Teacher strike!
Subtitle: public education and the making of a new American political order
By: Jon Shelton
Series: The working class in American history; Working class in American history
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 251
ISBN-13: 9780252040870; 9780252082368
Subjects: Politics and government; Strikes and lockouts; Collective bargaining; Teachers' unions; Teachers; Labor movement; Public schools; History
Description: "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"--

"This project explores the teacher strikes of the late 1960s and 1970s, arguing that the strikes reflect the tensions of a liberal vision that could no longer afford to sustain the promise of economic opportunity. The manner in which the state provides education to its citizens has been a major political battleground for much of American history given that education is a fundamental facet of everyday life as well as the single-most expensive expenditure of local governments. Teacher strikes, therefore, directly affect the public in ways that no other workers strike could. Using media sources such as television news, print reportage, editorials and letters to the editor, and school board meetings, Shelton puts close examinations of strikes in Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and St. Louis in dialogue with the national trajectory of neoliberal conservatism in this period, demonstrating how the strikes and the discourses they provoked contributed to the growing public perception that unions were at best irrelevant and at worst detrimental to American prosperity. He also examines the ways that foes of the labor movement increasingly tapped into cultural and economic anxieties of that tumultuous decade to undermine teacher unionism, in particular, and liberal and pro-union policies, more generally"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: "A new era of labor relations" : teachers and the public-sector labor problem; title: Teacher power, black power, and the fracturing of labor liberalism; title: "Who is going to run the schools?" : teacher strikes and the urban crises of 1972-73; title: Dropping dead : teachers, the New York City fiscal crisis, and austerity; title: The Pittsburgh teacher strike of 1975-76 and the crisis of the labor-liberal coalition; title: The "fed-up" taxpayer : St. Louis, Philadelphia, and the eclipse of the labor-liberal coalition; title: Conclusion : teacher unions and the American political imagination.