The article provides a global picture of school social work in 2021 using data gathered by the International Network for School Social Work. School social work is a growing specialty around the world. There are school social workers practicing in more than 50 countries. School social workers support students' educational success, especially those…

Purpose: This paper aims to demonstrate how the Nordic model, featuring highly regulated trade union-employer collaboration, has enabled the building of learning organizations through a co-generative learning model involving both practitioners and action researchers. Design/methodology/approach: A literature search on the Nordic sociotechnical…

The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMA), a public research university, has demonstrated a long-standing commitment to improving working conditions for non-tenure track faculty (NTTF) with a 20-year track record of progressive policies to improve the support for them. This commitment is manifested through a series of improvements in policies,…

Purpose: This paper aims to describe how the human resources development (HRD) policy has shifted from the national level to the sectoral levels; the paper also explains the changes that have been made in skills formation in the economy by presenting the emergence of Industry Skills Councils (ISC). Design/methodology/approach: This paper presents…

In recent years, issues pertaining to graduate student union organizing have been at the center of several political battles and court cases. This attention is, at least in part, due to the growth of graduate student unions at a time when organized labor's influence is receding in other, more traditionally unionized sectors of the labor force. As…

In this article, Shital Shah, who supports community schools as assistant director for educational issues at the American Federation of Teachers, and Natasha Capers, a coordinator for the New York City Coalition for Educational Justice (CEJ), a parent-led collaborative of unions and community organizations, discuss the community schools movement…

Advanced manufacturing is growing and thriving in the United States. Companies are in great need of reliable employees who can communicate well, effectively make decisions, and are interested in long-term careers with opportunity for advancement. Employers have identified a need for a more robust talent pipeline to narrow America's skills gap--a…

Chicago has long been one of the national epicenters for public school reform. In many ways the reform efforts of the past decade in the Windy City have served as the blueprint for the current focus of federal education priorities. In particular, federal policy for school turnaround and transformation takes clear cues from the efforts that current…

The adult basic education field in the United States has experienced an ebb and flow of interest and investment in "worker education" over the past three decades. Although the rhetoric around workplace basic skills tends to focus on such outcomes as productivity and competitiveness, some proponents of worker basic education see it as a…

The literature on teachers' unions is relatively silent about the role of union strength in affecting important outcomes, due in large part to the difficulty in measuring union strength. In this article, we illustrate a method for obtaining valid, reliable, and replicable measures of union strength through the use of a Partial Independence Item…

To receive School Improvement Grant (SIG) funding, districts must submit an application to the state that outlines their strategic plan to implement one of four intervention models in their persistently lowest-achieving schools. The four intervention models include: (1) School Closure; (2) Restart; (3) Turnaround; and (4) Transformation. The…

This article traces the history of union involvement in learning and skills policy from the neo-corporatism of the 1960s and 1970s through the voluntarism of the 1980s and 1990s to the present "post-voluntary" era. It sets out the political background against which the development of union learning representatives can be contextualised.…

Over the past decade, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) in Maryland has focused on improving teacher capacity as a strategy to address achievement gaps and promote "college-ready" standards in what has become an "urban suburb" with significant pockets of high-need students. As part of this focus on quality teaching, the…

This article presents a principal-agent model in the context of public schools to help explain the use of merit pay for teachers. The model considers how both the nature of teaching and the political costs of union resistance affect school district merit pay decisions. Our results support the idea that merit pay is more likely in environments…

Discusses the deficiencies of search engines and the importance of metadata and examines three models of metadata retrieval: distributed; distributed data with a centralized index; and centralized union catalog. Highlights include the Z39.50 protocol; the OAI (Open Archives Initiative) protocol; virtual union catalogs; and a pan-European model.…