Teacher Organizing Across the Americas

Teacher Organizing Across the Americas explores why teachers' unions in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States, representing similar constituencies and fighting for comparable goals, have embraced radically different strategies. Through an ethnographic comparison of teacher organizing in São Paulo, Oaxaca, and New York, the book focuses on three key strategies in teacher organizing^—^leftist party politics, autonomist politics, and interest group politics^—^to demonstrate how the strategic choices teachers make matter for both schools and society. In São Paulo, teachers' leftist party politics helped to elect pro-labor presidents five times, with significant social reforms; yet these same politics failed to influence education policy and led to factionalism within the union. In Oaxaca, teachers' autonomous politics led to robust cultural initiatives, an innovative pedagogical proposal, and the capacity to boycott national education reforms, while also resulting in state repression and the near destruction of the teacher movement. Finally, in many U.S. cities in the 2000s, including New York City, teachers rejected interest group politics in favor of rank-and-file caucuses that prioritized union-community coalitions and racial justice, which also created new fault lines within the unions and an ambiguous relationship with electoral politics. Bringing together insights from labor studies and social movement scholars across the Global North and South, Teaching Organizing Across the Americas offers important lessons for both scholars and activists interested in transforming institutions like unions to promote more just schools and societies.