In the United States, right-wing politicians have diligently worked to defund public education. Republicans have often done this in two major ways. They have diligently and irresponsibly attacked public school teachers. And at the same time have used the alleged shortcomings to divert public school funding toward private schools.
Read more →
Author Colin Gordon’s book, Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality is an online textbook that uses historical and economic analysis to trace the causes and consequences of economic inequality in the United States.
Read more →
Teachers unions have faced some of the most challenging legal strictures in U.S. history. Before public collective bargaining employment laws, teachers effectively were told they had no right to organize by a judicial system that used a variety of constructions of the law to invalidate the citizen’s right to free speech and assembly in the workplace.
Read more →
Should Labor Historians Encourage A Boycott of Teach for America? Please comment.
In the last few years, Teach for America has gone out of its way to send its Corps members into cities which have fired large numbers of veteran union teachers-among them Chicago, Newark and Washington DC.
Read more →Recent experiences suggest that the generations-old practice of collective bargaining as the normal, if not dominant, method of negotiating the terms of unionized employment is losing its legitimacy.
Read more →
Margaret Peterson Haddix’s historical novel Uprising provides a valuable resource for those of us interested in engaging our students in their real-life drama that animates labor history.
Read more →The Chicago Teachers Union’s (CTU) recent decision to boycott Illinois Standards Achievement Tests, its efforts to fight privatization of education and school closures, and its attempt to break free from business-as-usual politics harkens back to a rich and largely hidden history.
Read more →Patrick S. O’Donnell of Santa Barbara City College sends us a bibliography of titles related to labor law.
Read more →