Teacher Strike! : Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order

"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 wereat 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"--