Charles Taylor Kerchner

Negotiating What Matters Most: Collective Bargaining and Student Achievement

Despite a statutorily narrow scope of bargaining, the scope of topics of union‐management discussions has widened over the last 20 years, resulting in the birth of reform, or professional, unionism. But over the last half decade, professional unionism has waned. School management often refuses to see unions as partners, politicians fail to view unions as legitimately speaking for education change, and unions themselves are reluctant to assume added responsibility. This article advocates a change in labor law, requiring union and management to negotiate student achievement goals, as a way of beginning to change these dynamics.

9. ORGANIZING AROUND QUALITY: THE STRUGGLE TO ORGANIZE MIND WORKERS

Teacher unions’ departures from industrial organizing are documented in a series of case studies and collections on reform-minded locals’ practices and contracts (see Johnson & Kardos, 2001; Kerchner & Koppich, 1993). Recently, investigators have collected data on union locals that belong to the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN), a group of NEA and AFT locals. For example, William Harju (2003), retired executive director of the San Diego Teachers Association, visited most of the TURN locals (working from a document collection schedule and case study format similar to the one in Kerchner & Koppich, 1993). Kerchner and Koppich, in recent unpublished work, visited Minneapolis, Columbus, and Rochester and made additional inquiries by telephone interview.1 TURN locals by no means represent the totality of union reform, and no encyclopedia of union reforms in the United States exists, but TURN locals are certainly among those with the longest experience and most extensive reforms.