In most countries there is one major teachers’ organization to which all or nearly all teachers belong and pay dues. Sometimes membership is obligatory, sometimes voluntary. Thus there is the National Union of Teachers in England, the Japanese Teachers Union, the Fédération Générale d’Enseignement in France, and the Australian Teachers Union. In the former Soviet Union, where much of the political and social life of the people had been organized around unions, there were three teachers’ unions—for preschool teachers, primary- and secondary-school teachers, and teachers in higher education. These unions provided pensions, vacation pay, and sick-leave pay and thus touched the welfare of teachers at many points.

The organizational complex is stable in some countries and changing in others. England, for example, has two different associations for male and female secondary-school teachers, two different associations for male and female headmasters of secondary schools, and a separate Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions. These associations are parallel to the National Union of Teachers, which is open to any qualified teacher from nursery school to university level. The National Union has no political affiliation but is politically powerful in its own right. France, in contrast, has a wide variety of teachers’ organizations, with various political leanings, but they do not get on well together and are politically less effective.

In the United States there is a basic rivalry between the National Education Association, which includes teachers of various levels as well as administrators, and the American Federation of Teachers, a trade union that excludes administrators. Since about 1960 the NEA, a loose federation of local, state, and national organizations, has become more militant in working for the economic improvement of teachers and has tolerated strikes. This policy has resulted in a reorganization of the NEA into a looser federation, with classroom teachers operating quite separately from the associations of administrators. It has also brought the NEA into direct competition with the AFT, which is relatively strong in several large cities.

Although the classroom teachers’ organizations began as agents for obtaining better salaries and working conditions, wherever they have succeeded substantially in this effort they have turned to the other activity—setting standards of performance and attempting to improve educational policy and practice. Faced with great difficulties in educating children in the less affluent areas of big cities, the teachers’ union in the United States, for instance, put into its collective-bargaining agreements a statement of interest in, and responsibility for, educational policy and for the development of teaching methods and the training of teachers for those difficult positions.

The various national primary- and secondary-school teachers’ associations moved toward the formation of two loose international federations. One included the national associations from the former communist bloc of countries—the World Federation of Teachers’ Unions. The other, the World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession, was founded in 1952 and included most of the national associations from the noncommunist bloc. They both competed for the allegiance of teachers’ organizations in the uncommitted countries.