Strike for the Common Good: Fighting for the Future of Public Education

Description

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. Contents Preface | Amy Schrager Lang and Rebecca Kolins Givan Acknowledgments Introduction: On Strike for Our Students and the Common Good | Rebecca Kolins Givan The Long War on Public Education 1. Collective Action and the Common Good: Teachers’ Struggles and the Revival of the Strike | Joseph A. McCartin and Marilyn Sneiderman 2. Battle for or in the Classroom: Teachers’ Strikes in the Context of the “Epidemic” of School Violence and the Working Environment | Elizabeth Faue 3. The Critical Issues of Teacher Pay and Employment | Sylvia A. Allegretto 4. The Ripple Effect of the 2012 Chicago Teachers’ Strike | Robert Bruno and Steven K. Ashby 5. The Long History of Attacking Teachers’ Unions and Public Education | Clarence Taylor Red States Rising 6. Rank-and-File Organizing and Digital Mobilizing in the Red State Revolt | Eric Blanc 7. Educators United Online | Rebecca Garelli 8. Owning My Labor | Nicole McCormick 9. The Antiracist Struggle in the Kentucky Teacher Strike | Petia Edison and Ivonne Rovira 10. “People Are Sticking Together”: School Bus Drivers Take Action in the Right-to-Work South | Marion Payne and Rebecca Kolins Givan On Strike for the Common Good 11. Black Lives Matter at School to Social Justice Union Educators: Lessons from Seattle | Jesse Hagopian 12. The LA Strike: Learning Together to Build the National Movement We Need | Cecily Myart-Cruz and Alex Caputo-Pearl 13. Reclaim Our Schools Los Angeles: Whose Strike? Our Strike! LA’s Fight to Reclaim Our Schools | Rudy Gonzalves and Edgar Ortiz 14. The Teachers’ Strikes of 2018–2019: A Gendered Rebellion | Gillian Russom 15. You Can’t Fire Us! Student Solidarity on the Picket Line | Jhoni Palmer and Rebecca Kolins Givan What Comes Next? 16. The 2018 Wave of Teacher Strikes: A Turning Point for Our Schools? | Stan Karp and Adam Sanchez 17. Trust, Joy, Militancy: Lessons from the First Charter Strikes | Chris Baehrend 18. Relearning the Supermajority Strike | Jane McAlevey 19. Silicon Valley, Philanthrocapitalism, and Policy Shifts from Teachers to Tech | Roxana Marachi and Robert Carpenter 20. Global Educator Movements: Teacher Struggles against Neoliberalism and for Democracy and Justice | Lauren Ware Stark and Carol Anne Spreen Afterword: The Strikes Continue... | Rebecca Kolins Givan Contributors Index