The American public has increasingly heard that teacher unions and quality education are contradictory terms and that unions are responsible for the ???failure??? of public schools. Many critics of the unions would cheerfully channel public funds to largely nonunion private and parochial schools as ???free market??? alternatives.

The present volume, edited by friends of the teacher unions and featuring contributions by prominent education scholars as well as union activists, has a far more positive perspective on the achievements and value of teacher unions and our public education system. The collection does not avoid critical examination of the teacher unions, however. Moreover, taken as a whole, it speaks to the need for continuing reform and renovation within the unions themselves, and it affirms a need for innovation and competition within public education as a way of enhancing its quality.

Toward those ends, the volume first reviews the substantial contributions that teachers and their unions have made to the well being of their members and the education of students over more than a hundred years. It then explores collective bargaining as it affects reform and educational quality. It continues by examining the real-world outcomes of education in unionized environments; taking an inside look at a turn toward bipartisanship in the NEA??'s political and lobbying activities; and analyzing the unions??? recent record in shaping education legislation and policy. The book also examines teacher union activities in higher education; the innovative work of local ???reform??? unions; union support for education research and development; and the shape of a teacher unionismspecifically organized to promote educational quality. The volume concludes by tracing the development and current activities of international education associations as defenders???in both the developed and developing countries???of the teaching profession and of the rights of all children to a quality education.

This book is no mere reverie on a heroic union past. It is instead an exploration of past and present as prologues to the manifold possibilities for enhancing the unions??? contributions to quality public education.

"Most Favored Nation" discusses the movement for tariff revision under Republican administrations in the critical years preceding World War I. Paul Wolman shows how and why some Republicans turned away from their party's -- and the nation's -- traditional tariff reduction and revision. Wolman describes how the revisionists of this period developed a comprehensive program that sought to replace the "logrolling" system of protectionist interest trading that had prevailed in the United States since the 1860s. In its place they proposed a multiple-rate tariff embodying substantial reductions; commercial reciprocity agreements, especially with Germany, France, and Canada; and a "scientific" tariff administered by a commission.
According to Wolman, all revisionists hoped to further American leadership in an open-door world economy. But as their movement developed, revisionists split into two competing groups. One group, the "radical" revisionists, wished to use lower tariffs to restrain the growing power of corporations. Led by agricultural implement manufacturer H.E. Miles of Wisconsin, the radical revisionists hoped that freer importation of goods such as steel bars and billets would break the growing strangehold of U.S. Steel and International Harvester on markets for intermediate goods and restore more competitive pricing.
The second group, or "cooperationists," accepted the emerging hegemony of large corporations, which were beginning to supplant traditional American propriety enterprises. Encouraged by Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, these revisionists worked to rationalize the emerging corporate market system and U.S. foreign commercial relations without promoting anticorporate activism.
Wolman suggests that through both consensus and conflict, the Republican revisionists of the McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft era laid the foundation for modern systems of liberal trade. In detailing how they did so, Wolman offers new insights not only on the tariff question but also on related concerns in U.S. foreign economic policy, including business-state relations, corporate development, international treaty making, and imperialism.
Originally published 1992.
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