Teachers Unions

鈴木大裕（２０１６）『崩壊するアメリカの公教育　〜日本への警告〜』第９章、岩波書店

鈴木大裕　『シカゴ教員組合スト：組合改革から公教育の「公」を取り戻す社会運動へ』　人間と教育、民主教育研究所。２０１５年、第８６号、pp. 100-109.
Suzuki, D. (2015). Chicago Teacher Union strike: From a union reform to a civic movement to put “public” back into public education. Ningen to Kyoiku (Research Institute of Democracy and Education), 86 (Summer, 2015).

２０１２年、全米第三の学校区であるシカゴで教員組合が四半世紀ぶりに決行したストライキが、学生、親、市民らの支持を受けて勝利を勝ち取ったというニュースが全米に衝撃を与えた。ストに至るまでの教員たちの４年間の活動と声の記録からは、４つの重要なポイントが見えてくる。第一に、シカゴ教員組合ストは、従来の「労働組合」から教育的正義を求める教育者の集団への変容を図った教員組合改革の結晶であったこと。第二に、市政府への権力の集中と非民主的な教育運営を可視化する運動を展開することで、政治や社会の在り方そのものが問われたこと。第三に、シカゴ教員組合が教育問題をきっかけに、教育の市場化と民営化の弊害に対する人々の意識を高め、市民運動を起こし、世論を動かしたこと。そして、最後に、失われつつあった公教育の「公」とは何か、「教育」とは何かを問い直すことで、公教育の再定義を行ったことだ。それは、子どもの教育を介して人々が団結し、大人たちの主権者としての意識を覚醒させ、社会の潮流を変えるという一つの新しい教育改革の形を示している。

This article explores a growing trend in the politics of education: the intersectional frontline organizing work of educators' social justice unions on behalf of a woman-dominated workforce and local students, families, and communities, many of whom experience racial and economic disparity. I show that educators' social justice unions have tended to coherently employ intersectional language to articulate student, family, and community need along racial and class lines during the COVID-19 crisis, but have struggled to explicitly tie a gendered analysis of educators' working condi- tions to the raced and classed public school experiences of the populations they serve. In the spirit of supporting the growth of educators' social justice unions in the educational justice movement, I bring together the theoretical work of Angela Davis, David McNally and Nancy Fraser to argue that long-term movement growth requires enhanced intentionality in naming systemic identity-based linkages across worker and student experiences of public schooling while highlighting how “advanced neoliberalism” co-opts identity-based rhetoric to maximize capitalist accumulation for the few while limiting educational equity for the many. In other words, I assert that movement growth requires intentional articulation of the systemic identity-based relations linking working with learning conditions in late-stage capitalism.

When I think about the recent successes of the demonstrations
in West Virginia (twice), Arizona, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Colorado,
North Carolina, and more recently Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago
and Oakland, I feel both a sense of encouragement and caution.

Over the past three decades, the public education system in the United States has been dramatically reshaped by market-based policies at the local, state, and federal levels. These policies have been described as a “global assault” (Compton & Weiner, 2008) on education that has exacerbated existing economic and racial inequalities (Lipman, 2011). While leaders of the nation’s two major teachers’ unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have failed to adequately respond to this assault (Weiner, 2012), a number of local, national, and international grassroots organizations have developed with the express purpose of combatting neoliberal policies and social inequalities from the ground up (Spreen & Stark, 2014). Among these organizations are social justice caucuses: groups of rank-and-file educators who build their collective power to democratically transform their unions and advance justice in schools and society.

This dissertation explores educator organizing in the United Caucuses of Rank-and-File Educators (UCORE), a growing network of social justice caucuses within teachers’ unions in the United States. The UCORE network was founded in 2014, following two years of informal organizing between member caucuses and over twenty years of policy mobility between union organizers in cities such as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Seattle. While scholars have published a small number of case studies of social justice caucuses, there is little research documenting the development of educator organizing and policy mobility between caucuses. Likewise, few studies have explored the purpose, principles, and practices of educator organizing within social justice caucuses. With this in mind, the aim of this dissertation is to trace educator organizing and policy mobility within the UCORE network using the methodology of militant ethnography. This project documents the work of member caucuses using participatory observation, document analysis, social media analysis, and interviews.

Over the course of this dissertation, I discuss how organizers conceptualize the purpose of social justice caucus organizing, arguing that individual caucuses adapt their stated purposes over five iterative phases of development. I also identify four ethical principles that educator organizers use to frame, guide, and evaluate their work. Moreover, I identify ten cultural practices of social justice caucuses, noting how these practices enable organizers to advance their caucus’s purpose and principles. Lastly, I discuss how some of these practices enable the spread of social justice unionist policies across the UCORE network, furthering the development of contemporary educator movements. By investigating the work of social justice caucuses, this dissertation will result in a better understanding of recent developments in the history of labor organizing and education policy in the U.S. It will also contribute to research on education activism, social justice unionism, and social movement organizing.

This research focuses on conducting action research in collaboration with teachers in a private, international school in Egypt. It aims at empowering teachers as agents of changes through a process of developing school improvement plan. The research seeks mobilizing teachers and embarks on a case study of participatory action research for school improvement in Egypt, thus not only it contributes to literature in these areas but also represents a pioneering study in the Egyptian context. The researcher works in this school and is also a graduate of it. Thus her relationship with the school community extends over a period of 15 years. This has helped in building rapport between the researcher and the school practitioners. Similar to the researcher, 50% of the school teachers and administrators have been working in the school for over 10 years or are alumni of it. This in turn enabled the school to reserve its culture for decades. Aiming at supporting the school improvement, participatory action research is employed. The purpose of this action research is not only to gain knowledge but also to undertake actions, particularly by involving teachers in the reform process where their ownership of change evolves. The research followed qualitative approach and included emergent design of which regular meetings and focus group discussions were conducted with eleven teachers and surveys with open-ended questions were administrated to 68 teachers in order to assess the school performance and develop its improvement plan. In addition, the researcher used observation and kept a record of field notes. The research reveals the main areas of strength and improvement for the school. It also brought to life many of the concepts pertaining to the literature review such as democracy, reflection, positionality, trust, internal transformation, collaboration and resistance to change. These concepts have further been demonstrated in this research by mobilizing teachers as agents of change and sharing leadership responsibilities for the school improvement.
Key words: Teacher-leader, Action Research, School Improvement

“Teacher unions in Canada have had concerns about developments in online learning, but have generally been supportive if they have felt conditions were appropriate,” according to the Director of Research and Technology at the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF). This sentiment has been echoed by the researchers involved in the annual State of the Nation: K-12 E-Learning in Canada. These researchers have also underscored the fact that teacher unions have also been active in conducting research to investigate how teaching in the distance education and online learning environment is different than teaching in the classroom, and what impact that has on the nature of work and quality of work life for its members. The present study is an example of this exploration.

This report describes a study conducted to explore written provisions for the working conditions of K-12 distributed learning teachers in Canada (i.e., distance education and online learning are generally referred to as distributed learning throughout the report). At present, there is one provincial jurisdiction that includes language in their collective agreement with teachers related to distributed learning. There are also two provinces where there is language in one or more local contracts focused on distributed learning. Finally, there was one province where the provincial teacher union had a significant policy related to distributed learning.

Within these documents, there were consistent themes around 1) defining distributed learning; 2) clauses focused on teacher working conditions in the distributed learning environment; 3) responsibilities for the schools and/or school boards that choose to operate distributed learning programs; and 4) mechanisms to allow for consultations between those operating the distributed learning program and the union. In all of these themes, there are actually few regulations that go beyond what would be expected for traditional brick-and-mortar education. The main areas where distributed learning teachers were treated differently than face-to-face teachers were for legal reasons, as well as the provision for consultations between distributed learning operators and their respective unions. These unique aspects are reflective of stakeholders’ efforts to examine what constitutes the equivalent experiences for teaching in the distributed learning environment relative to traditional classroom teaching.

Teacher unionisation is among the under-researched themes in South Africa. The few teacher union studies focus on the notoriety of teacher unions' activities, especially the impact of teacher strikes. Studies frequently demonstrate how teacher unions disturb education with a tendency to make schools ungovernable. In fact, in many studies, results have shown that strong union activity undermines school effectiveness. Additionally, these studies people revealed how various role-players such as parents, communities and district officials have maintained that effective teacher unions are the missing link to successful leadership as well as meaningful teaching and learning. This case study examined the potentially positive role of unions in two historically black schools in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. In both schools the principals were active members of two of the most powerful teacher unions in South Africa. At the time of the study, one principal was an office bearer in the South African Democratic Teachers' Union (SADTU) whilst the other was aligned with the National Professional Teachers' Organisation of South Africa (NAPTOSA). The paradox in both schools was that, despite the strong unionism, the union and school management collaboration appeared to bolster learner success, teaching and school principals' effectiveness. The conclusions demonstrate that strong teacher unions are pivotal in building selffulfilled teachers, the management of diversity and high levels of learner achievement. Finally, the school leaders proved that, with meaningful cooperation among role-players including teacher unions, underperforming schools have the potential to thrive.

With nearly 3.2 million public school teachers in the United States and nearly all of them having some sort of membership in the national teachers’ union, the National Education Association, some serious consideration needs to be given to the thoughts and perceptions of those teachers and what the teachers’ union does for them and their students. When Wisconsin entered the national spotlight in 2010 surrounding mandatory unionism, teachers, parents, communities, and stakeholders from across the state shared their informal thoughts about the union. The purpose of this case study, which used a qualitative methodology, was to explore how public-school teachers perceive the influence of teachers’ unions on student achievement. The conceptual framework used critical systems theory and included 27 anonymous teachers from Wisconsin who answered questions in an online questionnaire, 15 anonymous teachers also from Wisconsin who participated in telephone interviews, and a review of archival data. The over-arching question was, “What perceptions do Wisconsin public school teachers have on the possible influence of the teachers’ union on student achievement?” The findings of the study revealed four themes. Public school teachers in Wisconsin perceive (1) very little to no influence from the teachers’ union on student achievement, (2) a systems influence that may lead to an indirect influence on student achievement, (3) an influence in pedagogy and teaching strategies, and (4) political activity from the union that affects teaching.

Philadelphia's teacher-led activist group, the Caucus of Working Educators, has displayed shifts in how it frames the central problems facing public education since its emergence in 2014. Initially, the organization tended to advance the notion that neoliberalist discourses and values were primarily responsible for " education reform " effects, including underfunded schools and districts, shrinking public school districts, and the privatization of formerly public aspects and services of schooling. Over its first four years of life, however, the organization has increasingly integrated critiques of structural racism in how it frames such issues in public education. This article asks: How do teacher Caucus members employ neoliberalist and structural racism problem frames within their activist teacher organization? I show how members have increasingly centered racial justice concerns, and argue that organizational strategy concerns and the desire to push the organization to align more tightly with specific ethical concerns have driven this transformation process.

The published article is also available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/IX2scMxZYKjCCi499QG8/full

When New York City’s Board of Education fired Alice Citron for insubordination in 1951, they ended a nearly twenty-year career dedicated to the students and residents of Harlem.  A pioneer of community-based education, Citron helped introduce the study of African-American history and culture into the curriculum while leading efforts to replace explicitly racist textbooks, some of them written by district’s own superintendents and principals. By 1951, Citron already had a long experience with anti-communist persecution, having been targeted since 1932 by school administrators and anticommunist officials of the city’s teachers union for her rule-violating engagement in a politics of “misrepresentation” and alleged bad faith.  While not explicitly targeting her as a woman, these attacks were en-gendered nonetheless by a history of discrimination in the schools, as well as by a fundamental hostility on the part of school management, conservative labor leaders and municipal authorities to the politics of mass mobilization practiced by Citron and other communist teachers.

Este artículo describe y analiza la negociación que sostuvo el ministerio de educación de Chile con el colegio de profesores, en la cual se lograron acuerdos relevantes e inéditos para mejorar la calidad de la educación y modificar la carrera docente (introduciendo, por ejemplo, una asignación de excelencia pedagógica o bien un sistema de evaluación del desempeño profesional docente).

En este artículo se desarrolla una reflexión sobre las posibilidades de llevar a cabo un estudio etnográfico en el campo de la educación, desde un enfoque de investigación comprometida. Esta particular forma de acercamiento a la realidad social, centrada en el compromiso político, la empatía y el diálogo, reviste el proceso de producción de conocimiento para generar otras formas de aprendizaje colectivo, más allá de las limitaciones que impone la academia convencional. Mediante el relato de mi experiencia como antropólogo, vinculado a las luchas político-sindicales de docentes en Michoacán, México, se describen los elementos epistemológicos y las estrategias metodológicas que me permitieron realizar un trabajo de investigación social de esta envergadura, subrayando la relevancia de reconocer el aparato crítico de la práctica antropológica para apuntar reflexivamente limitaciones y desafíos de la colaboración.

What are the implications of Donald Trump's victory for U.S. teachers unions' rights and responsibility to represent teachers' collective interests as workers and professionals? My analysis begins with a brief overview of the economic and political terrain before the November 2016 election and U.S. teacher unions' position in it. I then propose that while the GOP and Trump are intensifying policies that have been part of the neoliberal project in the US for at least two decades, neoliberalism has experienced a very sharp ideological challenge that has important implications for public education, teachers' work, and teachers unions. Drawing on this analysis, I explain why union efforts to contest attacks on the right to bargain collectively for teachers should challenge the framework and political assumptions of collective bargaining laws, which predate neoliberalism and were based on " corporate productivism, " the post-World War II agreement between labor unions in the private sector with capitalism. To protect gains made by teachers unions, teachers will need to create and adopt new forms of mobilization that contest power relations in the school site. Transformed unions will also need to develop new kinds of alliances with community groups, parents, and workers who are not members of organized labor, collaborating as respectful allies who may not share identical political premises. The final section of the article presents three imperatives for teachers union officers on the state, national, and local level.

Over the past 10 years, the popular media has increasingly reported upon teacher union efforts to influence educational policy through radical tactics like school walkouts and strikes. Less visible though is the behind-thescenes organizing work by social justice caucuses. Such caucuses strive to push their broader unions to take on more radical stances and tactics while advocating for traditional workplace concerns alongside broader common good issues. The United Caucuses of Rank-and-file Educators (UCORE) reports that social justice caucuses have formed in more than 40 locations in North America over the past 12 years, the vast majority in the United States. This includes caucuses in historically conservative locations, such as the "red states," as well as regions known for their progressive politics. Much of the impetus for such organizing stems from educators' desires to protect public education from privatizing and corporate influences. They seek to improve their working conditions through strengthening public investment in schools, while striving to remedy systemic racism and economic disparity through their union organizing work. In this interview, Rhiannon Maton talks with 2 founding members of Raising Educators' Voices (REV), which is a caucus that formed two years ago in Vancouver,

In March 1936, a Soviet edition of the youth periodical „Płomyk” was published. Some papers of that time denounced it as a part of the Soviet propaganda. To defend their good name, the publishers of the periodical sued one of such newspapers, but they lost the case. A year and a half later, in September 1937, the government suspended the Executive Board of Polish Teachers’ Union (ZNP) and appointed an administrator. One of the charges, along with financial inaccuracies, was that the organization harboured pro-communist political sympathies.
In response to the government’s actions, some of the members of the
Executive Board organized a sit-in, soon followed by teachers and many
trade unions as well political organizations. The strike proved successful. First, the government pulled out on the previous appointment and assigned a new administrator. Subsequently, the Polish Teacher’s Union convention appointed a new Executive Board composed of key pre-strike activists.
For activists closely connected with the ZNP, government’s activities
constituted an attempt to curb trade union liberties, and the industrial action was merely an act of defence of freedom and civil liberties. However, one can find traces of the Polish Communist Party’s direct contacts with strike initiators can and their aspirations, at least in the case of certain activists such as Wanda Wasilewska and Janina Broniewska, to escalate the conflict and call a general strike.

Like the Arab Spring, the U.S. “Education Spring” was an explosive wave of protests. Statewide teacher walkouts seemed to arise out of nowhere, organized through Facebook groups, with demands for increased school funding and political voice for teachers. Though the walkouts confounded national media outlets, which had little idea how to explain or report on the movements, for parent and teacher activists who have been organizing against reforms in public education over the past four decades, the protests were understandable, if unexpected. What was surprising was their breadth of support (statewide), their organizing strategy (Facebook), and their breathtakingly rapid spread. (Vol. XVII No. 1, Whole Number 65).

How does educational research inform understanding of the current labor activism among U.S. teachers and illuminate teachers’ capacity when they are organized as workers to challenge neoliberal educational policies? To address these questions we examine critical research on teachers’ work and teachers unions from 2000-2019, scrutinizing knowledge production about teachers’ work and the role of teachers unions in contesting and conceding to reform, and analyzing how ideological assumptions about capitalism, labor, race, class, and gender configure the amount and nature of scholarship on teachers unions. We explain why scholarship on school reform should include attention to teacher unionism, re-conceptualizing tensions between what are understood as “social justice” struggles and defense of teachers’ professional interests, livelihoods, and working conditions.

Labor unions play a key role in combating inequality. Recent research focuses on unions' ability to shape "moral economies" that make greater inequality socially inappropriate. But this research largely hypothesizes moral economy pathways for combating inequality, rather than showing them in action. Through a case study of the 2018 teachers' strike wave, we identify mechanisms that allow unions to shape moral economies. Based on analysis of indepth interviews with key strike leaders, social media discussion groups, and contemporaneous media coverage, we find that the interaction of sustained mass disruption and worker-organizer intervention were the key mechanisms that allowed the teachers and their unions to reshape moral economies. Externally, the strikes created a social and political crisis to which political elites had to respond, while tying the teachers' struggles to broader community issues, galvanizing public support for the strikes. As disruptions escalated, the teachers' experience of collective action created a positive feedback effect, reshaping workers' understanding of what they wanted, what they deserved, and what they could win. The 2018 teachers' strike is analytically useful because it managed to reshape norms and expectations around educational and economic inequality rapidly, on a large scale.

BRIAN FORD
The Significance of Charter Schools and the Privatization of Standards: holding the wolf by the ears
Policy Futures in Education, Volume 3, Number 1, 2005

ABSTRACT The dynamics of educational policy discourse in the USA are illustrated by the highly contested positions on charter schools in three arenas: media debates, national policy and local school reform. In media debates, civil society actors – including teachers’ unions, think tanks and print media – engage in polarized exchanges notable for their name-calling and vitriol. In national policy, after two decades of much consensus where charters were viewed as a way of raising standards, policy formation is presently shaped by deep splits on funding and privatization initiatives; charters are increasingly short on the former and seen as potential vehicles for the latter. This manifests itself on the level of local reform, where charters are a component part of numerous school reforms, including a systematic overhaul of the nation’s largest school district. There, a corporate model that emphasizes the chief executive officer’s role in selecting among productive and unproductive employees has been deployed. The title image (wolf, ears) responds to some of the discourse and is taken from Thomas Jefferson’s explanation of the dilemma slavery posed for the USA. As the privatization of standards seems to advance incrementally, the article suggests that a similar dilemma now confronts advocates for public education, especially teachers’ unions, who have previously supported standards-based reform and the use of charters for the purpose of educational innovation.

Wisconsin has had mandated membership in its teacher's union for all public school teachers since 1959. In 2010, Wisconsin's teachers' unions have been under discussion when the new governor came into office and signed Act 10 into law, which allowed all public school teachers to have a choice in membership. Much debate, discussion and furor has surrounded this legislation. The purpose of this paper considers the impact the teacher's union has had on student achievement according to unionized and non-union teachers and the state standardized assessment.

This paper focuses on the origins of the teachers' union in Portugal, making an historical journey through the associations of the 19th century and the first demonstrations of the trade unions in the first Republic. In the light of history, it is intended to analyze the emergence of the Teachers' Union, in Portugal, and their paths in the decades of the 1970's and 1980's of the 20th century, and to present some of the reasons that have contributed to a substantial change in teachers' union from the decade of the mid 1980's. We will give particular attention to the roots of the contemporary teacher unionism that are found in the Study Groups of the Teaching Staff of the Secondary Education (GEPDES) and which constitute a movement of reflection and claims in anticipation of the teachers unions that were formed in the days followed by the April revolution. The empirical study was carried out by means of interviews with four of the main protagonists of this movement and reveals the goals, the political consciousness of its members, the possible influences of the Communist Party, and the importance of this movement in emergency and affirmation of the teachers' union. It is a reflection on the conditions existing in Portugal in post- April 25th, 1974, and about the conditions that have emerged from the second half of the 1980s, especially with the advancement of economicist and neo-liberals policies, who have contributed to a certain decline and crisis of the teacher union movement as to the crisis of professional identities of teachers. The teachers union was constituted as a reflexive movement drifting away, gradually, from the references of the labor movement, stating at the same time its specificity and autonomy.

This paper presents findings from an interview-based study investigating how a sample of New York City public high schools used the School-Based Option Transfer & Staffing Plan (SBO), which was designed to balance strict seniority with other school-determined criteria for teacher transfers. SBO also put other teacher hiring in the hands of school-based committees comprised of teachers, administrators and parents. The study finds that different schools implemented the SBO quite differently (some even entirely abandoning seniority as a consideration), that principals and administrators were well pleased with the program and that principals did not believe that the committee structure prevented them from hiring the candidates they desired. Thus, such a program might provide alternatives to seniority-driven systems that unions and districts can agree upon.

Talk at the Tamiment Library launching new book:  Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism and the Origins of McCarthyism.  What we can learn from the history of the Rapp-Coudert inquisition (1940) about contemporary McCarthyism and where it is going.

"Great Teachers: How to raise student learning in Latin America and the Caribbean"  is simultaneously a report of research conducted under the auspices of the World Bank and policy prescriptions linked to its research.  GT identifies poor teacher quality as the major obstacle in reducing poverty in LAC. Teachers unions are described as blocking government efforts to raise educational quality  and thereby eradicate poverty by opposing policies identified with the neoliberal project. ).  In this article we interrogate five key premises that drive GT’s policy recommendations, examining the evidence for its prescriptions. We find that GT ignores earlier World Bank research on education in LAC, fails to address contradictions in its own findings, and omits acknowledgment of educational research that challenges its analysis.  We identify significant flaws in methodology that limit the credibility and usefulness of its findings and the recommendations based on its research.

The School District of Philadelphia announced that district schools would officially reopen their doors on February 8, 2021, despite a widely-touted lack of adequate ventilation systems and PPE. In response, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) made national news by refusing to enter district schools on the official day of reopening. The work action forced the district to negotiate with the union, and they were later able to mutually agree upon a plan that would provide safer working and learning conditions in schools.
Throughout this contentious time, the Caucus of Working Educators, a social justice caucus seeking to push its union toward stronger member engagement and assertive resistance to austerity and school privatization, has done much of the behind-the-scenes work to support union members and advocate for safe and healthy schools.
In this interview, Rhiannon Maton, an assistant professor at SUNY Cortland and former active supporting member of the Caucus, interviews Daniel Symonds, a high school social studies teacher in the district and active Caucus of Working Educators member. The interview took place on Sunday, March 14, and discusses what teaching has looked like during Covid-19, union response and organizing in the face of school reopening, and the complex relationship between the union and a caucus vying for power.

A century before teachers in the US launched their wildcat strike wave this spring, workers in the war industries did the same during World War I. Self-organized teachers are using high profile wildcat strikes to turn back decades of efforts to dismantle public education. What has been overlooked in much of the news coverage is that these strikes parallel another wave of wildcat strikes in the war industries that rocked the country 100 years ago during World War I.

En este articulo se desarrolla una reflexion sobre las posibilidades de llevar a cabo un estudio etnografico en el campo de la educacion, desde un enfoque de investigacion comprometida. Esta particular forma de acercamiento a la realidad social, centrada en el compromiso politico, la empatia y el dialogo, reviste el proceso de produccion de conocimiento para generar otras formas de aprendizaje colectivo, mas alla de las limitaciones que impone la academia convencional. Mediante el relato de mi experiencia como antropologo, vinculado a las luchas politico-sindicales de docentes en Michoacan, Mexico, se describen los elementos epistemologicos y las estrategias metodologicas que me permitieron realizar un trabajo de investigacion social de esta envergadura, subrayando la relevancia de reconocer el aparato critico de la practica antropologica para apuntar reflexivamente limitaciones y desafios de la colaboracion.

How does educational research inform understanding of the current labor activism among U.S. teachers and illuminate teachers’ capacity when they are organized as workers to challenge neoliberal educational policies? To address these questions we examine critical research on teachers’ work and teachers unions from 2000-2019, scrutinizing knowledge production about teachers’ work and the role of teachers unions in contesting and conceding to reform, and analyzing how ideological assumptions about capitalism, labor, race, class, and gender configure the amount and nature of scholarship on teachers unions. We explain why scholarship on school reform should include attention to teacher unionism, re-conceptualizing tensions between what are understood as “social justice” struggles and defense of teachers’ professional interests, livelihoods, and working conditions.

A promoção da Educação Para Todos (EPT) está profundamente relacionada com as declarações das Conferências de Jomtien (1990, que inicia o movimento de Educação para Todos, e Dakar (2000). Contudo, desde a conclusão dos processos de independência, década de 1970, e em alguns casos já desde as lutas pela libertação, décadas de 1960 e 1970, alcançar a educação para todos é uma prioridade dos Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa (PALOP). Após as citadas Conferências as organizações da sociedade civil formaram e estreitaram redes para melhorar a possibilidade de sucesso na implementação dos compromissos internacionais nos diversos países signatários. Os sindicatos, enquanto organizações da sociedade civil, assumem um papel relevante na luta pelo direito à educação. A Campanha Global pela Educação (CGE) assume-se como a maior e a mais ativa rede que reúne ONG e a Internacional da Educação - federação de associações e de sindicatos da área da educação. A CGE, no âmbito da sua ação, promove e reforça ativamente as coligações/redes pelo direito à educação a nível regional e nacional. Estas organizações traçaram as Recomendações Parktonian (Joanesburgo, 2006), a fim de estreitar a parceria estratégica entre ONG e Sindicatos de Professores e alcançar uma educação de qualidade para todos. Mais recentemente (abril, 2016) foram criadas as Recomendações de Dakar para definir formas concretas para implementar a nova Agenda de Educação. Tendo estes pressupostos em mente, o presente artigo pretende analisar, de forma exploratória, o papel que os sindicatos de professores desempenham nas coligações/redes pelo direito à educação na Guiné-Bissau e em Moçambique e as tensões que emergem deste processo. Conclui-se que as circunstâncias históricas e o presente contexto dos países são cruciais para perceber o papel dos sindicatos dos professores nas coligações/redes nacionais pelo direito à educação.