Reckoning With the “Other” Pandemic: How Teachers’ Unions Responded to Calls for Racial Justice Amidst COVID-19

Abstract

After George Floyd was murdered by police, teachers, alongside the leaders of their unions and professional associations, confronted urgent calls to address racism in their communities, schools, and classrooms, just as they were concluding an academic year rendered chaotic by COVID-19. This article leverages four waves of semistructured interviews with teachers’ union and association leaders embedded in 14 states and 45 school districts to investigate how and why teachers’ unions responded to those calls during 2020 and 2021. Local leaders were more likely to have taken concrete steps if they were serving urban or suburban and predominantly Democratic communities. Most commonly, unions offered symbolic gestures of support or sought to develop their capacity to recognize and understand bias.