Teachers’ unions provide the quintessential Rorschach test. Where their critics see intransigent interest groups opposed to commonsense education reforms, their defenders see unions as an essential champion of broader social welfare policies that will benefit the common good. In A Collective Pursuit, Lesley Lavery lays her cards firmly on the latter table, focusing on what she argues are the many areas in which teachers organize and mobilize for reasons that go far beyond their narrow self-interest.

The heart of the book is a series of in-depth case studies examining unionization in Minnesota charter schools. By presenting detailed case studies of unionization in two charter schools in the Twin Cities—the Community School of Excellence (CSE) and the Twin Cities German Immersion School (TCGIS)—paired with a broader qualitative look at the role unions have played in addressing racial inequality and school funding issues, Lavery argues that teachers’ unions have evolved from the simple industrial model to increasingly embrace “bargaining for the common good.” Far from being anachronistic or disconnected from school reform, she contends that unions offer “services both vital and varied”—not only for teachers as professionals but also for other education stakeholders (p. 8).

Although it has attracted comparatively little scholarly attention, there has been an unexpected spike in teacher organizing in the charter school sector. Consequently, Lavery’s focus on charter unionization is an important contribution that can help push scholars to look beyond the effects of unions in traditional district-run schools. For Lavery, the simple fact that charter teachers have sought to organize at all challenges “the notion that [school] reform and innovation must oppose unionization (and vice versa)” (p. 31). After all, charter advocates and union critics have long held that the institutional rigidity imposed by collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) often undermines effective schooling practices. But what has been forgotten, Lavery argues, is one of the fundamental purposes of teachers’ unions: to protect the rights and needs of teachers against management abuse. Indeed, in the cases that Lavery examines, teachers found themselves in charters that were not “laboratories of innovation,” but rather unstable environments plagued by poor school leadership and lagging student achievement (p. 52). Seeking to address these deficiencies, teachers organized not only to push for raises and better benefits but also to ensure that educators would be given greater voice in school decision-making, increased work stability, stronger ties among faculty, and clearer protocols for settling disputes. Both her interviews and analyses of teacher contract negotiations suggest that the motivations that drove charter school teachers to unionize went beyond their narrow occupational self-interest (even if that was not wholly absent): these teachers wanted to build better schools.

Although Lavery’s case studies are certainly illuminating, it is fair to ask how representative they are of union behavior in the typical charter school, let alone the typical public school district. Although she acknowledges this limitation (p. 75), the reader would benefit from more insight into the overall generalizability of her cases. This is not to say that the experiences of teachers at CSE and TCGIS do not offer insights into the dynamics of union mobilization in charters, but these lessons may apply more narrowly to the minority of charters that unionize. In other words, readers might wish to know whether the dynamics that drove teachers to unionize in two struggling charter schools reflect the views of most charter teachers about how to best maximize educator voice. The fact that the vast majority of charters are not unionized, including some of the highest-performing charter management organizations (CMOs), such as KIPP and Success Academy, raises questions about the degree to which unionization in the charter sector is endogenous to things like school quality, a shared vision between teachers and leaders, or any number of other factors that differ across states and districts. Moreover, it is far from clear that unionization could fully coexist with the controversial “No Excuses” model of charter schooling to which many of the school leaders in these high-performing CMOs attribute their success.

Despite these limitations, Lavery provides additional evidence in the book’s third and final section to support her central argument—that teachers have begun to move beyond their narrow, job-related interests to bargain for the “schools all students deserve.” Here, in a series of exceptionally well-written chapters that run the gamut from teacher strikes to school finance reform to unions’ increasing efforts to address opportunity gaps, Lavery sheds light on the array of valuable services that she says unions have increasingly provided to students, parents, and community members. A few of the more notable examples she mentions include union members organizing campaigns to raise awareness of race-related issues and suggest innovative approaches to school discipline; local unions negotiating the hiring of nurses, librarians, counselors, and social workers at the expense of salary bumps; and, in one particularly compelling case, St. Paul teachers urging the district to halt business with banks that foreclosed on district families throughout the school year.

These and other examples presented throughout the book illustrate the deficiencies of caricatured public narratives that portray teachers and their unions as greedy and myopically self-interested actors. As Lavery puts it: “When educators enter their profession…[t]hey do not sign employment contracts in declining districts in the hope of earning six-figure salaries. They enter public schools because they care about kids” (p. 10). As successful as she is at demolishing this false narrative, a great deal of evidence remains to suggest that union and student interests do not always neatly overlap, nor that teachers and the public share the same views about school reform (e.g., see Martin R. West, Michael Henderson, and Paul E. Peterson, Teachers versus the Public, 2014). In other words, just as teacher and student interests are not reliably divergent, neither are they uniformly congruent. For each and every issue where union supporters can credibly argue that “teachers want what students need”—for example, smaller classes, more support staff, and safe schools—union critics can likewise point to examples of union resistance to jettisoning policies that are far more popular with school employees than with parents and the general public (e.g., strict seniority provisions, tenure policies, rigid step-and-lane pay systems).

Because the overlap between teacher and student interests is contingent and mixed (rather than neatly congruent or divergent), teacher union debates tend to devolve into the Rorschach test alluded to previously. While their critics can highlight instances where unions resist education reforms that threaten their members’ occupational interests (even if such reforms might benefit kids), their supporters can just as easily emphasize the broader efforts of unions to lobby for more egalitarian economic and social welfare policies to benefit students and families. Lavery captures this sentiment well when she notes, “The economy, policy, and a legacy of structurally ingrained racism contribute far more to public schools’ decay than the contract priorities of teachers’ unions” (p. 166). In short, when it comes to adjudicating whether unions are good for schools, where you sit will be determined by where you stand.

Although her book will not bridge this chasm, if there is one thing that all readers can take away from A Collective Pursuit, it is that any serious attempts to overhaul American education will almost assuredly fail if the teacher workforce feels shut out of the process. Scholars of public administration have long pointed to the key role that teachers, as street-level bureaucrats, play in implementing education policy on the ground. Indeed, the high-profile disappointments of several muscular federal education interventions point to the difficulties policy makers face in crafting effective reforms without the support of the professionals who will ultimately be charged with implementing these policies and whose lives will be so dramatically affected by them. Though it may not have been exactly what Lavery intended when she titled her book, if America’s education system is to seize its promise in the coming years, education reform will have to become a genuinely collective pursuit.