No abstract

Despite the growing media attention paid to charter-school unions, comparatively little empirical research exists. Drawing on interview data from two cities (Detroit, MI, and New Orleans, LA), our exploratory study examined charter-school teachers’ motivations for organizing, the political and power dimensions, and the framing of unions by both teachers and administrations. We found that improving teacher retention, and thus school stability, was a central motivation for teacher organizers, whereas, simultaneously, high teacher turnover stymied union drives. We also found that charter administrators reacted with severity to nascent unionization drives, harnessing school-as-family metaphors and at-will contracts to prevent union formation. As the charter sector continues to grow, understanding why teachers want unions and how those unions differ from traditional public school unions is crucial to analyzing the long-term viability of these schools and the career trajectories of the teachers who work in them.

When American Federation of Teachers-Local 527 launched their collective bargaining campaign in 1965, they were one of five mostly segregated teachers’ locals in New Orleans and represented a minority of the system’s educators. Spurred on by the National, who saw them as the lynchpin to organizing the South, they held a three-day job action, the first teachers’ strike in the South, in 1966 and then a longer nine-day strike in 1969. Through these mobilizations, they connected their demand for collective bargaining to racial and economic equity in the schools, aligning themselves with Black students, parents, and lower paid support workers. In the early 1970s, New Orleans underwent an ambitious faculty desegregation program that transformed the schools and led to the merger between Local 527 and the majority-white National Education Association (NEA) local to form the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO). Although faculty desegregation was a top-down reform, the union capitalized on teacher integration to form intentional alliances across race and mobilize new members. Following the merger, UTNO renewed their call for collective bargaining, eventually pressuring the board to approve an election in 1974. I argue that by positioning racial justice as central to their union organizing, prioritizing participatory democracy among membership, and engaging in civil rights unionism, UTNO succeeded in achieving collective bargaining when so many other Southern cities failed.