Class ends. Students pack up and head back to their dorms. The professor, meanwhile, goes to her car . . . to catch a little sleep, and then eat a cheeseburger in her lap before driving across the city to a different university to teach another, wholly different class. All for a paycheck that, once prep and grading are factored in, barely reaches…

For nearly two decades teachers unions and charter schools have defined the major points of conflict over school reform, forming an "us vs. them" narrative that pits one against the other. By design, charter schools are free from many state and district regulations--including collective bargaining agreements. And when students enroll in…

In recent years, states have sought to increase accountability for public school teachers by implementing a package of reforms centered on high-stakes evaluation systems. We examine the effect of these reforms on the supply and quality of new teachers. Leveraging variation across states and time, we find that accountability reforms reduced the…

With the national focus in education turning to increasing student achievement and closing achievement gaps between demographic groups, federal and state policy has extended responsibility and high stakes accountability for student growth and achievement. Overall, student achievement status and elimination of achievement gaps between…

In four decades of teaching college English, the author has watched many good teaching jobs morph into second-class ones. Worse, she has seen the memory and then the expectation of teaching jobs with decent status, security, and salary depart along with principles and collegiality. To help reverse this downward spiral, she contends that what is…

Background/Context: Faculty unionization is an important topic in modern higher education, but the history of the phenomenon has not yet been fully considered. This article brings together issues of professionalization and unionization and provides needed historical background to ongoing unionization efforts and debates. Purpose/Objective/Research…

Randall Eberts explores the role of teachers unions in public education. He focuses particularly on how collective bargaining agreements shape the delivery of educational services, how unions affect both student achievement and the cost of providing quality education, and how they support educational reform efforts. Eberts's synthesis of the…

African teachers in general and South Africans in particular face tremendous challenges, several of which are curriculum related. These challenges manifest themselves at various levels and in various areas, that is, from national level to within the classroom. There are various role players who may make a contribution towards overcoming these…