Collectively Confronting COVID-19: Teachers Unions’ Respond to a Global Pandemic

• In Event: Enduring Lessons in Education Politics and Policy from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Though much has been written about teachers and their unions since March of 2020, both scholars and journalists have focused narrowly on the questions of whether or not schools would reopen to in-person learning and what role teachers’ unions have played in shaping that choice. These are important decisions; how and by whom they are made are important questions. Yet this narrow focus, like much of the scholarship on teachers’ unions, misses a more varied and complex picture. Leveraging four waves of semi-structured interviews with local and state union leaders as well as district-level case studies across 12 states, this study investigates how teachers’ unions have responded to the COVID-19 global pandemic. We find that they have done far more than negotiate over the resumption of in-person learning. Teacher union leaders have fought for safer in-person learning environments, demanded transparent data and decision-rules, sought resources to improve the quality of virtual instruction, elevated community concerns, and managed anxiety and conflicts among members. Given the absence of federal leadership and the vagueness of state guidance, their contributions to planning have often provided vital subsidy to school district capacity.

Authors

• Lesley Lavery, Macalester College

• Sara E. Dahill-Brown, Wake Forest University