By Charles Taylor Kerchner, Claremont Graduate University

With the assistance of William Hariu and DeLacy Ganley

June 28, 2000

Although often referred to as "professional unionism," the set of practices that represent the frontiers of teacher unionism reflect the values and traditions of craft and artistic work as well as the traditional professions (Kerchner and Koppich 1993). The guild and craft traditions, which preceded industrial organization, considered workers as members of communities. Even today craft unions wield control through apprenticeship and job placement programs. In most craft situations, development and enforcement of standards have become part of what unions do. White collar unions, such as engineers (Kuhn 1970) set standards, and so too did waitresses in a now-disbanded union. As Cobble (1991) reports, in the case of waitress unions, women assumed responsibility for "management" tasks such as hiring and discharge of employees, the mediation of on-the-job disputes, and the assurance of fair supervision. "In a sense workers in the culinary industry had instituted a form of self-management" (p. 426).

It is somewhat ironic that teacher unions remain one of the strongest advocates for the very system whose managerial excesses and rigid rules they sought to tame with collective bargaining. Part of the irony can be explained by the fact that schools, despite heavy borrowing from the scientific management movement, never were factories. Despite their bell schedules and thick policy documents, there is more than a little truth to the teacher refrain "that I'm in charge when the classroom door is closed." In the industrial sense, schools are always incomplete bureaucracies. School organizations are almost always incapable of operating on a literal command and control basis. Still, the logic of industrial organization created a clear division between work creation and control and task execution. Under industrial bureaucracy, codified into industrial labor relations, managers asserted control over the content and design of teaching. In labor relations terms, these were management's reserved rights and not mandatory subjects of bargaining, and frequently law and custom excluded the content of teaching from the bargaining process altogether. The idea of organizing teachers around the craft, artistic, and professional dimensions of their jobs joins discussions of teacher unionism to the larger topic of post-Fordist work places. Strictly interpreted, industrial organization would hold teachers responsible only for the faithful reproduction of lesson plans and classroom routines developed elsewhere. Invention, creativity, and spontaneity would not be required or expected and sometimes not even well tolerated.

It was always assumed that organizing in a post-industrial environment would induce the birth of a new work environment, just as the movement from craft to mass manufacturing changed work. The optimistic or romantic view has been that hierarchy would die of its own weight and that more flexible, high-commitment, and skill-embedded work would emerge relatively naturally and without major conflict (Fox 1974a, Fox 1974b, Piorie 1984, Lawler 1992). Instead, it is easy to observe the rise and application of Fordist work controls in what have been traditionally free-standing, self-organizing professions, such as medicine and law, and the distinction between core and periphery work forces in the emerging high-tech industries.

Recent experiences in U.S. health care illustrate the problem (Kerchner and Abbott 1999). Formerly free-standing professionals, approximately half of U.S. physicians now work for managed care organizations and 9 out of 10 have at least one managed care contract. New physicians report high levels of dissatisfaction with their occupation. In a recent survey, 94 percent of young physicians said they were unhappy with their jobs and would not again undergo the years of rigorous training necessary to become a doctor (Gilkey 1999). In July 1999, the American Medical Association voted to establish a national collective bargaining unit. This decision immediately affected about 17% of the nations doctors who are salaried employees and are now able to unionize under the National Labor Relations Act (Klein 1999).

Even the white-hot Internet and high technology industry has failed to develop the kinds of work places envisaged for it. As Fast Company, new economy's most popular journal, laments the new economy was supposed to be about unlimited opportunity and democracy in the work place, but it is also about "economic inequality, rampant opportunism in the marketplace, and a troubling disconnect between unreal financial rewards and any individual's real contribution and effort" (Editorial 2000, p. 166). The same economic practices that created thousands of Microsoft millionaires has also created cleavage between core workers and peripheral contract workers, so-called "microserfs" (Coupland 1996). As Fast Company notes, "Excess and exploitation can undermine even the most robust period of economic growth and wealth creation."

Thus, in many respects, this most glittering example of the new economy is not producing the new work place. In contrast, teaching and teacher unions are starting to substantively redesign how teachers work.

Departures from industrial organizing have been documented in a series of case studies and collections (Kerchner and Koppich 1993). Most recently, data has been collected on those union locals who belong to the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN), which is a network of locals belonging to the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers. TURN locals by no means represent the totality of union reform examples, and there is no encyclopedic compendium of union reforms in the United States, but TURN locals are certainly among those with the longest experience and deepest reforms.

A quick overview of the contents of reform can be seen in Figure 1, which reports the content of collective bargaining contract language in unions that are members of TURN. The left-hand column lists the city and state where the school district is located (the official name of the school district sometimes varies) and the national affiliation of the teacher's union in that city. The remaining columns indicate different post-industrial areas of teacher work life covered in those union contracts, including shared decision-making, peer assistance and review, professional development, parent involvement, alternatives to the conventional compensation system, charter and pilot schools, low performing schools, uses of time, and learning standards.

When changes in traditional teacher unionism started to be noticed in the 1980s, shared decision making and budget allocation became one of the first objects of change. School-based management and shared decision making schemes were started by a number of districts, and as Figure 1 shows, these practices continue in some form. But school-based management proved to be more difficult and less enduring than its advocates had thought.

The simple notion that just eliminating bureaucracy would spur large advances in educational reform proved wrong. In many cases, school-site management fell apart because of an inability of school-based committees to reach decisions; process paralysis it was called (Malen 1990, 1992). Field investigators returned with stories of schools that spent a year discussing the conditions under which a student could be punished for an infraction of school rules, and—in an often-recounted story—one school in Los Angeles spent a year discussing who would have access to the photocopy machine.

Decentralized operations also fell victim to external circumstance. In Miami-Dade County, Florida, a Bureau of Professionalism was established to oversee reform initiatives, but it collapsed in the wake of financial cutbacks during the recession of the early 1990s. Elaborate training programs were cut back, and an application process involving school planning and consensus building fell by the wayside. All schools were simply declared site managed. Increasingly, the designation has come to mean relatively little.

Both the AFT and NEA have participated in efforts to create national standards through membership in the New Standards Project, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, and other bodies. The AFT has made standards the key to its quality schools strategy. Its Task Force on Redesigning Low Performing Schools has created an intervention strategy for low performing schools that includes indicators of low performance as well as materials, procedures and established school-wide improvement strategies (Task Force, 1998). At the same time, local unions provide compelling examples of enactment of standards, and they suggest why such activity is difficult.

Because the United States has no official national curriculum, the idea of establishing country-wide performance and content standards has been contentious. The AFT has made standards the key to its quality schools strategy. Its argument has been that judging school progress is impossible without explicit standards, and that school reform without reference to student achievement is impossible. The pressure for standards comes simultaneously with increased use of external tests to measure achievement and to publicly rank schools. In many states, these tests have taken on a "high stakes" characteristic, determining whether a student graduates from secondary school, for example, or whether they are eligible for admission to colleges and universities.

The existence of state standards and testing regimes has led to direct state intervention in school operations in those schools whose student test scores fall far below performance targets. Various forms of intervention have allowed either the local school district or the state education agency to assume direct control of the schools, sometimes voiding all or part of the teacher labor contracts. Some of these organizational shock treatments have been substantive; others have been little more than slight-of-hand. In San Francisco, for example, "reconstituted" schools reported increased test scores, but failed to mention that part of reconstitution meant enrolling different students than the school had previously attracted.

Because education is a prerogative of the states, each state maintains machinery for initial teacher licensing. But the country has never had a national system of board certification of experienced teachers, something roughly analogous to board certification in the medical specialties. Along with U.S. Presidents from both parties, the National School Boards Association and virtually every professional and academic society, the NEA and AFT have endorsed the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which was founded in 1986 to create rigorous and practice-based examinations for experienced teachers. Some 22 subject specialties have been developed and are being offered. The examinations themselves recognize the contextual character of teaching and thus largely involve artifacts from a teacher's own classes including portfolios of lessons and student work, videotapes of the teacher at work, self assessment, and peer evaluation. The National Board is supported by both public and private funds. It has 63-board members, the majority of whom are teachers.

The numbers of board certified teachers are still small: about 5,000 out of a teaching work force of over 2 million. However, each year sees a significant increase in the numbers of teachers who are responding to incentives to undergo the two-year examination process. In 2000, more than 9,500 teachers applied. Both national teacher unions have supported legislation to encourage teachers to become certified, and many local unions have bargained salary incentives for board certification. Numerous states and localities—often with private foundation support—have adopted fee supports, created salary supplements, allowed license portability, or made provision for board certification to count toward license renewal or continuing education units. Collective bargaining allows schools to link monetary incentives to board certification. In New York City, a board certified teacher qualifies for a salary differential of approximately $3,700, in Cincinnati $1,000, in Rochester, NY, $1,500. Minneapolis, Hammond, Indiana, and other cities advance board-certified teachers in the regular salary schedule. In Chicago, the union supports training and fees of 20 candidates for board certification.

Board certification is important in its own right, but the influence of the board's methodology—teacher evaluation based on demonstrated practice rather than university credit hours alone—is already having an influence in other domains. The same set of ideas that created National Board assessments is beginning to be applied to novice teachers. Districts and unions are beginning to consider using the types of evaluative mechanisms and standards developed by the National Board in internal district teacher evaluations. The methodology of board certification and the process of peer review evaluation and renewal are beginning to support one another.

Peer review is a powerful demonstration of how teachers create knowledge of their own practice. In the 50 or so school districts that have enacted it, peer review brings higher standards to teaching. It significantly changes the conception of teaching work by recognizing the importance of engagement and commitment as well as skill and technique. It recognizes a legitimate role for teachers in establishing and enforcing standards in their own occupation. For unions, it represents both a radical departure from established industrial norms and a rediscovery of traditional craft and guild union functions. Under peer review, the union's role balances protection of individual teachers with the protection of teaching. As Albert Fondy, president of the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers, notes, "a union is not conceived with the primary mission of protecting the least competent of its members" (Kerchner and Koppich 1993, p. 48).

Peer review started in 1981 when the Toledo, Ohio, schools and the Toledo Federation of Teachers added a one-sentence clause to the contract by which teachers agreed to police the ranks of their veterans in return for the right to review new teachers. Since then, peer review has spread among progressive districts and both the AFT and NEA now support peer review, the latter having changed its position in an historic policy shift in 1997. Interest in peer review has increased in the wake of the NEA's policy change. In May 1998, a peer review conference sponsored by the Columbus, Ohio, local drew more than 500 participants from 30 states (Bradley 1998). Among the districts with active peer review programs are: Seattle, Washington, Columbus, Ohio, Rochester, New York, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Hammond, Indiana, and Poway, California. In 1999, the California legislature authorized peer review statewide and provided economic incentives for those districts and unions that adopted it.

Union and management support for the measure was lukewarm at best. Obviously, it is still controversial in many quarters, but as Rochester Teachers Association president Adam Urbanski says, "Peer review is only controversial where it hasn't been tried" (Kerchner and Koppich 1993).

What is called "the standard single salary schedule" is one of the most ubiquitous organizational characteristics of public schools. Both in the 37 states where teachers are allowed to bargain contracts and in 13 where they are not, teachers are paid according to the amount of education they have and the number of years of service in the district (Odden and Kelley 1996). Although unions are frequently credited or blamed for the lack of linkage between pay and performance, the salary schedule traces its origins to civil service and its universal application to the post-World War II enrollment boom. It became necessary for school districts to attract women by paying them as much as male teachers, who had previously been paid more. While education and years of service may in some rough way equate to expertise, the system ignores any relationship between salary and effectiveness.

Nonetheless, departures from the standard single salary schedule have remained on the "undiscussable" list for most unions, and indeed for most schools. Unions fear the rise of managerial favoritism in setting salaries as well as the problems of discontent among members who find themselves paid differently for reasons that are not easily explainable. A few unions have begun to discuss alternatives. Most unions offer additional stipends for extra assignments, so that deviation from the salary schedule is not considered particularly novel.

Most recently, the union and the district in the 44,000- student Cincinnati, Ohio, public schools have negotiated a significant departure from the basic pay pattern. Under an agreement, which still must be ratified by union members, teachers will advance through five career levels that are aligned to teaching standards. Teachers can move through the schedule at their own pace. There are penalties for not moving, however. Teachers who do not move out of the novice or apprentice levels within specified periods would not have their contracts renewed. In addition, more experienced teachers can be reduced in career stage by negative ratings, and those who did not improve would be fired. The new system was largely designed by teachers, and it was field-tested in 10 schools during the 1999-2000 school year (Blair 2000).

Almost all unions involve themselves in some kind of teacher professional development: some modest, some substantial and highly integrated with the district. Interestingly, it is often the union rather than the school district leaders that provides the continuity to keep a professional development project alive. For example, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Miami-Dade County (Florida) Public Schools witnessed five changes of superintendents, along with rapid demographic changes in its student body, a recession, and a devastating hurricane. The set of staff development programs negotiated with the United Teachers of Dade survived these tough times (some with substantial modification) and continue today because they have both an anchor in negotiated agreements and continuing union leadership (Phillips 1993).

If done well, the union connection to professional development creates a powerful systemic effect connecting professional development to training and induction, assessment of schools and teachers, the curriculum, and the salary schedule. The Minneapolis and New York City public schools offer particularly good examples of a long-term working relationship that has increasingly focused on student standards and achievement.

The Minneapolis process illustrates effects of gradually building and deepening the relationship between management and labor. Begun in 1984 with a joint Labor/Management Task Force on Teacher Professionalism, the process spawned a mentor teacher program and five years later a new teacher evaluation process. The professional development program, which is administered by a joint district-union panel, links professional education to how teachers gain tenure in the district, their pay, and teacher support and evaluation.

In New York City, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the school system collaborate in creating staff development that is embedded in the schools and in the work days of teachers. More than 220 teacher specialists staff professional development teacher centers in schools. Through the centers, these teachers deliver classroom coaching and mentoring and direct assistance with school-adopted interventions, such as Success for All. A substantial number of the teacher specialists have received intensive workshop training in the New Standards Project, whose work has been adopted by the school district. They are the means of transmission for turning New Standards from rhetoric to reality.

Embedded staff development was spurred by the increased attention being given to standards and accountability. Some 97 New York City schools are on the state chancellor's list of schools on academic probation. Both the union and the district needed a way to intervene in these schools and in others in danger of placement on the probation list. Providing high quality professional development in schools was one of the responses, one that the UFT endorses and a program it operates. Embedded staff development is particularly well developed in Community School District 2, which includes a widely diverse economic swath in central Manhattan.

UFT staff members point to a paradigm shift within the union to focus on outcomes and instruction. Interestingly, union staff teachers appear to be treating professional development as an entitlement under the contract rather than a mandated duty.

Just as one can observe and enumerate examples of union organizing around educational quality and student achievement, any observer would be forced to note that teacher union organizing outside of its industrial origins has not spread rapidly. Both national unions exhibit tentativeness about how departures from industrial unionism should proceed. In the late 1980s, the AFT promoted site-based management and school decentralization as the keystones of organizational reform only to abandon the effort in favor of a strong emphasis on standards and the adoption of a limited number of coherent reform strategies. The NEA's New Unionism was supposed to ignite a bubbling pot of locally initiated reforms, but the evidence from the first years illustrates the difficulties of moving forward. AFT and NEA locals associated with the Teacher Union Reform Network have undertaken many of the boldest reforms, including those described in this chapter. But TURN comprises fewer than 25 locals, and even its members struggle with how far and how fast to go. In sum, union reform appears to have little of the momentum that characterized the growth of collective bargaining in the 1960s and 1970s. Without a driving force behind it, the new unionism is likely to remain not only new but novel.

• existing cultures of teachers and school administrators,
• the organization of unions themselves,
• the array of political forces in education,
• and the ways in which culture, organizational capacity, and educational politics are embedded in public policy.

Much has been made of the recalcitrance of unions, and indeed there is delicious irony in the fact that teacher unions, which organized in opposition to the authority system of public education, should be the fiercest defender of the system against alternative ways of delivering schooling. However, for the most part union leaders are reflecting their members' views. Unlike many policy activists, teachers do not believe that public education is facing a large institutional tranformation or that schooling needs to change in major ways. We are told that polls done by the unions themselves show that teachers want help with problems of student achievement, but that they do not particularly associate their unions with this function. Indeed, teachers who work at charter schools seem disassociated with the union and public education altogether (Koppich 1998). Younger teachers are more likely than veterans to see a need for change, but they rarely associate their union with such activity. Older teachers, who are often on union representative councils, see relatively less need for change. These beliefs percolate upwards in the unions. Teachers from small towns and comfortable suburbs outweigh and out vote the cities and poverty belts where public education faces its most visible challenges.

In addition, union staff and school administrators, though often opponents at the bargaining table, are frequently united in their embrace of the hierarchical management logically paired with industrial unionism. By word and deed, most school administrators believe that a union's voice needs to be made as quiet as possible and the scope of negotiations restricted to teachers' economic interests. Although the American Association of School Administrators has sponsored some efforts in "joint team" training, unions are not generally thought of as a partner in educational reform. A majority of union staff probably believes the same. It is not uncommon to hear comments such as, "we just want to represent teachers; we've no interest in running the district. We've got plenty to do just keeping an eye on those principals who won't live by the contract. This a big enough job in itself."

Moreover, there is a belief that unions can't organize around reform. Despite polls and focus groups showing that teachers are frustrated by their lack of success in the classroom, union staff and officers report great difficulty getting teachers to support reform ideas and to work actively to advance them. The emotional pull, the elemental anger, that allows teachers to organize against school administrators is harder to tap when leaders try to get teachers to organize around quality. The assertion that taking charge of quality is a union's role is dulled by a history of a highly individualized and restricted view of teaching, what one observer called "shallow professionalism." In this occupational worldview, the union is a mechanism to get administrators to leave teachers alone, insulating them behind the closed classroom door. Within this belief system, messages that teachers organize to enforce standards in schools, be responsible for weeding out bad teachers, and take charge of reform are not always well received (NFIE 1996; Kerchner and Koppich 1998).

More than a decade ago, Kerchner and Mitchell (1988) observed what they called generational behavior in teachers' unions, different eras of ideological belief, each separated by revolutionary struggles for control of teacher union locals and corresponding turnovers in school administrators. Teacher union officers and staff who lead change often face substantial opposition from their members and contenders for their positions. Union staffs are divided between those who support a new identity and those who oppose it. At issue are both changes in unionism as a belief system and unionization, a way of getting organized. Embrace of the educational quality agenda represents a generational change that has not yet played out as either belief or organizational reality.

Even if unions want to get organized around craft, artistic, or professional work motifs, it is still an open question whether they can pull it off. Again, contrary to the ways in which unions are portrayed, unions have small staffs and generally modest budgets. A recent field visit to a mid-sized city union revealed a picture of a union office with a professional staff of seven people compared with a school district housed in a central office building of seven stories. Clearly, questions of joint operations between unions and school districts are compromised by the union's organizational capacity.

The capacity question is not simply a matter of staff; it's what the staff knows how to do. Most union staff gained their positions because they were good organizers or good advocates, not because they were especially skilled at day-to-day operations. These people are generally better at rocking boats than steering them. Organizing—a core union skill—requires motivating people to action usually for a short period of time: a political campaign, a strike, a representation election or some other episodic event.

Unions are less well organized for the "steady work" of education, creating and spreading a curriculum, professional development, or the actual operation of schools. Their core purpose is to represent people doing the work of schooling, not getting the work itself done.

Much of the reforms of the 1980s involved unions taking what is called joint custody of reform (Kerchner and Koppich 1993). In many cases, these efforts stretched the unions beyond their reasonable capacity to deliver. The problem was not in the ability to reach a collective bargaining agreement that dealt with reform. But converting the agreement into action was extremely difficult: the details of implementation seem to swamp organizations. Ironically, these implementation problems seem to swamp school districts also. But school districts had difficulty delivering on reform for different reasons than unions. School districts, particularly urban ones where most of the inventive locals operate, suffer from high degrees of instability at the top. Superintendents turn over rapidly. Fiscal relationships are precarious. And there are frequent interventions from the outside. In political realm, the union is often the most stable player.

Union reform is also made difficult by the array of forces in educational politics. While it is true that teacher unions are formidable friends or enemies in political battles, they are much less monolithic and much more vulnerable than commonly believed.

For decades, the NEA and AFT have discussed merger. The days when they could profit from organizing against one another have passed, and the occasional raiding parties into districts organized by one or the other have proved increasingly expensive and unproductive. In recent years, an explicit merger plan was developed, and in 1998 it was put to a vote by delegates of each union. Despite the urging of its popular president, Bob Chase, the NEA failed to ratify the statement of principles for merger, and national merger talks have been effectively abandoned for the near term. Some states, however, continue to work on merger. Minnesota and North Dakota have merged their teacher unions; Florida is set to follow.

The lack of agreement about merger is also reflected in the general lack of agreement about the correctness and necessity of linking unions and educational reform. NEA president Chase has championed a "new unionism" but there is no consensus about what it means and no agenda for bringing it about. And although there are many small experiments with expanding the scope and substance of labor relations, there is yet to be anything approaching a sweeping vision. The AFT has strongly endorsed standards and made some hard calls on how to fix low performing schools. But labor relations in some of the nation's toughest urban school districts remain unproductive even as political forces gather to radically reform and restructure the districts.

Internal fractiousness effects the ability to respond to an increasingly harsh external political environment. In 37 states, unions face Republican governors,many of whom were raised in a political culture in which very little good was said about public education and nothing at all good was said about unions. Unlike Republican office holders in the post-World War II generation, contemporary incumbents do not see organized labor as serving an institutional function for either the country or their states. Some governors have pointedly positioned themselves as opponents of teacher unions.

Within the cities, unions face additional political pressure. Big city mayors have become educational activists. Some, such as Milwaukee mayor John O. Norquist, who set up charter schools under city rather than school district control, explicitly say that they can't attract the middle-class back to the city unless the schools perform better. "People were leaving for the suburbs because the quality of public schools, and that's not acceptable" (White 1999, p. 34). Other mayors simply look covetously at the slice of local tax revenues going to schools. In these local political situations, teacher unions and public schools have lost some allies. African-American politicians, traditionally supporters of public school reforms, have become increasingly doubtful of the system's ability to right itself and increasingly looking at quasi-market alternatives.

In addition to weakness among public officials and political parties, unions are disadvantaged by the rise in popularity of populist politics on both the right and left. Community control of schools, which can have either right- or left-wing origins, is as much an enemy of the status quo as educational vouchers.

In this context, unions have simply lost the momentum of change. One of the great change forces in public education over the past half-century, unions are largely reduced to fighting against changes supported by others rather than advocating for and organizing around a set of educational ideas.

To argue for a new or changed institution of public education is much different than it was to organize teachers within the existing institution. Until unions have an agenda, they will not be able to develop policy alternatives.

The presence of systemic political, cultural and organizational barriers suggests the need for public policy intervention. Policy solutions fall within two basic domains: changes in statutes that follow the existing labor law traditions, and changes that alter teacher work and teacher unionism in less conventional ways.

Labor law legitimates, protects, and spreads the work of organizers. In teacher labor relations, organizing spread rapidly only after states began to adopt statutes patterned on the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which covers most private sector workers. Statutes could be copied one state from another, and the introduction of a statute provided an orderly way for a transition into collective bargaining. It is not accidental, for example, that the educational labor relations statute in California bears a strong resemblance to that in Indiana.

As important as changes in labor statute are, they are probably not sufficient. Recent critiques of the NLRA in the United States have almost entirely addressed the deficiencies of the law within framework of industrial unionism itself. The solutions they suggest are mostly well suited to the industrial workplace and its employment traditions. Meanwhile, most job growth and union organizing is occurring in the service sector that includes some of the lowest paid occupations and some of the highest. For example, AFL-CIO "Justice For Janitors" campaign has drawn substantial popular support, something that organized labor has not seen for a long time. Health care organization has had a similar response. Managed health care corporations are under attack throughout the country for their quality of service and the limitations they place on patient access to services. In this atmosphere, it is not surprising that organizing efforts are both successful and relatively well received. Even a Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill supporting physicians' rights to organize. These occupations are different than industrial jobs. Employment is often more fluid. Particularly in contract labor settings, which are becoming more prevalent, the lines of authority are blurred. Contract workers toil in organizations that don't pay them directly, and they work for people other than those who hired them. For many service sector workers, the pressing issues revolve around control over the work itself: patient care levels, authority to make editing decisions on a film, or influence over the curriculum. Sometimes these have a financial aspect, such as rights for payments when one's work is used. This is a longstanding issue among workers in the arts and entertainment industries and an emerging one in higher education. Sometimes the issue is purely a question of organizational authority. These issues are partly addressed by changes the labor law changes we address in the next section, but changes in labor law do not fully address them.

There are seven substantive mismatches between the existing laws and educational reform:

Which Workers Are Covered?

Both employed professionals and independent contractors have precarious status under existing labor law.

Professionals and others, whose work definition includes making organizational decisions, run afoul of the legal tradition that excludes managers from protections under labor law. The NLRA posits a fundamental dividing line between labor and management. Legislative history and court decisions interpreting the law assert that collective bargaining by managerial employees would create intolerable divided loyalties. Employees affiliated with management would be torn between their responsibilities to their employers and their solidarity with other employees in the union movement. These conflicts could impair job performance and threaten the organization (Rabban 1989).

The tradition of denying supervisors bargaining rights causes potential problems when the work of teachers takes on decisions that traditionally were the province of managers. The 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University reinforced the separation of workers and managers in higher education, as did the recent case involving nurses (National Labor Relations Board v. Health Care & Retirement Corporation of America, 1994). The 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the NLRA specifically excluded supervisors from coverage under the law, specifying [in section 2(11)] that supervisors are those who have the authority to hire, transfer, suspend, lay off, recall, promote, discharge, assign, reward, or discipline other employees. Faculty members at Yeshiva were denied collective bargaining rights because their faculty senate and its committees made substantive decisions at their university. Thus, they were considered "supervisors" under the law and ineligible for bargaining rights. Although this federal legal doctrine has never been applied to a state case governing public school teachers, it stands as a symbolic barrier, a monument that the law did not intend workers and management to share decisional power (Schlossberg and Fetter 1986). "In the end, the Yeshiva case is troubling because it is at war with the idea of consensus between professional employees and their administrators..." (Schlossberg and Fetter 1986, p. 15). This legal status is troubling not only to teachers but also to other professional employees.

A second legal issue arises among independent contractors, persons who may work at an organization but are not considered employed by it. With the use of contracting-out mechanisms and part-time contingent labor workers, and even the use of professional service contracts, inclusion of the independent contractor status within the protection of labor laws is of the utmost importance.

When it passed the Wagner Act in 1935, Congress had in mind protecting workers that moved from workplace to workplace. The scope of protection was not to be limited to single enterprises. The Supreme Court even extended the law's protection to newspaper boys, coverage that outraged publishers, and which was removed by the 1947 amendments. Over time, however, coverage of the labor law has come to be associated with current employment (Pleasure 1985).

However, the concept of a broadened scope of coverage gains importance if teachers are no longer employed by a single school district and if their social and economic security does not rest on continued employment. This would be the case if the numbers of charter schools grew considerably or if large teachers became independent contractors under arrangements being pioneered by the Association of Educators in Private Practice.

The Bargaining Unit

Bargaining unit provisions determine which workers are grouped together for the purposes of negotiation and representation. The goal is to form what the law calls a community of interest among workers, and thus groups are formed according to the type of work they do. Almost always, teachers and professionals are divided into separate units. Classroom aides, janitors, cooks, secretaries, and school security workers nearly always have their own bargaining units. In larger school districts, they tend to be separated one from another; in smaller ones they are often combined. Sometimes credentialed or licensed workers other than teachers are placed in separate units, too. Thus, generally school nurses, counselors, and librarians bargain separately from teachers.

This arrangement makes a number of structural reforms difficult. For example, United Mind Workers (Kerchner, Koppich and Weeres 1997) advocates a school site labor agreement called an educational compact that explicitly ties educational plans to resource distribution. Such agreements would need to be the product of the entire community of interest: everyone who works for money in schools, and students and parents, who work but don't draw salaries. It also advocates a staffing scheme that is a career ladder with teaching at the top that allows flexibility and differentiation in staffing. In order for such staffing to be feasible, employees would have to bargain together or at least have areas of joint responsibility. Otherwise, every occupational boundary would become a battleground, as was historically the case with the building trades and which we now see in health care.

The question of teacher-as-free-agent also arises under charter school and other autonomous school arrangements.

Cooperation and Joint Enterprises

Cooperation between labor and management is still legally suspicious. Although Sen. Robert Wagner espoused cooperation among workers, the law for which he is remembered, and the state statutes derived from it, nearly universally place barriers in the way of a close working relationship between unions and management. The framers of the law were concerned with so-called company unions, organizations that looked like unions but which were dominated by management and formed to forestall worker organization by independent unions.

Section 8(a) (2) of the NLRA provides that it shall be an unfair labor practice for an employer to:

Employee organizations (Section 2 (5)) included virtually any kind of employee representation committee or organization that deals with wages or working conditions.

Currently, however, there is a felt need to form substantive joint enterprises, such as professional practice committees and professional development schools, without violating the employer assistance or domination prohibition. While recent lower court decisions have seemed to recognize that changing conditions strengthen the case for cooperative employer-employee relations, the Supreme Court has yet to clarify the situation.

We believe that development of a legal structure more conducive to the implementation of professional values requires changes in the concept of company domination. Collegial committees or actual joint operations need support from employers. Teachers should be able to form committees that advise and actually make policy, and school authorities should be able to assist those committees with staff support and budgets without violating the labor statute.

We agree with David Rabban's suggestion that "the definition of company domination that best promotes professional values should be limited to actual employer interference with the independent decision making of employee committees, whether or not this interference derives from anti-union animus. Unless committees of professional employees are able to reach their own conclusions, they cannot provide the employer with the expert advice that justifies their existence" (Rabban 1990, p. 755).

The Scope of Bargaining

Industrial style bargaining evokes a legal fiction: that wages and the work rules of teachers can be separated from educational policy. While many critics of collective bargaining have taken pains to show that unions have encroached on the educational policy arena, they miss the point. Even the narrowest constriction of the scope of bargaining—wages, classification of workers, benefits, and hours of work—effectively encumbers virtually all the operating budget of a labor-intensive organization such as a school system. Moreover, the scope of bargaining has a tendency to expand over time as the parties to labor agreements use that vehicle to solve personnel problems and settle disputes. This is most often done without reference to the educational consequences of the agreement, thus creating what we have called accidental policy making. It is the worst of all worlds, one that preserves the legal position that educational policy remained in the hands of legislatures and school boards while operating in an environment where professional-level employees effectively controlled the budgetary expenditures and time allocation. Narrow scope bargaining, as embodied in the NLRA framework, makes it impossible to solve the problem of professional judgment and public accountability.

However, simply broadening the scope to mandate bargaining on virtually any issue would be to introduce intolerable inflexibility into the process. The practice of union locals that attempt to use collective bargaining for educational reform varies widely. Some districts, such as Minneapolis, attempt to make the contract become the district's reform plan, and they craft a document that is as much intended for advice and direction as it is to withstand attack during legal interpretation. The document becomes more organic and less legalistic. Other locals deliberately try to use other vehicles for educational quality, professional development, and educational policy questions. The enterprise compact we advocate is somewhat similar to that being used in some manufacturing settings in which there are specific resource allocation decisions made on the basis of continuing improvement (Bluestone and Bluestone 1992). The agreement becomes a means for creating joint custody of reform. But the question of how to create a policy expectation that teachers would use collective bargaining or means associated with it as a part of the educational advancement mission has not yet been captured in statute.

Peer Review

Peer review challenges both the ideology and the practice of current labor relations in rather obvious ways. It also is legally suspect. The courts have held that by achieving the status of exclusive representative for a group of employees unions also take on a duty to "exercise fairly the power conferred upon it in behalf of all those for whom it acts, without hostile discrimination among them" (Steele v. Louisville & N.R.R., 323 US 192, p. 202-203).

This duty is felt in several circumstances, but the one most associated with peer review is the representation requirement when employees are disciplined or discharged. The courts have held that a union has discretion in deciding how far to press a grievance brought by a member in these cases, so long as it does not discriminate against or among groups of members (Morris 1971). Thus, not every grievance needs be carried to arbitration or into the courts. But in peer review cases, the union approves of and participates in a process in which members judge other members, and unions have generally agreed that they will not challenge the substance of peer review rulings. While the existing peer review experiments have produced no legal challenges from teachers who were judged to be incompetent, the status of unions remains unclear, and a statute that anticipated workers serving in a professional peer review situation should be honored.

Peer review also challenges sections of education statutes that reserve the managers' right to evaluate employees. Principals in Rochester, New York, unsuccessfully challenged the teacher union's introduction of peer review on this ground. In California, districts that adopted peer review, administrators sign the final recommendations thus complying with the letter of the law. A recent analysis of peer review by union attorneys suggests contractual language that would assure that teachers serving on peer review panels or as supervising teachers would not compromise their status as bargaining unit members (AFT-NEA 1998).

Unions as Agents of Employment

Craft unions flourished in the 19th Century because labor organizations were able to control entire fields of work through a combination of solidarity, coercion, and licensure. Indeed, the modern professions followed in the footsteps of the guilds by regulating entry to work through education and apprenticeship and setting the standards of practice. Membership in medical or bar associations became a matter of social expectation and often a requirement of forming a successful practice.

Thus, the practicality of a form of unionism that extends beyond one employer depends on the legitimated right of unions to undertake activities that create representation throughout a field of employment. Current law discourages such activity.

Dispute Resolution

While one hopes that organizing around quality will be cooperative in the sense that it forms a community of professionals and broader community of support, any system of employment relations that does not anticipate disputes is doomed from the outset. For labor relations, the question is always how to balance workers’ rights to voice their interests in ways that do not lead to unreasonable disturbances in the work of schools or overly costly, protracted, and cumbersome dispute resolution techniques.

Any autonomous school with high levels of faculty involvement—such as some charter schools—might anticipate that the range and nature of conflict will be different, not that the level of conflict will necessarily be higher or lower.

Conventional labor law differentiates disputes over rights from those over interests. Rights disputes usually take the form of grievances, typically an employee's charge that management failed to do what was required under the contract. Most often, grievances arise when the contract is unclear, for example, about which employees are to have preference in transfers to a different school or whether a principal-called staff meeting was allowable under the contract. Rights disputes are subject to a contractually required step-by-step dispute resolution process familiar to most educators. The endpoint in this process is frequently binding arbitration. In contrast, interest disputes arise during collective bargaining or union organizing when agreements can't be reached over the terms of a contract or whether a union will be recognized. These disputes are the most difficult and frequently lead to overt conflict and direct action through strikes and other means.

In union engagement in educational quality, the line between rights and interests is less clear than in conventional systems. In more autonomous schools, teachers and administrators will carry with them the rights to set work parameters and also the responsibility to make the school function smoothly. The ability to engage in conflict as if it is someone else's responsibility to operate the school will vanish, and neither labor nor management will be able to leave disputes unsettled without consequences.

The experiences of schools that have experimented with highly participatory school-site management or decision making programs illustrates the need for high levels of dispute resolution training and skills. Where the primary skill of labor activists in the industrial setting is to rally workers around clearly (if sometimes artificially) articulated divisions with management, the dominant skill in the knowledge era is to form communities of interest. If the experience of labor relations reform efforts over the last decade are any guide, a great deal of training, expertise, and support will be necessary in process, problem solving, and dispute resolution skills. Teachers and administrators in Glenview, Illinois, for example, invested heavily in meeting process skills, and those in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in consensus decision making (Kerchner 1991, Smylie 1991, Smylie, Brownlee-Conyers and Crowson 1991). Interestingly, the origins of emphasizing dispute resolution had less to do with labor-management relationships and much more to do with controlling the conflict between students that was preventing school reform programs from going forward. Teachers then found that they needed the medicine they were giving their students.

Additionally, any dispute resolution system must come to grips with the right to strike. Striking remains controversial in the public sector: a blasphemy to detractors and ideological bedrock for unionists. Increasingly, however, strikes are seen being as of dubious utility, a right that is needed but frequently not useful.

Connecting the right to strike and educational issues is uncharted territory. Except under extreme circumstances, we do not believe that the right to strike should be extended to individual schools when the economic and other aspects of their employment are still contained in a master contract with a school district or some other regional authority. It is interesting to note, though that strike, and the threat of strike over educational issues has been relatively common in school districts that have organized around quality. Rochester, Cincinnati, Toledo, and Poway (California) have all had protracted disagreements over educational issues that were taken to the verge of strike.

The tradition of the National Labor Relations Act reinforces the industrial union heritage in the United States, and even the statutory alterations addressed above fit within the same skin. The questions raised by knowledge work, or post-Fordism, are substantially broader: what are the labor arrangements that both protect the workers and advance the work in situations where occupations and economic settings are rapidly changing? How do unions organize in a time of great turbulence? And around what?

United Mind Workers (Kerchner, Koppich and Weeres 1997) advocates organizing around teaching careers rather than individual jobs and around individual schools rather than large educational organizations. It also advocates that unions seize the levers of educational quality and pull them hard, establishing organized teachers at the forefront of educational reform rather than allowing organized teachers to be pictured as blocking reform or providing halfhearted support. These questions require thinking of unionism outside of traditional employment relationships and traditional labor law.

Occupational Unionism

It is intriguing to think of teaching outside of a traditional employment relationship. The idea of teachers forming their own professional practice corporations and bargaining for services from schools or education agencies has an interesting potential for teachers to achieve more flexibility and self determination in defining their work. The Association of Educators in Private Practice is a small, 600-member organization of teachers who work as independent consultants to school districts or who teach in charter schools. Some members engage in the equivalent of a professional practice group with which school districts contract for instructional services. Although the association is composed largely of members who espouse a libertarian free market ideology, its operations bear a strong resemblance to traditional craft unions, and it is consistent with what Heckscher (1988) would call associational unionism.

These unions also provide good examples of how property rights can be protected when work has economic value or when there is a question of property rights. The application of technology to higher education is one such area.

Teachers Councils

The balance between advocacy and responsibility may be too great for unions to handle alone. Scotland, now followed by England and Wales, has devised a means to give teachers a powerful voice in educational quality concerns that is independent of the unions and also of the government. Since 1965, Scotland has maintained a legislated General Teaching Council. Thirty of the 49 members are teachers elected by their peers. Others are appointed by universities, associations of school directors, the government, and other bodies. England and Wales are following suit in 2000 with General Teaching Councils of their own. In the case of England, the teacher unions will appoint 9 teachers in addition to the 25 elected representatives.

These organizations set the standards for teacher preparation, maintain a register of persons who are allowed to teach in the public schools, and they advise the government on teaching policy. Almost all U.S. states maintain a body that licenses teachers. In some cases, these bodies have teacher representatives and in some cases substantial teacher representation. But in no state that we know of has the teacher licensure body taken on the stature of speaking for teaching as an occupation.

Works Councils

The U.S. has made quite limited use of European-style works councils in which representatives of labor become official governors of enterprises. In public education, teacher unions endorse and support the political campaigns of candidates running for local school boards, but in no constituency is there an official governing board seat reserved for organized labor. Rather, the works council idea is furthered by labor memberships in nongovernmental agencies whose task it is to support school reform.

Union presidents or executive directors in Los Angeles, New York, and Cincinnati, belong to school reform organizations established with private funds. Such organizations are relatively common in the U.S. partly because the country's civic tradition (and tax laws) encourage private philanthropy. The union presence is much more legitimate in these ventures, and the union voice respected as more than a spokesperson for a powerful interest.

One such organization existed for a decade in Los Angeles. LEARN was founded by a joint concern for the state of the public schools by a board-based coalition of business, civic, and political leaders including the president of United Teachers Los Angeles. It was a substantial reform organization and led the union to begin to think of itself as an important agency for further education and professional development for teachers. LEARN, however, proved to be a temporary organization. The reforms it proposed were threatening to both the existing school administration and to more traditional elements of the union. The organization and its programs have been disbanded, but elements of its ideas—further professional development for teachers and autonomy for schools—have found their way into an official reorganization of the school district.

In New York City, the United Teachers of New York has become a powerful partner in several educational reform ventures. They were part of a coalition that came together to secure funding to start and develop small schools that are thought to be a good alternative to large, impersonal urban campuses. The union has also become a key developer of continuing professional education for teachers. Based on a contract with the district, the union runs Teacher Centers in over 200 schools, and these centers are the means by which new curriculum and standards ideas are introduced.

The teacher union leadership in Cincinnati helped found and now sits on the board of directors of that city's professional development facility, the Mayerson Academy. The Cincinnati case holds particular interest because the professional development relationship has been maintained even though the union and the district are in sharp disagreement over other aspects of the educational quality agenda and over conventional labor relations issues.

In all three of these cases, the establishment of an external agency to which the union belongs helps propel reform. In all three cities, the external agency and the coalition of interests it represents has not been sufficient to control the swirling winds of educational politics, however. The grand urban coalition to develop and control educational reform has proven impossible to sustain. But these external agencies show us that bits of reform can be protected and sustained over time.

Alternative Agreements

The collectively bargained contract is the centerpiece of teacher labor relations, but there has been a relatively little noticed tradition of agreements outside the traditional contract. So-called side letters or memorandums of agreement, have been a fixture of American labor relations for many years, and these have found their way into public education bargaining. These agreements generally handle problems or details that occur between the terms of the contract or they deal with subjects that for some reason the parties did not want to subject to the legal processes implicit in contract. Sometimes, very substantive agreements are handled this way. In Toledo, Ohio, for example, the entire peer review system is anchored in the contract by only a single sentence. The rest of the program's operation is the result of a series of letters, memorandums, and informal handshake agreements between union leaders and the school district.

Over the last two decades, there has been increasing interest in somehow regularizing and capturing the apparent ability of these alternative agreements to introduce new topics into negotiations and to reach agreements more amicably. Several school districts in California and elsewhere have experimented with what are called trust agreements. As originally conceived, these were to be agreements for the use of monetary resources or organizational authority that would be held "in trust" for the benefit of students or the school community. Union and school management would then agree to a joint working group to develop the terms of the trust (Koppich and Kerchner 1990. In practice, unions and school districts were reluctant to bargain substantial amounts of money into these agreements, and they became more statements of intent to work together to solve problems. But even without dollar resources, the force of the agreement has been powerful in some localities.

Two recently advocated but untested ideas appear as variations on the theme of alternative agreements. The idea of school-site compacts for educational and school planning ventures flows from an organizational instinct to drive labor relations toward work groups and away from the large school bureaucracies. Under this idea, school districts or local educational agencies would enter into a slim contract for aspects of compensation and other matters, but the majority of the work rule determination would occur at the individual school where it would be linked to that school's individual operating plan and budget (Kerchner and Koppich 1997).

A second idea, also not yet tried, was advocated by AFT president Sandra Feldman, who suggests a process of allowing schools to "opt in" to an alternative set of rules. Over the last two decades, many U.S. unions have negotiated agreements that allow schools to gain exceptions from both labor contract and statutory restrictions. These schools were then allowed to petition for a waiver or to opt out of certain contractual provisions. For example, teachers might want to establish different work schedules or they might want to staff the school differently. Feldman's idea is to establish a different path or pattern for labor relations attaching different roles and responsibilities to each path. The parties would not have to negotiate the details of a contract; they would only have to decide whether they wanted one relationship or another.

There is a great deal at stake in the reformation of teacher unions in the U.S. The status and shape of teaching as an occupation hangs in the balance, and so, too, does the definition of public education as an institution. By one estimate, the country will need to recruit more than 2-million new teachers in the next decade. This turnover alone will change the ethos of teaching, or will have the opportunity to do so. By taking on roles in induction, standards setting, and professional development, teacher unions will have the capacity to define the occupation and define unionism.

In order to define teaching in the next generation, unions will need to capture the hearts and minds of the next generation of teachers as well as their memberships. At the present time, there appears to be a growing gap between what unions in the U.S. do and what novices want. Polls conducted by the unions themselves, suggest a low level of union identification among younger teachers, and a strong desire by novices that the union help them teach better and particularly help them survive the first difficult years. Two examples illustrate.

At a recent academic conference, researchers presented a series of papers drawn from interviews of novice teachers. The papers spoke of the difficulty of being a first year teacher, of simultaneously mastering the curriculum and learning the school's culture. They spoke of the highly tentative commitment to teaching as a life's work. After the presentation, a questioner arose in the audience to ask, "What did these young teachers say about their unions?" The researcher answered that none of the novice teachers mentioned the union at all, except to say that the union dues added to their financial burdens. No one said that the union had helped them decide to be a teacher, helped train them, or helped make their first year on the job easier.

Recently the NEA sponsored a survey of teachers in charter schools: autonomous schools run with public money but not within the direct control of school districts. The survey found that the teachers there were satisfied with their jobs despite the fact that in many cases they lacked union protection. The teachers who were union members lacked strong identification with the organization, and many of them didn't think of themselves as teaching in the public schools at all. Few of them could think of anything that their union had done to help them (Koppich 1998).

If these anecdotes accurately represent the state of unionism, the next generation of teachers will be a challenge for teacher unions. If they can succeed, they are in many ways superbly positioned to become a model for post-Fordist worker organization in the United States. By any reasonable description, teachers are knowledge workers for whom success depends on their ability to work through highly abstract ill-defined situational problems. Teachers work in the service sector, where jobs are expanding rather than the manufacturing sector where jobs are declining. They work in historically large bureaucracies and understand the tension between individual discretion and organizational control. Finally, most teachers are female, and relative to other highly educated work forces, teaching includes a high proportion of persons of color. Thus the occupation brings a voice and perspective to the workplace that is largely missing among the traditional professions and among most unions.

The classic Fordist work place is one where managers rather than workers are responsible for key decisions, where there is relatively little innovation, and where there is low process variability (Clegg 1990, Kerchner and Mitchell 1988). These work places are being reproduced in much of the service sector as these jobs are brought under process control and computer monitoring. There is nothing automatic about institutional transformation making jobs smarter. Teaching, like other service sector jobs, can be "dumbed down" or "smartened up." The question of direction may be the most crucial labor battle of the next decade.