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The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze how the Swedish Association of Biology Teachers (ABT) and some other subject associations helped form pre-service biology teacher education in two major Swedish reforms from ca. 1960 to 1990.

The activities of subject associations can be understood as boundary-work since they defend their subject boundaries in terms of content, space in the timetable, and legitimacy. A hermeneutic method of text interpretation is employed in analyzing historical archival and parliamentary material.

The work of the ABT to demarcate their subject in the 1968 and 1988 Teacher Education Reforms may seem like merely defending certain biological items instead of others, in the name of science. However, it was also a professional struggle to assert the importance of the teachers, their jobs, education, knowledge of biology subject matter, and thereby their professional authority and autonomy. The ABT were also caught in a political struggle for their subject throughout the period of investigation. Depending on the political winds of the time they therefore had to ally themselves with or distance themselves from various actors.

In comparison with the few other studies of subject associations, this paper is unique in outlining how the ABT acted in relation to teacher education. However, the ways of doing boundary-work were still very similar to those used by subject associations in schools in other countries, especially in acting for increased study time in their respective science subjects as well as their resistance to subject integration. An obvious conclusion regarding teacher education is that subject associations such as the ABT did not contribute to bridging the gap between subject matter and pedagogy but rather the opposite. Biology teacher education was seen as an academic pursuit carried out at universities rather than at the practically oriented teacher training colleges.

The NEA did not begin as a teachers’ organization, as such. Rather, the organization began in 1870 as a federation of four organizations representing distinctly different perspectives: the American Normal School Association, the National Association of School Superintendents, the Central College Association, and the National Teachers Association (Elsbree, 1939, pp. 264–265, 500). Only the last of these groups, the NTA, formed in 1857 from 10 state teachers’ associations, actually represented teachers, and for roughly the first 100 years of its existence, the NEA was controlled by administrators rather than teachers, frequently worked against teachers’ interests (especially when they conflicted with administrative or supervisory priorities), and opposed collective bargaining. Although the NEA lobbied fairly effectively on the state level on issues such as increasing expenditures on education, consolidating and professionalizing administration of school districts, and establishing certification and standards for teachers, its unwillingness or inability to support candidates for federal elections made it relatively less successful on the national level.

More than five years have passed since A Nation at Risk was published in 1983 by then‐Secretary of Education Terrance Bell's National Commission on Excellence in Education. Those years have seen the publication of an enormous body of both primary material, composed of research reports, essays, and federal and state reform proposals and reports; and secondary material, composed of summaries and reviews of the original reform reports and reports about effective programs that are based on reform recommendations. This annotated bibliography seeks to identify, briefly describe, and organize in a useful manner those publications dealing with K‐12 education reform and improvement. The overall purposes of this article are to bring organization to that list, and also to trace relationships and influences from the federal initiatives to the states and professional associations, and from there to the school districts and individual schools.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the way informal groups rise and operate in the Teacher Association in a Secondary Vocational School Unit in Greece. More specifically, the way the role of the head teacher, the school culture and teachers’ emotional intelligence impacts these groups is investigated.

Qualitative research through in-depth interviews with teachers and the head teacher as well as the researchers’ participatory observation has been conducted, in order to support the selected method of the case-study.

The findings showed how both positive and negative informal groups rise and function in the Teacher Association. The role of the head teacher emerges as a very significant factor that influences the emergence and the preservation of such groups. The school culture has a bidirectional relation with the existence and quality of informal groups. Emotional intelligence also plays an important role in forming informal groups and in the quality of actions of these groups.

This study covers a significant gap in the international literature of group dynamics in a Teacher Association and provides practitioners with valuable insights regarding the underexamined factors that lead to the formation, operation and preservation of informal groups, the study of which can lead to the development of sophisticated scales of measurement of these dynamics by future researchers.

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).

Purpose – This chapter focuses on the challenges of introducing a nationally consistent and credible system for recognizing and rewarding accomplished teachers − a standard-based professional learning and certification system. Such systems aim to provide attractive incentives for professional learning for all teachers, in contrast with competitive merit pay or one-off bonus pay schemes.Methodology – The chapter provides a case study of one country’s progress in reforming teacher career structures and pay systems, and it also draws on the experience of other countries that have been pursuing similar policies, such as Chile, England, Scotland, and the United States. Using document analysis and interviews with key stakeholders, the chapter describes progress in Australia’s latest attempt to introduce a system for the certification of teachers, this time at two levels – the Highly Accomplished Teacher and Lead Teacher levels.Findings – Despite strong support in principle by the main stakeholders, implementation is proving difficult in changing political and economic contexts. Reasons for these difficulties are compared with problems in other countries as they seek to implement advanced certification schemes.Practical implications – The Australian case indicates the importance of ensuring that agencies established to provide professional certification have the independence, stability, and professional ownership they need to carry out their function effectively.Social implications – Recent Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports highlight the relationship between the degree to which the work of teaching has been professionalized and student performance. An independent professional certification system is a concrete and relevant way for countries to “professionalize” teaching and treat their teachers as trusted professional partners; however, the Australian case indicates some of the challenges involved in making this a reality.Value – The chapter is the first to compare professional certification schemes in different countries and analyze factors affecting their success.

The article aims to use the globalization theory and the implications of democratization for social policy to analyze the school governance reforms in Taiwan and South Korea.

The article describes the main features of decentralization policy in the school sectors in the two societies with a historical review of their democratic transition and educational reforms during the 1990s. It then classifies decentralization into two categories, namely managerial decentralization and societal decentralization, by conceptualizing their context, rationales and policy instruments. It closes by considering the implications of Taiwan's and South Korea's experiences for educational decentralization and education reforms.

It is found that in Taiwan there is a comprehensive and institutionalized empowerment of teachers and parents but full institutionalization of involvement of the school community is still in progress in South Korea.

This article reviews and compares the development and major changes of school governance in Taiwan and South Korea.

After the American Revolution, educational opportunities expanded with the growth of the new democracy, especially in New England and the Middle Atlantic states. For example, policymakers and the public responded to the broadening of white male suffrage in the early 19th century by increasing the number of public and private schools. Americans also believed that women also needed to be more literate so that mothers could help in the education of their children. By the eve of the Civil War, schooling was almost universally available for the white population everywhere except in the South. There, poverty and lower population density still hindered the expansion of schools (Kaestle, 1983; Kaestle & Vinovskis, 1980).