Unforeseen forces are at work in higher education today. The purpose of this article is to explore the issues involved in the changing landscape. Decisions are and will be made that impact the intellectual property rights of faculty. It is important to be cognizant of the factors involved and alert to possible ramifications. The basics of the…

Back in the mid-2000s, in public and in the news media, Joseph P. Burke, then superintendent of the Springfield public schools, and Timothy T. Collins, president of the local teachers' union, often seemed to be at odds with each other. Out of the public eye, however, the two men had begun meeting regularly. When Burke left the district, the work…

Faculty unions outside Michigan have reason to be concerned with its passage of legislation barring unions from collecting fees from workers who do not join them. But the experiences of faculty unions in states that adopted such laws years ago suggest that while the measures can be a major hindrance to their work, they are not a death blow.…

Teachers are our most valuable resource in education, and teacher leaders can maximize their impact on student learning by extending their impact beyond their own classrooms. Effective teacher leaders share their expertise, support the growth of other teachers, and increase the quality of instruction. This policy snapshot summarizes the literature…

Today, more than 60 percent of teachers in the United States work under a union contract. The rights of teachers to unionize and bargain together have expanded dramatically since the late 1950s, when states began passing "duty-to-bargain" (DTB) laws that required school districts to negotiate with teachers unions in good faith. Recently,…

The recent decision by a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Northwestern University football players on scholarship are "employees" entitled to unionize under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) should serve as a wake-up call for higher education administrators. Part of a trend in which both the NLRB…

Perhaps the most predictable lesson learned about the imposition of fiscal austerity over the past few years has been that it has generally failed where it has been tried. A recent Education International study of EI members examines global trends in freedom of association and collective bargaining in the education sector since the 2008 financial…

Public education has historically been in the public and political eye. Then came 2011 and the high profile and well televised protests in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana. In each case Republican Governors and Republican controlled state legislatures had introduced substantially similar bills that sought sweeping changes to each state's collective…

Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the contours of neoliberalism took shape, as individual corporations implemented new strategies seeking to shift the frontier of control in their favor and increase their profits. Their actions began to shape the political and economic practices of both major political parties, and the orientation of…

Rising health insurance costs have been a source of fiscal distress for school districts. In this paper, I closely examine data from the National Compensation Survey (NCS) of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to address a few basic questions: (1) Are district costs for teachers' health insurance higher, on average, than employer costs for…

The purpose of this paper is to address the need for guidance on professional standards for educational practices in online education. Since 1995, the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) has provided leadership in the introduction and successful implementation of distance education. During this time, the ASCCC has played a…

School systems are currently faced with critical recovery needs as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Leaders must decide how to allocate nearly $200 billion of federal funding, which has the potential to significantly impact efforts to accelerate learning and provide student well-being supports, especially for students who have been…

This article provides a case study of union change in an environment in which radical school restructuring is taking place, and active strategies to weaken and marginalize organized teachers are being pursued by the state. The case study union is the National Union of Teachers in England. The article explores a number of different strategies open…

The purpose of this study was to examine the general trend of education governance in the Canadian province of Ontario since 1995 when the Progressive Conservatives led by Michael Harris formed a new majority government. The article is divided into three sections. The first section provides the context and a historical background of Ontario…

Dissatisfaction with postdoctoral appointments is associated with demographics, career goals, types of research, postdoc-advisor interaction, and program quality. Rather than a simple inverse relationship to dissatisfaction, the effect of program quality depends on the postdoc's autonomy to shape a research project, interaction with an advisor,…