In 2019, Poland experienced a massive teachers' strike that lasted three weeks. Although the strike had a great impact on many teachers, in the end, this three-week action failed to obtain any of its demands. Using the concepts of workers' associational power and union legitimacy, I argue that one of the reasons for the loss was a crisis of…

Between 2011 and 2015, at the dawn of the global financial crisis, Spain went through severe austerity measures that led to social unrest and to the emergence of new expressions of collective action. In the educational field, teachers' unions and grassroots movements organised against the neoliberal and neoconservative policies promoted by the…

Teacher unions are working in challenging times. Building power is important for teacher unions to resist neoliberal reforms that have aimed to restructure school education and weaken collective organisation. Yet we have few understandings of the democratisation project that teacher unions have engaged in to build and renew internal power in this…

This article will explain how a series of educator strikes in 2022 in Ghana led to increased awareness of and calls for tax justice and debt relief from a growing movement of public sector workers and civil society organisations. We chart how the issues and demands of teacher organisations and other public sector workers shifted and increased over…

Teacher unrest is an important research object in the literature on teacher unionism in Latin America. This article makes a novel contribution to this traditional topic, presenting statistical data on primary and secondary teacher strikes in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico from 2012 to 2022. This approach highlights important differences in strike…

The 'demand for justice' is a long-standing principle of Oaxaca's Sección 22 union chapter, which has led a teachers' movement since the 1970s that has evolved to meet changing social, political, and economic circumstances. Various researchers around the globe have increasingly linked notions of justice with education, exploring terms like social…

Labour strife in the education sector in Ontario has repeatedly highlighted the precariousness of certain types of teaching and learning that are delivered under the catch-all designation extracurricular. This paper reviews education legislation in Ontario over the past 40 years that has impacted teachers' right to strike; examines how teacher…

The three articles that comprise this dissertation examine different ways that current teachers can express leadership outside of their classrooms, through labor activity and within-school instructional leadership. I use descriptive and quasi-experimental quantitative analysis to examine which teachers take on these roles, their effectiveness, the…

Unions have played a decisive role in promoting democracy and social justice in Tunisia. In 2023, two teacher unions led a yearlong 'silent strike' of withholding student marks from administration. Based on interviews with 60 teachers, this article analyses teacher views on the unions and on ongoing protests. While unions are still considered the…

In 2018, a wave of educator strikes called Red for Ed swept through several states. Educators in Arizona won additional funding from the state legislature, supposedly for teacher salaries, which school boards could spend as they chose. This article quantitatively examines the participation and results of the 2018 Arizona educator strike, using…

In 2018, West Virginia teachers staged a statewide strike which lasted almost two weeks and included schools across all 55 countywide districts. The main reported strike issues for West Virginia teachers included cuts to their healthcare coverage by the state and relatively low salaries. Prior to the strike, West Virginia teachers ranked 48th in…

Teacher strikes have gained national attention with the "#RedforEd" movement. Such strikes are polarizing events that could serve to elevate education as a political priority or cast education politics in a negative light. We investigate this empirically by collecting original panel data on U.S. teacher strikes, which we link to…

In "The Teacher Insurgency," Leo Casey addresses how the unexpected wave of recent teacher strikes has had a dramatic impact on American public education, teacher unions, and the larger labor movement. Casey explains how this uprising was not only born out of opposition to government policies that underfunded public schools and…

The 50-State Comparison on teacher employment contract policies provides a national comparison of teacher employment contract policies in all states. All of the information was gathered from and focused on state statutes and regulations. State case law was also utilized for metrics related to collective bargaining. Data collection focused…

In this paper, the 2019 Polish Teachers Strike (PTS), joined by 75 percent of all public schools and kindergartens for over three weeks, gives rise to an investigation in teacher professionalism that is grounded in local activism. Reading the Polish Teacher Strike (PTS) as a moment of social upheaval (Buchowski, 2017), I claim that the strike…