Public opinion, empirical research and personal experience all suggest that teacher unions have a strong tendency for reactivity to demands for educational change expressed by governments and teachers' employers.  because they are the legal organizations responsible for representing teachers' professional concerns, teacher unions are thus out in a less optimal position vis a vis promoting high quality teaching conditions.  This working paper considers the perspectives of organizational leaders with lengthy tenures in teacher unions, in five different jurisdictions around the world (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and the United States), in order to consider the extent to which and under what conditions their organizations have been able to take proactive, agentic stances, in support of teachers, teaching, and the quality of public education, in relation to educational reforms.

The paper draws on two typologies developed by other researchers to characterize the different stances teacher unions may take with respect to educational reform. The first one, developed by Carter and Stevenson (2009) characterizes three distinct stances taken by teacher organizations. One is "resistance", reacting to plans or proposals established without their participation.  Another is "rapprochement", that is going along with the plans of others for strategic reasons. The third is "renewal", a proactive stance where the union takes its cues from the realities of its own members and develops distinct ideas, proposals and plans of its own.

The second typology was articulated by Thompson and Sellar (2018) based on the writing of Deleuse and Guatari in A Thousand Plateaus.  This typology identifies three distinct responses when encountering changes in circumstances.  The first they call "breaks", a state of making sense of new realities in terms of previous understandings, leading to incremental shifts in sense making. The second, "cracks," reflects situations where an individual , group or organization's encounter with a new reality is not readily understandable in terms of pervious understandings, resulting in stasis: the entity is unable to make sense and thus to consider a way forward.  Finally, the third type is "ruptures," where new information or unusual events trigger whole new understandings of what is possible and what appropriate actions ought to be taken.

These two typologies, taken together, enable the researchers to distinguish how, and under what conditions, teacher unions attempt to improve upon, or at least shore up, the quality of teachers' conditions of work, their professional capacities, and the quality of public education more broadly.

For each of the five teacher unions (see above), two interview participants, senior long-standing organizational members, typically an elected official like president and a staff member such as general secretary. Each individual was interviewed in two sittings, roughly a week apart, for at least one hour. They were asked what events had shaped their organizations’ stances toward changing circumstances, how if at all these changed had led to shifts in organizational capacity for responding to or catalyzing changes to educational policy and practice. These interviews were transcribed, and a case was developed for each organization based on the four interviews. The researchers then conducted a cross-case analysis in order to develop more robust understandings of the choices and circumstances of teacher unions in relation to educational change. Individuals who were interviewed then were asked to read and comment both on their own organization’s case and the lessons emerging from the cross-case analysis.

Teachers and their organizations are structurally constrained by a variety of norms and laws in relation to formal policy decision makers, even in countries where unions are expected to play substantive roles in policy setting. Understanding this context more fully as it plays out in different places, and bringing forward instances of effective teacher union strategies, will enable these and other organizations to play more effective roles in determining the shape of educational policies and innovations such that they may bring forward the realities of teachers and teaching and improve the quality of educational practice.

Carter, B. & H. Stevenson (2009). Industrial Relations in Education: Transforming the School Workforce Taylor & Francis. Thompson, G & S. Sellar (2018). Datafication, testing events and the outside of thought. Learning, media and technology 43(2), 138-151.