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This article presents the dossier, "Work in higher education", composed of 10 articles and discusses the changes that have taken place in the Brazilian labor world since the parliamentary, media and judicial coup that took place in 2016. It considers the hypothesis that one of the central goals of the coup was precisely the attack on work, in distributive sense of income, and also in the organizational sense of social and workers movements. It analyzes the legislation approved in the period -- Law 13.429/2017 and Law 13.467/2017 -- which has led to a sharp setback in the rights enshrined in the 1988 Constitution, and critically lists the main consequences of this legislation for workers such as unemployment, increased turnover, decrease in wages, reduction of recourses to labor justice and, consequently, increased mockery of protective social legislation at work, weakening of trade union organization and greater suffering at work in general. In the end, it develops the impacts of these changes on the work carried out in higher education institutions.

The prevalence of labour disruptions in the Canadian education sector requires a comprehensive analysis of the adverse implications of strikes for stakeholders and Canadian society in general. Education is a kind of public good that generates positive externalities and strikes in Canadian universities and colleges engender negative externalities as manifested in the infliction of psychological and financial harms on students who become hostages to the hostility between unions and academic administrators. The overriding interests of students, families, faculty, educational institutions, and the broader community necessitate that impasses in collective bargaining negotiations be resolved without resorting to strike. Therefore, there are compelling, justifiable grounds to consider integrating compulsory binding arbitration in collective bargaining agreements as a mechanism to tackle and resolve impasses in collective bargaining negotiations in the higher education sector.

Analyzing the development of the "New Orleans Black Worker Organizing History" digital humanities timeline, this case study addresses the inevitability of transient partnerships between students and community members, while pushing back on the notion of "authentic relationships" in service learning. Embracing the ephemerality of service-learning projects, I focus more on intentional strategies that can lead to transformative learning experiences and help to create a more even playing field in knowledge production. I link critical service learning with feminist pedagogy to offer collaborative strategies that better leverage resources to bridge campus and community.

This study combines critical service learning (Mitchell, 2008) and antioppressive pedagogies (Kumashiro, 2002) to highlight the importance of using community sites aimed toward transformational social change. How sites are structured and how students are positioned influence what students learn from the experience. Using ethnographic methods, I analyze experiences of college service learners working with a labor union to illustrate how activist-oriented organizations are fundamental to providing critical spaces of learning and social change.

This case study provides the background for a discussion of the bankruptcy of a composite non-profit corporation under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code, and the possible alternatives available to bankruptcy. Topics considered include: reorganizations, the selection of a bankruptcy trustee or an examiner, duties of a non-profit board, the automatic stay, aspects of the creation and confirmation of the bankruptcy plan, priority of creditors, termination of employment contracts for tenured and non-tenured faculty and those faculty represented by a union, at-will employment, and Title IX implications for any bankruptcy filing. The case study then turns to a discussion of options and perspectives available in the case that bankruptcy under Chapter 11 is not seen as a viable or practical alternative. Could the real target of restructuring and cost cutting be academic tenure?

We analyse changes in the collective identity that Sweden's largest labour union for teachers had during the period 1990-2017. The study is based on theory about how collective identity is constructed in adaptation and resistance to external categorical dimensions and internal group identification. We identify shifts in relation to how the union employ different aspects on teachers' recognition, emotional engagement, and evaluation. Two clear cut-off points can be identified. The first point, which is clearly related to the impact of political reforms, took place in 2000 and is about increased demands with respect to transparency, legality, equality, efficiency, and attainment results. The second point took place in 2015, a year when Sweden confronted a new set of social challenges. The teaching profession was re-launched as a moral agent and in need of a trust-based steering approach.

The United States is rare among nations in its highly decentralized process for negotiating collective bargaining agreements with local teachers' unions. To determine whether partisanship can predict these highly localized decisions, I construct an original database of Pennsylvania collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) merged with publicly available voter registration records to predict the presence of high-profile contract items. Using spatial autoregression and probit regression, I reveal that the partisanship of a school district is a significant predictor for fewer seniority protections but not for lower salaries. These partisan relationships can guide both district administrators and union leaders in future negotiations.

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 discourses put forward in the struggle through the lens of Nancy Fraser's 'politics of needs interpretation'. Fraser's framework was conceived and is typically applied to social welfare policy, so this paper provides a new perspective and understanding of its theoretical application in its examination of competing educational claims. Analysing key CPS and CTU texts which are in the public domain, I argue that different actors in the struggle competed for ownership of an expert discourse on student need in Chicago. The paper draws attention to the way a teachers' union consciously used social movement framing to foreground an inclusive view of the working class. The CTU's refusal to accept the dominant conceptualisation of education as performativity was an assertion of teacher professionalism. Placing the social reproductive needs of their students and families at the centre of their demands for better education provision in Chicago was a radical reimagining of education. In conclusion, Fraser's theory is found to be a helpful tool when considering who has the legitimate authority to determine education needs.

In the current South African society, characterised by typical neo-liberal market-driven priorities also forced upon the education sector, the search for quality education needs careful consideration. This search has taken a prominent focus in robust academic, public, political, and school governance debates in South Africa for the past 2 decades. Officials of the Department of Basic Education (DBE) admit that, despite noteworthy efforts, it fails in providing quality education for all learners. Key stakeholders in education neglect their professional duties. This paper investigates factors related to (dominating) structure and (a lack of) agency that might be deterrents to attainment of quality education. Bureaucratic and labour structures often deny professional educators their agency. The central question is what the nature of the impact, if any, of the conflicting powers of structure and agency is on quality public education. It was found that the conflict between structure and agency often have a negative effect on the delivery of quality education but that the advantages of both structure and agency, once reconciled, might lead to the improvement of the delivery of quality education in South Africa.

Low-fee private schools (LFPS) have grown considerably in the developing world as public free primary education has been unable to cater to the poorest children. Bridge International Academies (BIA), one of the largest chains of LFPS, has positioned itself as a solution to issues of access and quality of primary education. Using newspaper articles from Kenya and Uganda, this paper examines public discourse of BIA through the lens of cultural political economy, or how public discourse can influence variation, selection and retention regarding LFPS. After exploring scholarship to understand the justifications and impacts of LFPS, this paper finds that justifications are present in public discourse while impacts are not. Therefore, public discourse has given voice and promoted the need for improvements, with LFPS as an option, but that discourse (and scholarship) has yet to emphasize LFPS as a real solution, due to inconclusive evidence and ongoing battles with governments.

The study examined the relationship between activities of trade unions and management of tertiary institutions in a bid to provide empirical solution to the lingering industrial actions by the staff unions in various tertiary institutions in Nigeria. The population comprises all tertiary institutions in Ekiti State, Nigeria. Four hundred and fifty subjects consisted of 390 members of unions that were selected using proportionate sampling techniques and 60 top management staff of the selected institutions was selected purposively. Two self-designed instruments namely, "Trade Unions and management of Tertiary Institutions Questionnaire" (TUMTIQ) and "Management of Tertiary Institutions Questionnaire (MTIQ)" were used to collect relevant data from the subjects. The researchers and another expert in educational management and test and measurement did the face and content validity. In addition, the test-retest method of reliability was adopted with a reliability coefficient of 0.66 and 0.72 respectively. The data collected were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics and the three hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study revealed that there was a significant relationship between activities of trade unions and leadership style of management of tertiary institutions. The study also showed that there was a significant relationship between trade unions' dissatisfaction with conditions of service and management of tertiary institutions. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended that management of tertiary institutions should adopt a leadership style that is all-inclusive through a participatory system of management. Government should also provide funding for management to enhance conditions of service in the form of a better pay package, in-service training, overseas trips and their welfare packages for staff.

Professional educators--in the classroom, library, counseling center, or anywhere in between--share one overarching goal: ensuring all students receive the rich, well-rounded education they need to be productive, engaged citizens. In this regular feature, we explore the work of professional educators--their accomplishments and their challenges--so that the lessons they have learned can benefit students across the country. After all, listening to the professionals who do this work every day is a blueprint for success.

Teacher leadership is vital to student success, with research finding positive connections between student achievement and teacher leadership and collaboration. While teacher leadership is certainly not a new idea, it is increasingly important in the nation's current climate to ensure students are taught in environments that are focused on their needs rather than on the ideas of far-removed politicians and policymakers, or those who have little experience in public education. Since 2011, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Teacher Leaders Program (TLP) has helped prepare educators (typically teachers) to facilitate discussions of policy issues that impact the profession both locally and nationally. The program has brought together and coached cohorts of teachers to take active leadership roles in their individual schools, school districts, and local communities. As teacher leaders, these educators have served as catalysts to build the profession and strengthen not just the union but also its connection to the community, in order to generate support for and better understanding of public schools. This article describes how the Teacher Leaders Program works and discusses the role and importance of peer-to-peer leaders, school-level leaders, and system leaders, respectively.

Public school teachers around the country are engaged in strikes. They walked out of their classrooms and schools to gain attention from state legislators, and not just for better salaries and benefits for themselves (although most Americans agree that teachers need better pay). Teachers are calling attention to a sticky problem in American public education funding: long-term inequitable distribution of funding that predictably falls along racial lines. Maryland, just like every other state, faces this kind of inequity. For example, the state has consistently underfunded Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPSS) in violation of their constitutional definition of adequacy, upheld by the courts multiple times. The funding inequity dates back to the Jim Crow period, during which Blacks paid taxes in Maryland but received nothing in return to fund their schools. For many years, the Baltimore Teachers Union (BTU) argued for more funding and increased salaries for its members. It was so committed to the latter that it negotiated a contract that included merit pay. Neoliberal school reform advocates across the country hailed the 2010 contract that promoted school choice as "progressive." However, many teachers were unhappy with this contract negotiation and thought it ignored many of the issues that were important to teachers. This discontent was not lost on a small group of teachers who decided to come together informally. They began by learning. They read common texts, visited union caucuses in other cities (e.g., Caucus of Rank and File Educators in Chicago), and regularly discussed their vision for Baltimore schools. Through this process, they built durable relationships with each other, reached out to others, and began to identify leaders among them. This group called themselves BMORE (Baltimore Movement of Rank and File Educators). [Co-written with the BMORE Caucus.]

On October 16, 1963, author James Baldwin delivered his well-known "A Talk to Teachers" in which he argued that the United States was "desperately menaced . . . from within" (p. 325) by centuries of racialized cruelty. In his speech, Baldwin (1985) implored educators to "go for broke" (p. 325) in their attempts to address the racism operating not only in their classrooms but in the very fabric of U.S. society. Speaking at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Baldwin addressed New York City teachers who witnessed the active desegregation of schools across the country and the ongoing fight for racial justice in voting, housing, and employment. Yet 56 years later, Baldwin's call to action is regrettably just as relevant to the modern educator. Our schools remain racially and economically segregated (EdBuild, 2019; Orfield, Frankenberg, Ee, & Kuscera, 2014; Reardon & Owens, 2014) and racial injustices permeate our contemporary sociopolitical reality (Edwards, Lee, & Esposito, 2019; McKernan, Ratcliffe, Steuerle, & Zhang, 2013; Nellis, 2016; Shapiro, Meschede, & Osoro, 2013). Many educators in the current era, however, are breathing new life into Baldwin's charge that teachers commit themselves to fight for racial justice. In this essay, we highlight one important example of that fight, the Black Lives Matter at School National Week of Action. Entering its fourth year, we first contextualize this growing movement by discussing the historically problematic position held by teachers' unions on issues of race before situating the National Week of Action within the current wave of social justice unionism. We then share our work as organizers of the higher education outreach for the National Week of Action and call on higher education faculty members and unions to join the fight.

The last few decades have seen increasing attacks on educators' right to participate in formal unions. Given the all-time low of formal union power in the United States and the success of anti-union efforts (Shelton, 2017), how and why have the educator uprisings manifested so intensely in the last few years? This article draws, in part, on a larger interview study the authors conducted with more than two dozen organizers of the 2018 red-state strikes in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona. Interviews took place immediately after the strikes and, again, one year later. The authors draw on key examples from the red-state strikes, as well as historical studies of education labor, to offer two distinct yet overlapping lenses through which the resurgence of educator militancy might be understood. Their first lens centers the rise of social movement unionism in the last few decades in tension with the historical and ongoing predominance of (anti-union) professionalist orientations to the work of teaching (Peterson & Charney, 1999). Their second lens centers the rise of rank-and-file-led solidarity associations--or what they term solidarity unionism. This approach exists in tension with business or service unionist approaches that privilege centralized, hierarchical leadership, and decision-making. Key examples are offered that illuminate these tensions and movements and suggest the importance of understanding the local and situated specificities of each struggle. Through mobilizing critical bifocality, the authors aim to understand how broader histories and political movements shape the terrain of local contemporary educator movements and vice versa.

This paper draws on the concepts of settled expectations and the educational racial contract to provide an analysis of the current social movements calling for the improvement of teacher salaries and work conditions in K-12 schools. This paper argues that some teacher unions' lack of centering race in their advocacy to ameliorate educational inequities will not radically transform how teachers are treated in the profession, unless there is an increase in motivation to fully recognize the humanity and educational needs of Students of Color in American society. The author calls for teacher activists to reject the false consciousness of their own settled expectations and work on equal footing with Communities of Color to co-author an emancipatory educational contract on the basis of relational equity, respect, and sympathetic touch.

This article draws from the concept of precarious employment to better understand the working conditions of teachers of adult English as an additional language (EAL) learners in Canada. I examine previously published research on the employment situations of this group of educators, drawing from data that have been gathered using interviews and surveys with teachers of adult English language and literacy learners over the past two decades. The findings of the review suggest that precarious employment in the form of part-time and temporary work, low wages, unpaid work hours, and multiple job holding is pervasive in this sector and that such conditions have persisted for decades. I propose that approaches developed in labour studies can assist in generating a better understanding of the ways that work insecurity affects these teachers' lives and pedagogical practices and suggest directions for further research into the intersections of working conditions and quality of education in this field. In particular, I suggest that precarious employment is produced by language and immigration policy frameworks and funding models and is linked to teacher and student identities. The article concludes by considering ways in which stakeholders can challenge employment insecurity and its associated precarity.

This article examines how teachers unions affect teachers' well-being under various legal institutions. Using a district-teacher matched data set, this study identifies the union effects by three approaches. First, I contrast teacher outcomes across different state laws toward unions. Second, I compare the union-nonunion differentials within the same legal environment, using multilevel models and propensity score matching. Finally, unexpected legal changes restricting the collective bargaining of teachers in four states form a natural experiment, allowing me to use the difference-in-difference estimation to identify the causal effect of weakening unionism on teacher outcomes. I find that (a) many teachers join unions even when bargaining is rarely or never available, and meet-and-confer or union membership rate affects teachers' lives in the absence of a bargaining contract; (b) how unions influence teacher outcomes vary greatly by different legal environment; and (c) the changes in public policy limiting teachers' bargaining rights significantly decrease teacher compensation.

Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with 17 teacher educators and normal school students in Oaxaca, Mexico, this article examines a particular teaching formation rooted in the concept of lucha, revolutionary struggle. Participants described how, during their four years at a normal school, they learn, rehearse, and internalize a historical set of revolutionary scripts and strategies, as part of a political role they will perform as teachers. The post-1968 generation of teachers in this study recalled learning to fight in the 1970s and 80s, in an era of great opposition to the Mexican government and national union, while the younger generation described learning how to advocate for themselves so that they can create change in their communities. The study demonstrates how teacher training can explicitly cultivate new teachers' capacities to operate as political actors, in opposition to standardized and apolitical professional models.

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 estimate difference-in-difference models to examine bargaining outcomes for districts that should have been more or less fiscally constrained. We find that unions and administrators change critical elements of CBAs and district policy during times of fiscal duress. This includes increasing class sizes, reducing instructional time, and lowering base salaries to relieve financial pressures and negotiating increased protections for teachers in areas with less direct financial implications, including grievance procedures and nonteaching duties.

Since the late nineteenth century, teachers have come together to found associations and unions in Europe and beyond. Drawing on oral histories, primary and secondary documents, and media reports, this paper delves into this rich historical background, leading to the founding of Education International in 1993. In particular it explores the relationships and tensions within and between these predecessor organizations, as well as the ways in which they interacted with the larger political forces of their times. Education International is now a significant organization, representing teachers and related workers situated across 178 countries. This paper attempts to provide a critical historical background for the development of this institution.

This research investigates whether teachers' unions influence student academic achievement in Southern states that prohibit collective bargaining. Our data are from the School and Staffing Survey and the Stanford Education Data Archive. We measure the strength of teachers' unions by union membership rate and meet-and-confer status of a district and employ a multilevel mixed-effects model to control for unobservable common characteristics of districts within each state. We find that teachers' unions have a significantly positive association with student test scores, in both math and English, particularly for Hispanic and Black students. This positive link of unions with math is concentrated on the low- and mid-socioeconomic status (SES) districts but is detected across all SES for English.

In the wake of the 2007 housing crash and subsequent economic recession, state legislatures across the country faced substantial declines in revenues, and by 2011, for the first time in more than a decade, average spending on education declined. However, states' budgetary responses to the Great Recession were decidedly uneven, with some making lasting cuts to public education. This article uses longitudinal data on state-level educational spending, politics, demographics, economic well-being, and a unique set of union strength indicators to assess the strength of teachers' unions as advocates for education spending by examining their role in states' varied budgetary responses to the Great Recession. We find that states with laws prohibiting collective bargaining for teachers and states with lower union dues per teacher made substantially larger cuts to overall educational expenditures, even after controlling for time-invariant state characteristics, secular trends, and an extensive set of time-variant state-level covariates.

Purpose: This article examines the relationship between teacher unionization and the academic performance of students in districts of varying socioeconomic status (SES). We aim to answer the following research questions: Do union effects vary with the SES of districts? Are these effects more (or less) pronounced in high-SES, mid-SES, or low-SES districts? Research Methods/Approach: We merge two nationally representative data sets from the United States: the School and Staffing Survey and the Stanford Education Data Archive. We measure union strength with the presence of collective bargaining contracts (CB) or meet-and-confer agreements (MC). We employ propensity score matching. Considering CB (MC) as a treatment, we define districts with CB (MC) as the treated units and no agreement districts as the nontreated units. Findings: We find that middle-class districts with CB agreements had higher average test scores, in all grades and both math and English, than did districts with similar propensity scores but no CB agreement in place. Neither low-SES nor high-SES districts exhibited significant effects of CB on math or English scores. The pattern in MC effects is quite similar. MC agreements are correlated with higher scores in both subjects in all grades in middle-class districts. Implications: Our results indicate generally positive effects of teachers' unions on student performance on standardized tests. Moreover, these positive effects are concentrated in middle-class US school districts. A decline in the ability of teachers to organize may therefore have differentially negative effects on the outcomes of students in these districts.

The Intermediate System of schooling, which operated in Ireland between 1878 and 1922, has, generally, been considered limited in ambition and as having generated a culture of high-stake terminal examinations. This article seeks a more nuanced understanding of the system and proposes that, despite an evolving system of secondary provision in Ireland prior to 1878, the Intermediate System provided an armature for a national system, prompted the awakening identity of the secondary teaching profession, stimulated the evolution of the teaching body in terms of trades union activity and initial teacher education; and, despite its many defects, provided increasing numbers of pupils with access to post-primary schooling in Ireland in the early decades of the twentieth century.

This paper is one of two which bring together leading educational researchers to consider some of the key challenges facing democracy and education during the twenty-first century, including rising social and economic inequality, political instability, and the existential threats of global pandemics and climate change. In this paper, key educational scholar-activists respond to the challenges and possibilities for democracy and education, with consideration of the importance of reimagining education as being for democracy. The questions asked in this paper have particular salience for educational leaders, who must be at the centre of any commitment to democratic education.

Because charter school principals are granted more autonomy and discretion than principals of traditional public schools, it is imperative to search for the attributes of principals that may improve charter school performance. This study examines the relationship between principals' collective bargaining and charter school effectiveness. Using propensity score matching based on the "School and Staffing Survey," I find that principals' unionization is positively and significantly associated with charter school performance. I also identify potential mechanisms through which principals' unionization influences charter schools: higher pay and better working conditions for principals, more formal principal evaluation, and more informal teacher evaluation.

Despite decades of Equal Opportunity legislation, gender inequality persists in Australian universities. This is largely due to the shaping of universities by new market principles, discourses of individualisation that render the asymmetry of gender relations invisible, and privileging masculine epistemologies. Concurrently, industrial relations have been decentralised, and individual universities negotiate staff pay and working conditions through local Enterprise Bargaining (EB). Whilst EB mitigates the development of a national gender-equity framework for universities, trade unions operating through inequality regimes rarely prioritised gender equity even when they did lead national negotiations. Therefore, within a context of complex inequalities in higher education and trade unions, this paper explores how feminist pedagogies can facilitate equality bargaining and gender equality in academia. It also suggests that equality bargaining is especially important during (current) times of austerity when the removal of gender-equality support structures within trade unions generally occur.