7. INNOVATIVE LOCAL TEACHER UNIONS: WHAT HAVE THEY ACCOMPLISHED?

Abstract

Soon after Dal Lawrence became the first president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers (TFT) in 1967, he began an effort to expand the union’s role in teachers’ evaluations. Throughout most of the 1970s, the union pressed for greater job protection as well as a peer evaluation program for new teachers; a proposal that the school district refused repeatedly over that decade. In the 1981 contract negotiation, however, the district declared itself willing to include the issue, provided that the union would consider an intervention program for nonperforming teachers. This agreement – now in its third decade, despite a number of conflicts between the district and the union over the years – provided a framework for a totally new process of teacher assessment based on peer evaluation, the Toledo Plan (American Educator, 1984; Bradley, 1998b; Lawton, 1996). In the Toledo Plan, for the first time, teachers would be evaluating each other’s work, with real consequences for those who were not able to successfully meet agreed-upon expectations. “The idea of a teacher union evaluating members of its own bargaining unit was so controversial,” noted Gallegher, Lanier, and Kerchner (1993), “that the TFT president Dal Lawrence waited several months before telling a shocked American Federation of Teachers (AFT) executive council what he had done” (p. 158).

Citation

Murray, C.E. (2004), "7. INNOVATIVE LOCAL TEACHER UNIONS: WHAT HAVE THEY ACCOMPLISHED?", Henderson, R.D., Urban, W. and Wolman, P. (Ed.) Teacher Unions and Education Policy: Retrenchment of Reform? (Advances in Education in Diverse Communities, Vol. 3), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 149-166. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1479-358X(04)03007-4