Fifteen Eighty Four

Mobilizing Teachers is a book that shows how teachers’ unions have turned into powerful labor organizations that developed different roles in the political arena. Teachers’ unions lie at the juncture of two global changes that are playing out in countries around the world. First, with labor unions in decline (because of changes including automation and globalization), public sector unions (and teachers specifically) are now at the forefront of the labor movement. Second, new growth models have highlighted the importance of human capital for sustaining economic development, and there have been calls for sweeping education reforms to bolster learning in the classroom.

Indeed, in countries like the United States that have centuries of experience with democratic governance, and in countries like Mexico that more recently transitioned to democracy, teachers’ unions have become flashpoints in public debates, because they are a bulwark of the labor movement (and may serve as a counterweight to the growing power of business interests) but also are a powerful organized group that may be an impediment to urgently needed education reforms. These unions are often criticized because they oppose reforms to evaluate teacher performance and incentivize better teaching, even when international standardized tests like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that many students in the United States and Mexico have not mastered basic skills and concepts. Debate about education reform has become polarized over the past 30 years, with calls for greater school choice and teacher accountability on one side and calls for greater education spending and specifically higher teacher pay on the other.

The rise of teachers’ unions has sparked significant debate in Latin America, where democratization and political reforms to include new societal actors in the 1990s gave teachers more space to articulate their demands. Throughout the region, the leaders of teachers’ unions are household names, who are either associated with protests and demands for better pay for teachers who endured precarious working conditions or electoral mobilization and corruption scandals. In Argentina in 1997, Marta Maffei helped to organize the White Tent protest, which became a major media spectacle in front of the national legislature, where nearly destitute teachers, many of whom were women from rural schools, camped out. By contrast, in Mexico Elba Esther Gordillo became a villain in the media, because she allegedly embezzled money from her union and used it to finance the campaign of her teacher-based party New Alliance.

This book provides an analytic framework for explaining the contrasting roles that teachers play in politics in the aftermath of democratization. Teachers’ unions participate in politics in different ways. Some rely primarily on protests, others gravitate towards left parties, and still others establish flexible alliances with whatever party is in power. There is divergence across countries, in terms of how teachers engage with governments, and there are established repertoires or tendencies for how this happens that endure over time.

Mobilizing Teachers undertakes a sweeping historical analysis of how teachers’ unions developed, beginning in the early 20^th century, when teachers organized movements to demand rudimentary labor rights and to protest against meager pay. Across countries, there is a point of inflection when these unions are founded, namely whether they are organized from the top-down with the assistance of governments or from the bottom-up and in opposition to the ruling elite. There is a second point of inflection decades later, during periods of political opening and democratization, when teachers’ unions again shifted their relationship to the government. In some cases, governments generously increased teacher pay and subsidized unions, in others they cracked down on protests and ignored teacher demands. This analysis provides insights into how these unions are organized and where power resides within their organization. The resources and capacities union leaders have at their disposal to mobilize teachers sets the stage for whether they mainly rely on protest, venture into the electoral arena with left parties, or set off on their own and negotiate instrumental alliances.

By focusing on organizational development, the contemporary politics of teachers in different countries are more clearly illuminated. Indeed, despite the many differences among the structure of the teaching profession, party politics, institutional design, and political culture in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico, and Peru, the national teachers’ union in each country has a distinctive structure that set the terms for its engagement in politics. Teachers are critical actors, in terms of their position in the labor movement, and their powerful influence over education policy. We need to understand them better, and we can do so by tracing them back to their origins, and highlighting the ways in which they shape different types of political debates.