Despite the growing media attention paid to charter-school unions, comparatively little empirical research exists. Drawing on interview data from two cities (Detroit, MI, and New Orleans, LA), our exploratory study examined charter-school teachers’ motivations for organizing, the political and power dimensions, and the framing of unions by both teachers and administrations. We found that improving teacher retention, and thus school stability, was a central motivation for teacher organizers, whereas, simultaneously, high teacher turnover stymied union drives. We also found that charter administrators reacted with severity to nascent unionization drives, harnessing school-as-family metaphors and at-will contracts to prevent union formation. As the charter sector continues to grow, understanding why teachers want unions and how those unions differ from traditional public school unions is crucial to analyzing the long-term viability of these schools and the career trajectories of the teachers who work in them.

中文翻译：

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特许部门的教师权力与工会组织政治


尽管媒体对特许学校工会的关注日益增长，但实证研究相对较少。我们的探索性研究利用来自两个城市（密歇根州底特律和路易斯安那州新奥尔良）的访谈数据，考察了特许学校教师的组织动机、政治和权力维度以及教师和行政部门对工会的框架。我们发现，提高教师保留率，从而提高学校稳定性，是教师组织者的核心动机，而与此同时，教师流动率高却阻碍了工会的发展。我们还发现，特许管理人员对新生的工会运动做出了严厉的反应，利用学校作为家庭的隐喻和随意合同来阻止工会的形成。随着特许行业的不断发展，了解教师为何需要工会以及这些工会与传统公立学校工会有何不同，对于分析这些学校的长期生存能力以及在这些学校工作的教师的职业轨迹至关重要。