The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has lost several of its most prominent leaders over the past decade. It has struggled with scandals at major locals. An internal survey showed low morale among its own employees. The union itself insists it is still very much on the path blazed by Albert Shanker, the AFT's late, legendary president, under…

Plainly, part-time/adjunct faculty members now play a vital role in educating the nation's college students. Even so, the data and research on part-time/adjunct faculty members have tended to be pretty spotty. This survey, conducted by Hart Research Associates on behalf of the American Federation of Teachers, is one of the first nationwide…

This monograph appears midway through the development of a book on the future of teaching, scheduled for publication in the fall of 2010. The book is a team effort, undertaken by 12 accomplished educators from across the United States, who have agreed to systematically study and speculate about public education and the teaching profession in the…

In this article, the author explores some particularly "luminous" paradoxes that have emerged from qualitative material gathered as part of an ethnographic study carried out over the last five years. The research, now a doctoral study, grew initially out of the author's own contradictory experiences of running learning provision in the…

It was the kind of crisis most universities dread. In November 2006, a group of minority student leaders at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) threatened to sue the university if administrators did not heed demands that included providing more funding for multicultural student groups. This article discusses how this threat…

Some four decades after the advent of collective bargaining in public education, the labor agreements it has produced now touch virtually all aspects of school district operations, from how teachers are paid and assigned to how they can be evaluated, how or whether they can be disciplined or fired, when and where they complete professional…

Of the cadre of non-educators--business leaders, military men, government officials, lawyers--who have been called on to transform large urban school districts in recent years, Paul Vallas has been at it the longest and, in the minds of many, is the one with the best track record. Since 1995, he has tackled the third- and eighth-largest districts…

The author traces the history of the campaign to stop Islington Green School being closed and turned into an academy specialising in business and financial services. Although the campaign, after a number of successes now looks as if it might fail in its immediate objective, the author argues that the battle was still worth fighting because of the…

A study investigated the perceptions workers had of labor unions. Affiliation behavior and gender differences were employed as independent variables with respect to workers' attributions of trustworthiness in labor unions and their messages, as measured by the three dimensions of character, expertise, and dynamism of the Giffin Trust Differential…

This monograph examines the development of the substantive and procedural law regulating union discipline of members. Chapter 1 presents a brief introduction and describes the organization of the rest of the booklet. Chapter 2 discusses the state courts' intervention into union disciplinary proceedings and then examines the substantive rules that…

This report reviews briefly some advantages and disadvantages of collective bargaining in higher education. Advantages discussed include: efficiency, equality of power, legal force, impasse resolution, communication, understanding the institution, resolution of individual problems, definition of policy, rights guarantee, faculty compensation,…

Faculty unions have become a reality on many college campuses. This paper examines some of the objections of the public and college administrators toward faculty unions. Public criticism usually centers on the possible increased costs of education generated by union demands, while the college management complains that union grievance and other…

Discusses how unions with strong leadership training can help workers with their problems and describes the education needs of union members. Describes typical union policies for workers' education, as well as essential features of a workers' education program. Covers curriculum development and long-range planning. (CH)

Examined the conditions under which union members were willing to support their union in a conflict. Hypothesized that readiness to support union action is a function of the individual's estimates of costs and benefits. Anticipated costs and benefits of a collective, social, and material nature accounted for the variance. (Author/ABB)

Describes programs sponsored by labor unions that provide postsecondary educational opportunities to their members. (GC)