Education International Research
Creating wider alliances The commitment to ‘open bargaining’ outlined above, with its emphasis on community engagement, highlights the importance of working within, and beyond, the union. This coalition building is a key priority as the unions seek to challenge dominant narratives and build support for alternatives. As one union officer stated, ‘The most effective way to combat that narrative is to live out a narrative that we want to define us.’ The Director of Human Rights and Community Relations for the AFT guides the work of community engagement organisers as they help local union affiliates understand the importance of, and increase their capacity to, work with communities. Several major cities, including Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, St. Paul, and Pittsburgh, have benefitted from community engagement organisation to challenge issues such as school closures, cuts in school funding, and standardised testing, and have organised community members to conduct school ‘walk ins’ in over 200 cities to demonstrate solidarity with teachers and public education. At a national level, this is reflected in the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS), an alliance of parent, youth, community, and labour organisations representing several million people across the country, fighting to reclaim the promise of public education as the nation's gateway to a strong democracy and racial and economic justice. AROS members and member organisations, which include both the AFT and the NEA, work to shift the public debate to support public education and build a national movement for equity. Meanwhile, in Minnesota, the union has created a Department of Policy, Research, and Outreach. One of its initiatives brought together a group of teachers to create a racial equity and social justice curriculum called ‘Facing Inequities and Racism in Education’ (FIRE). This has grown into a broader anti-racism and social justice movement of teachers in the state who call themselves ‘FIRE Teams’. Another innovation is the Educator Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), which brings together experienced teachers to create research-based policy proposals to address issues in Minnesota schools. This is done by combining academic literature reviews with the real-life experiences of teachers in the state. According to EPIC’s published materials, it ‘ensures policymakers will now have access simultaneously to the best academic research as well as to the thinking of front-line educators on the most pressing issues in education.’ EPIC has produced comprehensive policy briefs addressing Minnesota’s teacher shortage, universal preschool, full-service community schools, and standardised testing (see EPIC, 2016a, 2016b, for example). These briefs are presented to decision-makers at the state and national levels, and they have helped teachers to reclaim the public discourse about how to solve educational issues in the state.
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