Letter from the Editorial Board: An Unhappy Union?

Abstract

With recent film documentaries like Waiting for Superman and The Lottery receiving a lot of public attention, the American media has been increasingly critical of teacher unions, portraying messages that criticize the union's role in slowing democracy or school reform. In both films, teacher unions are portrayed as defending a status quo that sacrifices critical engagement and high performing outcomes of teachers and students for the selfish protection of teachers' eco- nomic interests. With these films being shown against a dismal economic backdrop of massive state budget cuts, education, and specifically teachers, are vulnerable targets of those cuts. As a response to the proposed cuts and potential layoffs, teachers in unions from Wisconsin to California have mobilized and protested for their right to participate in workplace and profes- sional decisions regarding their financial security, accountability, and standardized testing. In the midst of these protests, the public perception seems to be that teacher unions ignore the needs of children and stifle the democratic processes needed to improve pubic schools. Is this a fair perception? Are teacher unions inherently an adversary to democracy and school reform? Teacher unions have a mixed history, which includes an emphasis on professional education standards on the one hand and protection of economic rights on the other. The National Edu- cation Association (NEA), founded in 1857 as a professional association, was initially con- cerned about standards, ethics, and curriculum, while the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), founded in 1916, concerned itself with the protection of the wages and working con- ditions of teachers (Brimelow, 2003). Speaking at the NEA convention in St. Louis in 1904,