Research on Teachers’ Labor Activism and Teachers’ Unions: Implications for Educational Policy, Scholarship, and Activism

U.S. society has changed dramatically since the publication of the previous edition of the Handbook of Education Policy Research—alterations reflected in education and education policy. This chapter explores how critical analysis of research on teachers’ unions and teachers’ labor activism can clarify those changes and support the development of economic, political, and social alternatives as well as new educational policies. The authors advance a conceptual framework that analyzes education as reflecting, disrupting, and reinforcing social, economic, and political arrangements in capitalism, which is a global social system. They use diverse critical lenses that interrogate both the unique location of workers organized as a class and the special salience(s) of social oppression, explaining the potential of labor in general and of teachers’ unions in particular to support movements for social justice and for the ideals of democracy in education and society.

Keywords: teachers’ work; teachers unions; social justice teacher unions; educational policy