Abstract
Public-sector teachers are tremendously important politically for four reasons: (1) they are found in every village, town, and city (only the postal service is as territorially ubiquitous) and so constitute a potential nationwide power base; (2) because teaching is inherently labor intensive, there are a lot of teachers: when they unionize, they are often the biggest unions in the country; (3) such teachers are the public employees who interact most often, and in the largest numbers, with the citizenry; and, last but not least, (4) the work that teachers do, both the subject matter they convey and the processes by which they convey it, plays a major role in shaping how citizens understand themselves, the state, and the relationship between the two (including, potentially, the legitimacy of the political order).
Given all this, it is not surprising that states strive to control not only curriculum and pedagogy, but also teachers’ capacity to organize and engage in collective action, particularly forms of collective action intended to impact electoral politics and/or policy priorities and outcomes. The larger the teacher corps grows, with the extension of mandatory public education from the primary to the secondary school level, the greater these potential impacts become, and so the greater the felt need to control teachers. Faced with such efforts by the state, it is not surprising that teachers seek to organize in order to pursue more effectively better compensation, academic freedom and professional autonomy, and their conceptions of justice. The two contradictory imperatives seem bound to give rise to highly contentious politics.
What is, perhaps, surprising, given all this, is how little scholarly attention has been paid to teachers and their unions, relative to other types of workers and unions. In Teaching Marianne and Uncle Sam, Nicholas Toloudis, drawing on the kind of comparative historical sociology developed by Charles Tilly, helps to fill this gap. Toloudis compares the evolution of teachers’ organizations and their relationship to the state, in France and New York City, from the formation of systems of public education through to 1968. He argues that comparing France and the United States is useful because their contrasting political institutions (federal state and highly decentralized education policy versus unitary state and increasingly centralized education policy) generate very different dynamics between state and teacher organizations. The decentralized nature of the U.S. system makes a focus on one (or more) cities sensible; the choice of New York over possible alternatives is driven mainly, the author says, by the wealth of available scholarly materials.
Toloudis’ analysis is organized around two basic themes: (1) how state efforts to increase control over teachers and their associations provoke teacher organization and radicalization; and (2) how states respond to teacher organizing and radicalization by encouraging status divisions among different types of teachers and making limited deals with more conservative associations or unions, while attempting to marginalize the more radical ones. In the United States and France, the state strategy in these struggles entails “centralization,” though one can imagine struggles for control in which state strategy dictates decentralization (Canada might be such a case; see below). Toloudis calls the second process “selective engagement.”
In the New York case, teachers were already organized and politically active in each of the city’s wards. New York’s “centralization” moment occured as part of the effort of Progressive-era reformers to break urban machine politics (i.e., Tammany Hall). Progressive reformers, despite furious teacher opposition, succeeded in shifting decisions about curriculum and hiring away from local ward trustees, over which teachers had considerable influence, to a city-wide Board of Education. The new structure encouraged the formation of city-wide teachers’ organizations based less on ties to particular ethnic immigrant communities than on other collective identities. In particular, New York City’s new teacher organizations remained divided on two dimensions: K–8 versus high school (with women dominating the first and men the second), and radical (socialists and communists) versus “bread and butter” visions of what unions and society ought to be. With the Cold War, it became possible to isolate and crush the Teachers’ Union (TU), in which communists played the leading role; and the cooperation required for successful struggles to secure better wages and academic freedom gradually eroded status distinctions and more specific conflicts of interest among the unions, paving the way for the formation of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in 1960.
In France, teachers remained highly fragmented, with their organizations extending no further than the Department level, until the Third Republic. Catholic Church efforts to roll back public education and/or subordinate public school teachers to the authority of parish priests generated intense anti-clericalism among public school teachers. As tensions between secular republicans and religious conservatives intensified in the 1890s, politicians in the former camp realized that public school teachers could be a powerful political force in defense of their ideals, and passed laws to encourage the rapid growth of national teacher organizations and promote their esprit de corps. These associations were not yet functioning as unions. It took the devastation of World War One to radicalize enough teachers to change that. By 1923, both major teachers’ federations identified themselves as trade unions and demanded the legal right to organize as such; by 1928, France’s two major labor federations had organized more than 70 percent of France’s teachers, compared with just 10 percent of blue-collar workers (p. 121). In the wake of World War Two, teachers formed their own national federation (FEN); and over the next five years, FEN organized the first large-scale teachers’ strikes, autonomous from other state workers, in French history. A law legalizing public sector unions, including teachers, was finally passed in 1949, but by then France’s teachers had already established that right de facto.
The framework that Toloudis brings to the analysis of his cases is useful for organizing his historical presentation because it highlights key causal relationships, but it is not a fully developed theory. We may see this more clearly if we broaden the comparative net to include Canada. In that country, educational policy and teacher organization occurs mainly at the provincial level, rather than the national level as in France or the city level as in the United States. Selective engagement dynamics doubtless favored more conservative teachers’ associations and unions as they did in the other two countries, but in Canada this imperative did not result in centralization of state policy or teacher organizations. While both France and the United States had one or two national teachers’ unions by the 1960s, Canada still has different K–12 teachers’ unions in every province and no national federation of these provincial unions. This despite the fact that most other public sector workers are organized into two major national unions (CUPE and NUPGE), and university faculty almost all belong to a single national federation (CAUT). Moreover, some provinces (such as Ontario) have multiple teachers’ unions while others (e.g., British Columbia) have just one. To explain these kinds of international and inter-provincial variations, we need more analytic tools and a more fully developed theory than this book provides. That said, anyone who aspires to develop a theory capable of explaining such variations must read this book.