The GEW actively supported these reforms, while the teaching organizations of the DBB Federation of Civil Servants believed that traditional and selective schools were under threat, and subsequently helped to create the conservative union DL led by DPhV. During this period the GEW attempted to unite the different categories of teachers by obtaining identical training periods and salaries, while the DPhV sought to maintain a professional distinction between them.
Education, teaching, and professional training. Print PDF. Recommanded articles. Religions and education in Europe nineteenth to twenty-first century. Unified schools and equal opportunity in Europe during the twentieth century. In the racial battles of the era, teachers were sometimes made the target of public anger in a way that was unprecedented and seemed quite threatening.
As a result, the AFT became appealing to many teachers to whom it had not been before. The NEA shed those members who were not classroom teachers and traded its identity as a professional organization for a new one as a trade union. The newly energized teachers unions appealed to the AFL-CIO for help in getting state legislatures to pass laws that put teachers on much the same footing as those in unions representing workers in the private sector. The AFL-CIO was stronger then than it is now, and the teachers could put more feet on the ground in legislative political campaigns than any other single constituency.
This was particularly true in the northern part of the country, where organized labor was strongest at the state level. In the beginning, the lawyers that management hired were happy to negotiate contracts that closely followed common practice in the industrial sector.
But others had major consequences for the quality of teachers and for instruction. Among the most important of these provisions were those defining the hours of work, using seniority to determine who could transfer to jobs within the system as they opened up, and the order in which people would be laid off when staff size was reduced.
Many now think of these seniority-based rules as the result of collective bargaining. But such practices began in other industries in the s—before there was any national legislation mandating collective bargaining—and were part and parcel of the mass-production workplace. Management wanted rules that were easy to administer, and, in a world in which all workers were treated as interchangeable, such a system worked well for managers in most industries.
But the organizational costs were substantial. Thus, school boards and management gave away control over who could be hired in a school, who could fill leadership positions, how much time was available for professional development, and much, much more.
Few citizens were aware of the significance of the concessions that school boards made to unions over the years. Both school boards and the unions greatly feared teacher strikes, knowing that there were few things that could anger parents as much as not being able to put their children in school when they had to go off to work in the morning. While the teachers unions could seek higher compensation at the negotiating table, they quickly discovered that they would lose public support if the school board sought the authority to pay for raises by floating new bonds, for example.
When times were tough, it was often easier for both management and labor to negotiate increased benefits, particularly retirement benefits, than increased cash compensation, because, again, the public focused on current costs rather than on obligations that would not have to be paid for many years. The unions typically negotiated benefits that would be most attractive to their longest-serving members.
Over time, the compensation package got more and more expensive but less and less attractive to talented young people making decisions about which occupation to pursue. In the context of American-style labor relations, and the politics of American schooling, this was probably inevitable. The adversarial model of labor relations embodied in the national labor laws initially applied only to the private sector, but when President Kennedy, in an executive order, allowed members of the federal workforce to organize, state legislators adopted the private-sector model for public employees.
Public-sector unions were told by their attorneys that their members could sue if they did not defend the teachers in court against school district management seeking to deprive them of their jobs.
So the union lawyers routinely made it as difficult as possible to fire teachers, even those widely regarded as incompetent. Given the adversarial nature of the relationship, there was never any real possibility of teachers accepting joint responsibility for student performance outcomes, as was the case with unions in northern Europe, where the relationship has never been hostile.
In the United States, student performance was the responsibility of management, not labor. Today, American teachers want to be viewed as professionals, but their experience tells them they need their membership in the union and the clout that they have in the state legislature, even in states that do not allow them to organize.
Without the unions, they might lose ground economically and be at the mercy of management that often does not treat them as professionals. These dynamics set the stage for the current confrontation in the United States between the unions and the teachers on one side and, increasingly, school district management, legislatures, governors, and the public on the other.
The unions are perceived to be standing in the way of badly needed reforms, protecting incompetent teachers, and putting up barricades to prevent the erosion of pension benefits the public can no longer afford.
It is hardly surprising that teachers and their unions are circling the wagons to salvage as much as possible of what they have gained since the s. Finland is famously a world leader in student performance. It also has some of the strongest unions in the world, and that includes its teachers unions.
The winning combination is top-quality recruits, first-rate training, and teachers with the kind of autonomy—read trust—typically accorded to other professionals but rarely to teachers. There are no top-down accountability systems in Finland, with their implied distrust of teachers, of the sort that dominate the discussion in the United States. It is hard to say which came first, the trust in the teachers or their quality, but they clearly go hand in hand.
In Ontario, Canada, one of the great PISA Programme for International Student Assessment success stories, the current provincial administration took over from one that had instituted a province-wide curriculum and matching assessments, along with a tough accountability system. But the Conservative government that put these policies in place had gone to war with the teachers and their unions, cutting funding, reducing professional development by half, and taking out television ads demonizing teachers.
ITSs actually predate World War II, but were reorganized after the war as part of the family of international labor confederations. From the beginning a small minority of national unions questioned the wisdom of creating an international union organization that included organizations from the Soviet Union and communist-controlled Eastern European countries, arguing that such unions were not independent from the state and from controlling communist parties. However, at that time the impulse to create a workers' international overcame any qualms about the validity of unions in communist-controlled countries.
This brief period of labor unity ended in Between and , it became increasingly clear to union leaders in democratic countries that so-called unions in Russia and Eastern Europe were actually front organizations that served the foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union, rather that the legitimate interests of workers.
The efforts of these communist-controlled unions to block any criticism of the Soviet role in the coup in Czechoslovakia proved to be a breaking point. ITSs that had previously included both communist and noncommunist members also split, and new democratic ITSs were organized.
The word free in the titles of new international labor organizations signaled that they were democratic internationals e. Socialist and social democratic unions typically led these international labor organizations. The Soviet Union's internationals were composed of labor fronts from Eastern-bloc nations and communist-dominated unions in Western Europe and other parts of the world.
The third political strand in the international labor world was that of the Christian Democrats. The Christian Democratic political movement, founded by the Catholic Church in the first half of the twentieth century in response to the growth of communist and socialist movements, included the organization of fraternal labor movements at the national and international levels.
The WCOTP differed from the other teacher internationals by its lack of political orientation and, at least originally, any union orientation. It was created at a time when most national teachers' organizations were dominated either by school administrators or by teachers who had little interest in traditional union activity.
The American Federation of Teachers was founded as a labor union and was a member of the original AFL, as well as being a founding member of the IFFTU—the social democratic—oriented teachers' international. In contrast the WCOTP would accept organizations with any or no political orientation—and with little concern about an organization's independence from government or political parties, as long as it claimed to represent educators.
The ideological identification of the IFFTU did not mean that all its members were affiliated with, or directly connected to, a democratic socialist party. Rather, it indicated that the traditional leadership of the IFFTU unions tended to relate to social democratic movements or with similar parties, such as the Democratic Party in the United States. For example, most Scandinavian teachers' organizations were affiliated with the WCOTP until the beginning of the s.
With one notable exception, the internationals did not prohibit members from being simultaneously affiliated with other teacher internationals.
Generally, teachers' organizations from developed countries did not hold dual affiliations, for economic reasons, among other factors—it was not practical to pay dues to multiple organizations.
Many teachers' organizations from poorer countries, however, held more than one affiliation in order to benefit from financial assistance from different international organizations and free participation in international conferences and congresses—while paying little or nothing in membership fees to any international.
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