This article describes what it means to be a comprehensive teachers union, one that integrates industrial unionism, professional unionism, and social justice unionism, providing a historical context for this evolution. The author relates his own journey in becoming a union organizer and then in building public spaces for teachers to find their…

Public K-12 education in the United States is distinctively a local affair: school districts are governed by local boards of education, composed of lay members typically elected in non-partisan elections. These boards have decision-making power over hundreds of billions of public dollars and oversee complex agencies that, in addition to preparing…

Employing an institutional logics framework and critical discourse analysis, this study examines the discourse of participants in a stakeholder-feedback meeting about a proposal by the Denver Public School board to extend collective bargaining rights to teachers in the district's innovation schools. The findings provide insight into the logics…

This article examines how teacher collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), teacher salaries, and class sizes changed during the Great Recession. Using a district-level data set of California teacher CBAs that includes measures of subarea contract strength and salaries from 2005-2006 and 2011-2012 tied to district-level longitudinal data, we…

This article analyses the narratives and counter-narratives which characterised the struggle between the Chicago Public School Board (CPS) and the Chicago Teachers' Union (CTU) preceding the 2019 Chicago teachers' strike. This was an extraordinary event which has received little scholarly attention. The paper explores the types and uses of the…

This case study examines the intersection of rural education, new leadership, and supervising teachers when a power imbalance exists. Using a real-life example of supervision and professional interactions, this case study focuses future administrators on the real-life conflicts inherent in supervision and employee rights. The case study examines…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the priority level of the roles and responsibilities of the superintendent/principal in Illinois as perceived by board of education presidents, teachers' union presidents, and practicing superintendent/principals in the 102 Illinois school districts utilizing the superintendent/principal model.…

This paper examines the effects of declining student enrolment and population loss on one rural school district in the United States, as well as the district's strategies to mitigate these effects. In the state of Wisconsin, the relationship between student enrolment and school funding destabilises rural school districts experiencing population…

It all started when the author's daughter, also a Madison teacher, called her. "We need to call people to the rally at the Capitol." That Sunday rally in Capitol Square was just the first step in the massive protests against Governor Scott Walker's infamous "budget repair bill." The Madison teachers' union declared a "work…

This case study analyzes controversial teacher evaluation policies in the context of collective bargaining. Dr. Jill Abrams, a new superintendent in a struggling school district, is at the center of the case. Her school board demands a form of teacher evaluation she finds problematic because it includes value-added modeling. Moreover, the board…

Often considered harmonious places, rural communities are in reality spaces often fragmented along class lines, with political factions promoting competing values and interests regarding the purpose of schooling. Using an exemplar case, this study affords us a new interpretation of rural school-community relations in times of conflict. It…

This article examines the legal and political significance of teacher unionization in rural and suburban school districts between 1960 and 1975. While most historians focus on the growth of unions in urban areas, strikes in outlying districts played a determinative role in the development of public sector labor law, particularly in the arbitration…

Background: Via the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA), stronger accountability proponents are now knocking on the doors of the colleges of education that prepare teachers and, many argue, prepare teachers ineffectively. This is raising questions about how effective and necessary teacher education programs indeed are. While research…

School superintendents have many roles, and being responsible for collective bargaining is one of those roles in states where collective bargaining is mandatory. This role has changed over the years, and it varies from school district to school district. As teacher associations and unions have increased in number and strength, superintendents and…

Purpose: This study examines policies set in the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) negotiated between teachers' unions and school boards and explores what kinds of districts have contract provisions that restrict district administrators, enhance administrative flexibility, and/or improve teachers' professional work lives and that have…