Download or read book Teacher Unions and Social Justice written by Michael Charney and published by Rethinking Schools. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of more than 60 articles documenting the history and the how-tos of social justice unionism. Together, they describe the growing movement to forge multiracial alliances with communities to defend and transform public education.
Download or read book Special Interest written by Terry M. Moe and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are America's public schools falling so short of the mark in educating the nation's children? Why are they organized in ineffective ways that fly in the face of common sense, to the point that it is virtually impossible to get even the worst teachers out of the classroom? And why, after more than a quarter century of costly education reform, have the schools proven so resistant to change and so difficult to improve? In this path-breaking book, Terry M. Moe demonstrates that the answers to these questions have a great deal to do with teachers unions—which are by far the most powerful forces in American education and use their power to promote their own special interests at the expense of what is best for kids. Despite their importance, the teachers unions have barely been studied. Special Interest fills that gap with an extraordinary analysis that is at once brilliant and kaleidoscopic—shedding new light on their historical rise to power, the organizational foundations of that power, the ways it is exercised in collective bargaining and politics, and its vast consequences for American education. The bottom line is simple but devastating: as long as the teachers unions remain powerful, the nation's schools will never be organized to provide kids with the most effective education possible. Moe sees light at the end of the tunnel, however, due to two major transformations. One is political, the other technological, and the combination is destined to weaken the unions considerably in the coming years—loosening their special-interest grip and opening up a new era in which America's schools can finally be organized in the best interests of children.
Download or read book The Future of Our Schools written by Lois Weiner and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Future of Our Schools, Lois Weiner explains why teachers who care passionately about teaching and social justice need to unite the energy for teaching to efforts to self-govern and transform teacher unions. Drawing on research, her experience as a public school teacher, and as a union activist, she explains how to create the teachers unions public education desperately needs. Lois Weiner is a professor at New Jersey City University and has been a life-long teacher union activist who has served as an officer of three different union locals. She is the author of The Global Assault on Teaching, Teachers, and their Unions: Stories for Resistanc e .
Download or read book Uncivil Rights written by Jonna Perrillo and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, a wealth of research shows that minority students continue to receive an unequal education. At the heart of this inequality is a complex and often conflicted relationship between teachers and civil rights activists, examined fully for the first time in Jonna Perrillo’s Uncivil Rights, which traces the tensions between the two groups in New York City from the Great Depression to the present.While movements for teachers’ rights and civil rights were not always in conflict, Perrillo uncovers the ways they have become so, brought about both by teachers who have come to see civil rights efforts as detracting from or competing with their own goals and by civil rights activists whose aims have de-professionalized the role of the educator. Focusing in particular on unionized teachers, Perrillo finds a new vantage point from which to examine the relationship between school and community, showing how in this struggle, educators, activists, and especially our students have lost out.
Download or read book Conflicting Missions written by Tom Loveless and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ask people whether teachers unions are good or bad for education and you are likely to receive a wide variety of opinions. A 1998 Gallup Poll asked whether teachers unions helped, hurt, or made no difference in the quality of education in U.S. public schools. Twenty-seven percent responded that unions helped, 26 percent that they hurt, and 37 percent that they made no difference (10 percent of those surveyed said they did not know). Although teachers unions were first organized in the nineteenth century, and collective bargaining has been a fact of life in most communities since the 1960s, the body of literature evaluating the impact of teachers unions on American education is surprisingly small. Conflicting Missions? helps close the knowledge gap by providing a clear, balanced analysis of the role of teachers unions in education reform.The volume emerges from a 1998 conference organized by the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. The contributors represent a broad array of disciplinary backgrounds and methodological approaches, including some of the unions' harshest critics and most loyal supporters. In examining the relationship of teachers unions and educational reform, the authors approach the subject from several directions. They ask whether unions affect educational productivity, most notably in terms of student achievement. They analyze how teachers unions function as professional organizations concerned with the occupation of teaching, as institutional actors defending interests within a bureaucratic system of education, and as political actors wielding influence on legislation and elections. Reflecting a variety of perspectives and opinions, Conflicting Missions? offers a balanced analysis of a controversial topic. It is a useful starting point for readers who want to discover the complexity of teachers unions and their influence—both positive and negative—on the national effort to improve America's schools.
Download or read book The Teacher Wars written by Dana Goldstein and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking history of 175 years of American education that brings the lessons of the past to bear on the dilemmas we face today—and brilliantly illuminates the path forward for public schools. “[A] lively account." —New York Times Book Review In The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and unprecedented history of public school teaching, Dana Goldstein reveals that teachers have been embattled for nearly two centuries. She uncovers the surprising roots of hot button issues, from teacher tenure to charter schools, and finds that recent popular ideas to improve schools—instituting merit pay, evaluating teachers by student test scores, ranking and firing veteran teachers, and recruiting “elite” graduates to teach—are all approaches that have been tried in the past without producing widespread change.
Download or read book The Comparative Politics of Education written by Terry M. Moe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides new evidence on teachers unions and their political activities across nations, and offers a foundation for a comparative politics of education.
Download or read book The Teacher Unions written by Myron Lieberman and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone wants to reform public education in America. But few realize that the principal obstruction to all reform is a pair of powerful and well-entrenched organizations: the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
Download or read book Walkout written by Diana D'Amico Pawlewicz and published by IAP. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teacher unions and their members have long stood as polarizing figures in a vast educational landscape. As in the Western films of the 1920s, policymakers, education reformers, and onlookers often assign union leaders and the teachers they represent either the white hats of heroes or the black hats of villains. Politicized efforts to reductively classify teacher unions as beneficial or dangerous have only served to obscure the extent to which labor militancy and teacher activism have become part and parcel of the American public school system and the primary mechanisms by which teachers’ voices are heard – and heeded – in the policy arena. Teacher unions have grown in tandem with and in response to the expansion of the school bureaucracy and the acceleration of accountability reforms, and teachers’ calls for recognition and reform are inseparable from broader movements for social change. Far more than either good or bad, teacher unions are the inevitable outgrowth of American public education as it stands today. This book offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the state of modern teacher unions, the complex spaces they operate in, and the connections between militancy, activism, and school reform. Breaking free from the white hat/black hat dyad that has for so long colored the lenses we use to understand unions, the chapters of this book engage a set of fundamental questions: Where did the modern moment of militancy come from, and in what ways is it a continuation or a departure from the approaches of previous organized teachers?; What is at stake in modern expressions of militancy for teachers, communities, and schools?; Beyond the flashpoint of the walkout, what is the effect of teacher activism?
Download or read book A Fight for the Soul of Public Education written by Steven Ashby and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-04 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In reaction to the changes imposed on public schools across the country in the name of "education reform," the Chicago Teachers Union redefined its traditional role and waged a multidimensional fight that produced a community-wide school strike and transformed the scope of collective bargaining into arenas that few labor relations experts thought possible. Using interviews, first-person accounts, participant observation, union documents, and media reports, Steven K. Ashby and Robert Bruno tell the story of the 2012 strike that shut down the Chicago school system for seven days.A Fight for the Soul of Public Education takes into account two overlapping, parallel, and equally important stories. One is a grassroots story of worker activism told from the perspective of rank-and-file union members and their community supporters. Ashby and Bruno provide a detailed account of how the strike became an international cause when other teachers unions had largely surrendered to corporate-driven education reform. The second story describes the role of state and national politics in imposing educational governance changes on public schools and draconian limitations on union bargaining rights. It includes a detailed account of the actual bargaining process revealing the mundane and the transcendental strategies of both school board and union representatives.
Download or read book Reds at the Blackboard written by Clarence Taylor and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York City Teachers Union shares a deep history with the American left, having participated in some of its most explosive battles. Established in 1916, the union maintained an early, unofficial partnership with the American Communist Party, winning key union positions and advocating a number of Party goals. Clarence Taylor recounts this pivotal relationship and the backlash it created, as the union threw its support behind controversial policies and rights movements. Taylor's research reaffirms the party's close ties with the union—yet it also makes clear that the organization was anything but a puppet of Communist power. Reds at the Blackboard showcases the rise of a unique type of unionism that would later dominate the organizational efforts behind civil rights, academic freedom, and the empowerment of blacks and Latinos. Through its affiliation with the Communist Party, the union pioneered what would later become social movement unionism, solidifying ties with labor groups, black and Latino parents, and civil rights organizations to acquire greater school and community resources. It also militantly fought to improve working conditions for teachers while championing broader social concerns. For the first time, Taylor reveals the union's early growth and the somewhat illegal attempts by the Board of Education to eradicate the group. He describes how the infamous Red Squad and other undercover agents worked with the board to bring down the union and how the union and its opponents wrestled with charges of anti-Semitism.
Download or read book Teachers and Reform written by John F. Lyons and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on archival as well as rich interview material, John F. Lyons examines the role of Chicago public schoolteachers and their union, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), in shaping the policies and practices of public education in Chicago from 1937 to 1970. From the union's formation in 1937 until the 1960s, the CTU was the largest and most influential teachers' union in the country, operating in the nation's second largest school system. Although all Chicago public schoolteachers were committed to such bread-and-butter demands as higher salaries, many teachers also sought a more rigorous reform of the school system through calls for better working conditions, greater classroom autonomy, more funding for education, and the end of political control of the schools. Using political action, public relations campaigns, and community alliances, the CTU successfully raised members' salaries and benefits, increased school budgets, influenced school curricula, and campaigned for greater equality for women within the Chicago public education system. Examining teachers' unions and public education from the bottom up, Lyons shows how teachers' unions helped to shape one of the largest public education systems in the nation. Taking into consideration the larger political context, such as World War II, the McCarthy era, and the civil rights movements of the 1960s, this study analyzes how the teachers' attempts to improve their working lives and the quality of the Chicago public school system were constrained by internal divisions over race and gender as well as external disputes between the CTU and the school administration, state and local politicians, and powerful business and civic organizations. Because of the obstacles they faced and the decisions they made, unionized teachers left many problems unresolved, but they effected changes to public education and to local politics that still benefit Chicago teachers and the public today.
Download or read book The Worm in the Apple written by Peter Brimelow and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2004-01-20 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is no coincidence that the thirty-year decline in U.S. K–12 education and the simultaneous surge in education spending began at the same time the modern teacher unions were created. Today, the National Education Association has nearly three million members. Its agenda is not to provide better teaching in schools; it is to provide more money and benefits for teachers -- and, above all, for itself. In this devastating critique, Peter Brimelow exposes the teacher unions for what they are: a political and economic monopoly that is choking the education system. It is time, Brimelow convincingly argues, to bust the Teacher Trust.
Download or read book A Political Education written by Elizabeth Todd-Breland and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.
Download or read book Standing Up to Goliath written by Rebecca Friedrichs and published by Post Hill Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As seen on Fox & Friends! Rebecca Friedrichs tells real-life stories that expose state and national teachers’ unions as the money and muscle behind the degradation of America’s schools and culture. In a book that’s both accessible and enlightening, Rebecca Friedrichs recounts her thirty-year odyssey as an elementary school teacher who comes face-to-face with the forces dividing and corrupting our schools and culture—state and national teachers’ unions. An exciting true story that features real life testimonies of teachers, parents, and kids, as well as political and social commentary, Rebecca’s journey leads her to the realization that the only hope for America’s schools and families is returning authority to parents and teachers while lessening the grip of state and national unions that: • Promote a culture of fear and bully teachers and parents into silence. • Undermine parents’ authority by sexually, socially, and politically indoctrinating kids. • Use the apple-pie image of the PTA as a “front” to promote a partisan agenda. These insights and more led Rebecca and nine other teachers to the US Supreme Court where their case, Friedrichs v California Teachers Association, et al., sought to restore the First Amendment rights of all teachers and government employees. They argued no one should be forced to pay fees to abusive, politically driven unions, and were poised to change the very landscape of American education—until tragedy struck. Saddened but unbowed, Rebecca started a national movement, For Kids and Country, leading the charge of servant leaders who believe Judeo-Christian values (including kindness) and restoration of the teaching profession—possible only by rejecting state and national unions and forming “local only” associations—are the answers to America’s woes. She invites you to join them. “America’s teachers, parents, and kids deserve better,” Rebecca writes. “If we want freedom, we’re going to have to fight for it.”
Download or read book A Collective Pursuit written by Lesley Lavery and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-29 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teachers’ unions are the organizations responsible for safeguarding the conditions of teachers’ employment. Union supporters claim strong synergies between teachers’ interests and students’ interests, but critics of unions insist that the stance of teachers in collective bargaining may disadvantage students as unions reduce the power of administrators to manage, remove, reward or retain excellent teachers. In A Collective Pursuit, Lesley Laveryunpacks how teachers’ unions today are fighting for contracts that allow them to earn a decent living and build “schools all students deserve.” She explains the form and function of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions. Lavery then explores unionization campaigns in the Twin Cities charter schools. A Collective Pursuit also examines teacher strikes and contract negotiations, school finance and finance reform, and district and union attempts to address racial achievement gaps, to provide a context for understanding the economic, political, and demographic forces that inspire teachers to improve conditions for students. A Collective Pursuit emphasizes that while teachers’ unions serve a traditional, economic role, they also provide a vast array of valuable services to students, educators, parents, and community members.
Download or read book The Courage to Collaborate written by Ken Futernick and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Courage to Collaborate, school turnaround expert Ken Futernick makes the case that collaboration between school management and teacher unions is a necessary condition for educational improvement. The author cites evidence showing that collaboration often leads to increased trust, stronger professional relationships, better policies, better implementation of programs and, ultimately, to better outcomes for students. Drawing on new research, his own experience, and the experience of dozens of other district and union leaders, Futernick details key features and benefits of labor-management collaboration. He also identifies and addresses several obstacles preventing its widespread adoption, including resistance to change, myths about what collaboration really means, skepticism about unions, lack of technical support, and misguided education policy. The Courage to Collaborate recommends strategies and tactics for educators, policy makers, and others interested in embracing collaboration over confrontation. Both sides--unions and management--must make changes so that collaboration becomes the norm, rather than the exception, Futernick argues. While not sufficient in itself, labor-management collaboration is a necessary ingredient for creating an education system in which all students have an opportunity to attend good schools.
