, teachers’ organizations were essentially outlawed when the sweeping reforms of the past decade and a half significantly changed the locus of educational decision-making. Though they have returned, their influence and roles are not the same as they had been. Several Canadian provinces have recently reduced teacher association purview and membership rights. In the U.S., public relations between policy makers and teachers’ organizations seems to have recently fallen to an all-time low as the federal Secretary of Education called one of the two national teachers’ unions a “terrorist organization.” Beyond this, currently prevalent policy directions — centrally-driven large-scale reforms that emphasize standards for teaching and learning and accompanying accountability mechanisms — de facto challenge organized teachers’ participation in shaping policy and practice by enshrining what had previously been negotiable in central legislation.
This chapter is drawn from a longer report of the same name produced for the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy at the University of Washington (Document R-03-1), June 2003, and funded by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) of the U.S. Department of Education. Additional research was supported by the National Education Association in the U.S., the Connaught Fund of the University of Toronto, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. The author wishes to thank Ann Lieberman and Julia Koppich for their thoughtful comments on the longer report
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Alister Cumming
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Bascia, N. (2005). Triage or Tapestry? Teacher Unions’ Work in an Era of Systemic Reform. In: Bascia, N., Cumming, A., Datnow, A., Leithwood, K., Livingstone, D. (eds) International Handbook of Educational Policy. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3201-3_30
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