The work unions do in providing and supporting learning for their members rarely makes the news headlines, but it will be essential if people are to engage those workers who most need to acquire new and better skills to cope in the economic downturn. In this article, the author talks about the power in a union and describes UNISON, a comparatively…

Advocates of unions frequently argue that unionization results in benefits for libraries in general and for librarians. Previous data to support this position have been scattered, incomplete, and inconclusive. This study analyzes data on 1,904 academic libraries, 334 unionized, to explore whether there is a relationship between a librarian-union…

The teacher research movement in Chile has, historically, been an expression of the profession's concerns with the ways in which schooling reproduces and produces the social order in the broader society. The work currently done by members of the union's Pedagogical Movement is described, showing the connections between the scope of problems…

Everyone agrees that teacher evaluations are broken. So how can states and school districts fix them? This guide proposes six design standards that any rigorous and fair evaluation system should meet. It offers states and school districts a blueprint for better evaluations that can help every teacher thrive in the classroom--and give every student…

Education research convincingly shows that teacher quality is the most important "schooling" factor influencing student achievement. A very good teacher as opposed to a very bad one can make as much as a "full year's" difference in learning growth for students. Indeed, the effect of increases in teacher quality swamps the impact of any other…

The president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Randi Weingarten, is putting the sensitive issue of due process on the education reform table, with a pledge to work with districts to streamline the often-cumbersome procedures for dismissing teachers who fail to improve their performance after receiving help and support. She has also…

States significantly increased buy-in from local teachers' unions in round two of the Race to the Top competition, but made far less progress in enlisting districts or expanding the number of students affected by the states' education reform plans. Those patterns emerged from an "Education Week" analysis of applications from 29 states…

Faculty unions are a prominent, though a comparatively recent, feature of American higher education. Today, a vast majority of community colleges have a unionized faculty. A number of researchers in the 1970s speculated that the presence of unions signaled the end of collegial shared governance and that interactions between administrators and…

In comparing one public school to another, discussions frequently include talk concerning the socio economics of a school or district, which then leads to talk about the advantages that one socioeconomic setting has over another. Educators tend to agree that low academic achievement frequently associated with a low socioeconomic status is a…

This volume contains selected papers submitted to the 17th Annual International Conference of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society (BCES) held in June 2019 in Pomorie, Bulgaria. The 17th BCES Conference theme is "Glocal Education in Practice: Teaching, Researching, and Citizenship." Some selected papers submitted to the…

Every day, 14 retired teachers and other school employees arrive at the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers' headquarters and go to work for Hillary Rodham Clinton. The retirees--working with volunteers and union staff members from as far away as Alaska--are working to inform teachers' union members why the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)…

For fiscal year 2010, Congress appropriated $14.5 billion for Title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), which funds services to students in schools with high concentrations of students from low-income families. Title I, Part A includes several fiscal requirements, which are designed to prevent local school…

In this article, the authors explore the following questions: How have Americans actually responded to these developments? Have they grown more supportive of the current direction of school reform, or are there instead signs of a backlash? And how do the views of teachers compare to those of the public at large? In addition to the views of the…

In an era of intense state and federal accountability for teaching and student learning, school principals face noteworthy challenges which typically work against recommending contract non-renewal for teachers. School principals confront tremendous pressure from state and federal accountability legislation to produce evidence of student learning…

Current and former leaders of many major urban school districts, including Washington, D.C.'s Michelle Rhee and New Orleans' Paul Vallas, have sought to use tests to evaluate teachers. In fact, the use of high-stakes standardized tests to evaluate teacher performance in the manner of value-added measurement (VAM) has become one of the cornerstones…