Drawing on Bachrach and Baratz’s first and second faces of interest group power, we explore the relationship between teachers’ union power and reopening decisions during the fall 2020 semester in 250 large districts around the United States. We leverage a self-collected panel data set of reopening decisions coupled with measures of teachers’ union first face power (drawn from social media postings on teachers’ unions’ Facebook pages) and second face power (operationalized as district size, whether the school district negotiates a collective bargaining agreement with the teachers’ union, the length of the collective bargaining agreement, and the amount of revenue raised by the union). We found that school districts where teachers’ unions exhibit strong second face power (but not first face power) were less likely to start the school year with in-person instruction, were less likely to ever open during fall semester with in-person instruction and spent fewer weeks in in-person learning.

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, school districts worked quickly to roll out distance learning plans in the spring. Sometimes these plans impinged upon or were directly in conflict with provisions found in collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) negotiated between teachers' unions and district administration. In this brief, we unpack how urban school systems changed CBAs to make way for learning under COVID-19 conditions. We review COVID-19-related contract changes in one hundred and one urban school districts around the country. We find that twenty-five urban school districts returned to the bargaining table with teachers' unions to negotiate short-term fixes to CBAs that allowed for more flexibility to implement distance learning. These contract changes focused on several areas of the CBA, including compensation, workload, non-teaching duties, evaluation, leave, and technology. We argue that the lessons learned in spring contract negotiations have implications for the design and implementation of fall schooling plans, and that how fall schooling plays out will shape teacher morale and labor relations beyond the 2020-21 school year.

Equality of opportunity is the aspiration of a just society, but the reality is that inequities remain entrenched in many aspects of America today. Structural inequities are deeply rooted conditions that are codified into the organization of social systems and produce disadvantages to some groups based on their intrinsic qualities or capabilities (Noguera & Alicia, 2020). The experience of schools in their transition to online learning in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020 illuminated many of the structural inequities that plague the education system. In this paper, we use the literature on structural inequities to identify and analyze seven inequities that schools faced during the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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In this article, we examine the extent to which women teachers ran for state legislative office in 2018, where they won, and the degree to which they contributed to the surge of women representatives elected in state legislatures around the country. We engaged in a comprehensive effort to collect information on all of the teacher candidates who ran for seats in state legislatures during the 2018 midterm elections. We found that 430 teacher candidates ran for a state legislative office. These candidates were fairly evenly split between men (51%) and women (49%), and tended to reflect the racial demographics of the teaching profession. Most teacher candidates ran as Democrats (69%) and 33% came from the six states that experienced teacher walkouts during spring 2018. We found that men and women teacher candidates were similarly likely to win the general election, but due to the higher proportion of women teacher candidates running relative to the men-dominated composition of state legislatures, the teacher candidates contributed to the increase in the descriptive representation of women in state legislatures after the 2018 midterm elections. Women teacher candidates won 61 seats in the 2018 midterm elections, which represents about 3% of the 1839 seats won by women in state legislatures in 2018. Although our work focuses on only a single election cycle, if teacher candidacy is a growing trend, then political engagement from the women-dominated profession of teaching may create new growth in the number of women lawmakers in the United States.