After interviewing more than fifty teachers who were on the front lines during these strikes, historian Steve Golin concludes that another, equally important agenda, ignored until now, was on the table. These professionals wanted a voice in the decision-making process."--BOOK JACKET.

A wave of teacher strikes in the 1960s and 1970s roiled urban communities. Jon Shelton illuminates how this tumultuous era helped shatter the liberal-labor coalition and opened the door to the neoliberal challenge at the heart of urban education today. Drawing on a wealth of research ranging from school board meetings to TV news reports, Shelton puts readers in the middle of fraught, intense strikes in Newark, St. Louis, and three other cities where these debates and shifting attitudes played out. He also demonstrates how the labor actions contributed to the growing public perception of unions as irrelevant or even detrimental to American prosperity. Foes of the labor movement, meanwhile, tapped into cultural and economic fears to undermine not just teacher unionism but the whole of liberalism.

"Since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 Americans have viewed school integration as a central tenet of the black civil rights movement. Yet, school integration was not the only-or even always the dominant-civil rights strategy. At times, African Americans also fought for separate, Black-controlled schools dedicated to racial uplift, community empowerment, and self-determination. An African American Dilemma offers a social history of debates over school integration within northern Black communities from the 1840s to the present. This broad geographical and temporal focus reveals that northern Black educational activists vacillated between a preference for either school integration or separation during specific eras. Yet, as there was never a consensus, this study also highlights the chorus of dissent, debate, and counter-narratives that pushed families to consider a fuller range of educational reforms. A sweeping historical analysis that covers the entire history of public education in the North, this study complicates our understanding of school integration by highlighting the diverse perspectives of Black students, parents, teachers, and community leaders all committed to improving public education. It finds that Black school integrationists and separatists have worked together in a dynamic tension that fueled effective strategies for educational reform and the black civil rights movement. This study draws on an enormous range of archival data including the black press, school board records, social science studies, the papers of civil rights activists, and court cases"--

Strikes have been part of American labor relations from colonial days to the present, reflecting the widespread class conflict that has run throughout the nation's history. Against employers and their goons, against the police, the National Guard, local, state, and national officials, against racist vigilantes, against their union leaders, and against each other, American workers have walked off the job for higher wages, better benefits, bargaining rights, legislation, job control, and just plain dignity. At times, their actions have motivated groundbreaking legislation, defining new rights for all citizens; at other times they have led to loss of workers' lives. This comprehensive encyclopedia is the first detailed collection of historical research on strikes in America. To provide the analytical tools for understanding strikes, the volume includes two types of essays - those focused on an industry or economic sector, and those focused on a theme. Each industry essay introduces a group of workers and their employers and places them in their economic, political, and community contexts. The essay then describes the industry's various strikes, including the main issues involved and outcomes achieved, and assesses the impact of the strikes on the industry over time. Thematic essays address questions that can only be answered by looking at a variety of strikes across industries, groups of workers, and time, such as, why the number of strikes has declined since the 1970s, or why there was a strike wave in 1946. The contributors include historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, as well as current and past activists from unions and other social movement organizations. Photos, a Topic Finder, a bibliography, and name and subject indexes add to the works appeal.

In The Teacher Insurgency, Leo Casey addresses how the unexpected wave of recent teacher strikes has had a dramatic impact on American public education, teacher unions, and the larger labor movement. Casey explains how this uprising was not only born out of opposition to government policies that underfunded public schools and deprofessionalized teaching, but was also rooted in deep-seated changes in the economic climate, social movements, and, most importantly, educational politics. With an eye to maintaining the momentum of the insurgency, the author examines four key strategic questions that have arisen from the strikes: the relationship of mobilization to organizing; the relationship between protests and direct action; the conditions under which teacher strikes are most likely to be successful; and the importance of “bargaining for the common good.” More broadly, Casey examines how to organize teachers for collective action, focusing on four discourses of teaching: teaching as nurturance; as professionalism; as labor and craft; and as a vocation of democratic intellectual work.

Two people participating in the same events, yet on opposite sides, give an engrossing view of a struggle which engulfed a large community in northern Westchester County in New York State. It became the longest teachers strike in New York State's history. Even though they are personal memoirs, both authors try to give as full a picture of the personalities, institutions, and issues driving the struggle as each experienced it. The narrative is in two parts, side by side, and event by event. Both are impressionistic accounts that do not claim to be objective. Dr. Leon Bock's account is the viewpoint of a leader of a major institution, the Lakeland School District. In representing the district he had the heavy responsibility to merge the interests of students and parents, faculty, the taxpaying community, and the Board of Education. Mr. Thomas Kavunedus, a faculty member, served as a negotiator for the Lakeland Federation of Teachers. He saw his responsibilities as extending to the promotion of learning and teaching environment which would foster excellence. The contract with the school district, which Mr. Kavunedus had participated in promulgating years earlier, was a major step in raising teachers out of the dark ages of coffee in the boiler room, and hopefully greater professionalism. Both authors disagree with one another on many of the issues. Most of these issues bedevil our schools today. Yet, there is enough civility to recognize that partisanship need not be so all engulfing that it demonizes the other side and its objectives. No narrative of such a complex event can be totally accurate and objective. The authors try to focus on the interpersonal relationships, rather than serve as a textbook history of this series of complex events. There is no intention to discredit, or malign any of the personalities in the narrative; rather they are presented as the writers experienced them under conditions of stress.