University of Michigan needs your feedback to better understand how readers are using openly available ebooks. You can help by taking a short, privacy-friendly survey.
Strike for the Common Good: Fighting for the Future of Public Education
Rebecca Kolins Givan and Amy Schrager Lang, Editors
You don't have access to this book. Please try to log in with your institution.Log in
In February 2018, 35,000 public school educators and staff walked off the job in West Virginia. More than 100,000 teachers in other states—both right-to-work states, like West Virginia, and those with a unionized workforce—followed them over the next year. From Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma to Colorado and California, teachers announced to state legislators that not only their abysmal wages but the deplorable conditions of their work and the increasingly straitened circumstances of public education were unacceptable. These recent teacher walkouts affirm public education as a crucial public benefit and understand the rampant disinvestment in public education not simply as a local issue affecting teacher paychecks but also as a danger to communities and to democracy.
Strike for the Common Good gathers together original essays, written by teachers involved in strikes nationwide, by students and parents who have supported them, by journalists who have covered these strikes in depth, and by outside analysts (academic and otherwise). Together, the essays consider the place of these strikes in the broader landscape of recent labor organizing and battles over public education, and attend to the largely female workforce and, often, largely non-white student population of America's schools.
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Long War on Public Education
1. Collective Action and the Common Good
2. Battle for or in the Classroom
3. The Critical Issues of Teacher Pay and Employment
4. The Ripple Effect of the 2012 Chicago Teachers’ Strike
5. The Long History of Attacking Teachers’ Unions and Public Education
Red States Rising
6. Rank-and-File Organizing and Digital Mobilizing in the Red State Revolt
7. Educators United Online
8. Owning My Labor
9. The Antiracist Struggle in the Kentucky Teacher Strike
10. “People Are Sticking Together”
On Strike for the Common Good
11. Black Lives Matter at School to Social Justice Union Educators
12. The LA Strike
13. Reclaim Our Schools Los Angeles
14. The Teachers’ Strikes of 2018–2019
15. You Can’t Fire Us! Student Solidarity on the Picket Line
What Comes Next?
16. The 2018 Wave of Teacher Strikes
17. Trust, Joy, Militancy
18. Relearning the Supermajority Strike
19. Silicon Valley, Philanthrocapitalism, and Policy Shifts from Teachers to Tech