This article reports on the rise of nonunion advocacy groups for teachers which has enabled them to cut their teeth on policy issues that affect the profession. The teachers' unions remain the most visible, powerful, and probably the most important advocates for teachers. But over the past few years, a number of new efforts have sprung up…

As a new breed of national education advocacy organizations gains clout, they're entering into often-uneasy relationships with teachers' unions--and running into a debate about whether they can play a grassroots "ground game" comparable to that of labor. For many unions, the policy changes the newer groups typically support--staffing based on…

A new generation of education advocacy groups has emerged to play a formidable political role in states and communities across the country. Those groups are shaping policy through aggressive lobbying and campaign activity--an evolution in advocacy that is primed to continue in the 2012 elections and beyond. Though the record of their electoral…

Can a teachers' union successfully be both a hardball-playing defender of its rights and a collaborative force for the common good? It is both a question of philosophy and, increasingly, one of policy direction for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), whose biennial convention in Detroit showed delegates grappling with the tension between…

Besieged by state proposals to eviscerate collective bargaining, eliminate teacher tenure, and make it harder to collect dues, teachers' unions are fighting back. Lawsuits supported by local union affiliates have for now blocked anti-union legislation in Alabama and Wisconsin. E-mail "blasts," phone banks, and rallies are also among the…