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Randall W. Eberts, Ph.D., is the executive director of the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, Kalamazoo, Michigan.Mary Hatwood Futrell, Ed.D., is president of Education International (EI), headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, and dean of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at George Washington University, Washington, DC.Bob Harris, M.A., Dip.T (Sec.), (Australia), advanced study at the Institut Universitaire des Hautes Etudes Internationales, Geneva, is a former EI executive director and current senior consultant based in Nyon, Switzerland.Ronald D. Henderson, Ph.D., is the director of the Research Department at the National Education Association, Washington, DC.Rachel Hendrickson, Ph.D., is the higher education coordinator in the Membership and Organizing Department at the National Education Association, Washington, DC.Kevin Hollenbeck, Ph.D., is a senior economist and director of publications at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, Kalamazoo, Michigan.Susan Moore Johnson, Ed.D., is Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Professor of Teaching and Learning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Charles T. Kerchner, Ph.D., is Hollis P. Allen Professor of Education at the Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California.Julia E. Koppich, Ph.D., is president of Koppich & Associates, an education policy research and consulting firm, in San Francisco, California.Carrie M. Lewis, J.D., is a senior writer-editor in the Government Relations Department at the National Education Association, Washington, DC.Christine Maitland, Ph.D., is a former higher education coordinator for the National Education Association who now works on higher education issues with the NEA’s Pacific Regional Office in Burlingame, California.Christine E. Murray, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Education and Human Development and dean of the School of Professions, State University of New York College at Brockport.Diane Shust, J.D., M.S.Ed., is the director of the Government Relations Department at the National Education Association, Washington, DC.Joe A. Stone, Ph.D., is W. E. Miner Professor of Economics at the University of Oregon, Eugene.Wayne J. Urban, Ph.D., is Regents’ Professor of Education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University, Atlanta.Fred van Leeuwen is the general secretary of Education International, Brussels, Belgium.Maris A. Vinovskis, Ph.D., is Bentley Professor of History, senior research scientist at the Institute for Social Research, and faculty member of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.Paul Wolman, Ph.D., is a senior policy analyst in the Research Department at the National Education Association, Washington, DC.

The way in which the international teacher organizations evolved suggests both the advantages and the difficulties of maintaining a coherent and purposeful international organization for education advocacy (the abbreviations and acronyms for all the organizations are spelled out for reference in Appendix A to this chapter; the complex succession of organizations is traced in a table, presented as Appendix B to this chapter). The international teacher organizations began at the outset of the 20th century in Europe.¹ The first of these, founded in 1905 and centering on the concerns of primary school teachers, was the International Bureau of Federations of Teachers (IBFT; it became the International Federation of Teachers’ Associations [IFTA] in 1926). The second, founded in 1912, was the International Foundation of Secondary Teachers (known by its French acronym, FIPESO, the Fédération internationale des professeurs de l’enseignement secondaire officielle).

The public has long been led to believe that the connection between teacher unions and quality education is negligible or even a contradiction in terms. For an example of that view, one barely needs to go beyond the title of a 1996 U.S. News & World Report cover story, “Why Teachers Don’t Teach.” The story essentially tells the public that the teacher unions bear most of the blame, that they have used their money and muscle to preserve their own privileges and to stave off efforts at reforms aimed at improving educational quality. The two major teacher unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), are the main targets of this criticism.

Evaluating the political influence of a teachers’ union is, necessarily, a somewhat subjective task. It appears to me that the teacher unions’ power, as measured by their membership strength, has remained healthy and in fact increased slightly since 1988. The most recent public figures for the NEA and the AFT indicate that the two organizations are collectively nearing four million members – counting the NEA’s membership of 2.7 million and the AFT’s just over one million (Newman, 2000). As a measure of the unions’ ability to mobilize teachers, however, those numbers may overstate the case for power. In the AFT, approximately half of its membership now comes from teacher aides and other non-teaching personnel such as school bus drivers (Keller, 2002). Even so, the number of teachers who are members of the NEA and AFT is considerable, and any explanation of a diminished political influence on the part of those unions must deal with the issue of their large memberships.

By 2006, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards had offered advanced certification to 50,000 accomplished teachers using performance-based assessments of their teaching knowledge and practice (about 2% of the US teaching force). However, the Board has had much greater impact than the initial numbers of certified teachers suggested. As the first professional effort to define accomplished teaching, it has also had an enormous influence on standard-setting for beginning teacher licensing, teacher education programs, teacher assessment, on-the-job evaluation, and professional development for teachers throughout the United States. This chapter describes some of the results of the Board's work, evaluates its impact, and discusses issues that it raises for the future of teaching and the nature of the teaching career.

Many Black women continue to negotiate their way within higher education institutions, which are influenced by social class, race, and gender biases. Several scholars contend that Black women’s objectification as the “other” and “outsider within” (Collins, 2000; Fitzgerald, 2014; Jean-Marie, 2014) is still apparent in today’s institutions yet many persist to ascend to top leadership positions (Bates, 2007; Epps, 2008; Evans, 2007; Hamilton, 2004; Jean-Marie, 2006, 2008). In particular, the inroads made by Black women administrators in both predominantly white colleges (PWIs) as well as historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) depict a rich and enduring history of providing leadership to effect social change in the African American community (i.e., uplift the race) and at large (Bates, 2007; Dede & Poats, 2008; Evans, 2007; Hine, 1994; Miller & Vaughn, 1997). There is a growing body of literature exploring Black women’s leadership in higher education, and most research have focused on their experiences in predominantly white institutions (Bower & Wolverton, 2009; Dixon, 2005; Harris, Wright, & Msengi, 2011; Jordan, 1994; Rusher, 1996; Turner, 2008). A review of the literature points to the paucity of research on their experiences and issues of race and gender continue to have an effect on the advancement of Black women in the academy. In this chapter, we examine factors that create hindrance to the transformation of the composition, structure, and power of leadership paradigm with a particular focus on Black women administrators and those at the presidency at HBCUs. From a review of the literature, our synthesis is based on major themes and subthemes that emerged and guide our analysis in this chapter. The chapter concludes with recommendations for identifying and developing Black women leaders to diversify the leadership pipeline at HBCUs and other institutions for the future.

Many years ago, the amazing literary giant and social critic James Baldwin was never more profound when he noted that “Color is not a human or a personal reality in America, it is a political reality” (Baldwin, 1963, p. 139). If we ever had any doubts about the currency of Baldwin's commentary, we have only to remember the remarks by Senator Trent Lott (R-Mississippi) and his subsequent resignation as Senate Majority leader, in the U.S. Congress. Lott was under criticism for his remarks at a party celebrating the 100th birthday of Senator Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina), who ran unsuccessfully for president in 1948 on a segregationist platform. At the birthday celebration, Lott said the nation would have been better off had Thurmond won that election. The damages in Senator Lott's comments are not simply that they are offensive as a characterization of our national past. The damage is that his words imply an intention or acceptance of racial segregation as the continuing reality of America's future. Lott's remarks are but reflective of the Southern Manifesto or the Nixonian strategy, often called the ‘bubba factor.’ The strategy was to reclaim the south by appealing to the fears of southern white men. This blatant Confederate viewpoint was furthered and joined by conservative scholars and activists who developed the counterattack programs to dismantle the civil rights agenda and social programs, aimed at equalizing educational opportunity. The code word was “reverse discrimination.”

The changing nature of work has led to the increased use of teams and increased importance of contextual performance. However, there has been no published research that considers the confluence of these two trends. This chapter addresses this gap. We illustrate how scholars have focused attention on team processes related to the completion of teams' tasks (i.e. taskwork) and also on team processes related to the maintenance of teams' social systems (i.e. teamwork). We suggest that contextual performance (i.e. individual-level behavior that supports the social, organizational, and psychological environment in which task behaviors are performed) underlies teamwork, and task performance (i.e. individual-level behavior focused directly or in support of task accomplishment) underlies taskwork. Because contextual performance research specifies links between specific individual differences and task performance (i.e. individual differences in ability) and contextual performance (i.e. individual differences in personality), this framework provides a foundation for understanding how individual differences ultimately influence team effectiveness. We note several unresolved issues and possible future research directions.