Teacher Strike!

Abstract

Historians have sought for some time to understand why the labor-liberal coalition’s political influence declined and how the right instituted a conservative revolution in the 1970s and 80s in the US. Teacher Strike! shows that conflict over urban education was fundamental in this story. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of teachers went on strike in virtually every corner of the US in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and in many cases, for weeks or even months at a time. The many contentious and lengthy teacher union walkouts during this era made manifest three interlocking limitations to postwar liberalism: the failure to provide public employees full union rights, the inability to ensure that African-Americans in the nation’s largest cities enjoyed equal educational and economic opportunities, and the drastic, insoluble fiscal crises brought on by deindustrialization and economic downturn in the nation’s biggest cities. This book uses cases studies from New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Newark—all led by locals of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)--to show both the range and depth of this phenomenon. Through this broad treatment of conflict in public education, Teacher Strike! charts the new neoliberal order that emerged from the ashes of labor liberalism and shows how critics’ linking teacher unions and the urban poor together as “unproductive” proved crucial to altering the nation’s political trajectory.