Of all the recent budget cuts made by the Eagle County, Colorado, school district, none sparked as much anger or faced the same scrutiny as the decision to cut three foreign-language teaching positions and replace them with online instruction. At a spring school board meeting, supporters of the targeted programs in French and German, as well as…

This paper presents the highlights of a conference entitled "Advancing Student Achievement through Labor-Management Collaboration" held in Denver, Colorado last February 15-16, 2011. This first-of-its-kind conference on labor-management collaboration is a historic effort to transform the relationships among local superintendents, school…

In February 2011, the U.S. Department of Education (ED)--along with co-sponsors from the American Association of School Administrators, the American Federation of Teachers, the Council of the Great City Schools, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the National Education Association, and the National School Boards Association--brought…

This book demonstrates through case studies and expert analyses the impressive educational gains children can make when the best educational research, policy, and practice are aligned. This volume is a valuable resource to aspiring leaders, educational researchers, and current practitioners and a must-read for anyone who cares about the public…

The purpose of this bulletin is to describe the current status of proposals for formalizing negotiation procedures between teachers and their boards of education, indicating some potential trends. The entire issue of collective negotiation by teachers remains of relatively recent origin in terms of interest on a national scale, and the directions…

This study tests the fit of competing models of strike causes on a sample of public school districts in New York. The models are based on differing assumptions. One is that strikes are the result of mistakes or imperfect information; the other is that strikes are rational choices made in expectation of gain. The differences in these views are…

This paper reports a survey of the attitudes of school personnel toward teacher unions and draws some implications concerning the dynamics of labor relations in school systems. Teachers, principals, superintendents, and school board members responded to questions on what areas unions should be involved in, degree of satisfaction with the local,…

As faculty and other public sector unions become more sophisticated in collective bargaining, they tend to lay a greater variety of demands on the table. This, in turn, forces the employer to ask, Do I really have to bargain about these subjects? As more employers refuse to bargain, more unions charge them with failing to bargain in good faith,…

Drawing on survey data from 83 New York school districts and case studies of 6 districts, the project reported here explores several aspects of schools and districts as organizations. The conceptual framework guiding the study emphasizes that educational organizations are not governed either by their structure or by the reactions of individuals,…