ABSTRACT
Teacher quality' is a rallying cry around the world as educational jurisdictions 'borrow' teacher quality reforms from one context to another across both developed and developing countries. This chapter considers the variety of relationships teacher unions have with policy making and policy makers around the world as they grapple with teacher quality reforms. It describes how local contexts shape borrowed policies to render them consistent with local conditions and priorities, and then provides a set of country cases that emphasize how teacher quality reforms are taken up, shaping, and being shaped by relations between teacher unions and policy makers and by the relative authority unions are able to assert. In the United States, collective bargaining is the legal right of teachers in roughly two-thirds of the 50 states. The five country cases, namely, the United States, Ireland, Sweden, England, and South Africa, all depict unions engaged in some degree of struggle as teachers' work is impacted by teacher quality reforms.
