Teacher Strike!: Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order (Working Class in American History)

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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.

As Shelton shows, many working- and middle-class whites sided with corporate interests in seeing themselves as society’s only legitimate, productive members. This alliance increasingly argued that public employees and the urban poor took but did not give. 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.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B071RDSKC2
Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Illinois Press
Accessibility ‏ : ‎ Learn more
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 21, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1.2 MB
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 274 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0252099373
Page Flip ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Part of series ‏ : ‎ Working Class in American History
Best Sellers Rank: #1,964,360 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store) #493 in Labor & Industrial Relations (Kindle Store) #759 in Labor & Industrial Economic Relations (Kindle Store) #925 in Education History
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