A Fight For The Soul Of Public Education

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.

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.

The school choice reform movement believes parents should have a choice of where they send their children to school. In this book the author, an educational sociologist, discusses the practice and politics of school choice objectively and comprehensively.

Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

The inside story of the most-watched attempt to transform a troubled high school Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors tells the real-life story of Locke High School. Locke High- originally known for its excellence-became one of the toughest, most dysfunctional schools in the nation. Then in 2007 teachers voted to bring in an upstart charter school organization called Green Dot to try and restore the Locke Saints' past glory. It was a brave and desperate move. Working in secrecy, the school principal, a small group of teachers, and Green Dot's charismatic founder, Steve Barr, convince Locke teachers to support a petition that will take the school away from the Los Angeles Unified School District. The "new" Locke opened in the fall of 2008. Offers an in-depth look at a school "turnaround" effort that garnered a blizzard of publicity Russo's blog This Week in Education was named by The Washington Post as one of its best education blogs of 2010 Tells the gritty truth about the tough work of true school reform Locke's transformation shows that with hard work and sacrifice, broken schools can indeed be improved in meaningful ways. However, the process of school reform is one of the most vital, and least glamorous, projects that we can participate in.

In February 2018, 35,000 public school educators and staff walked off the job in West Virginia. More than 100,000 teachers in other states—both right-to-work states, like West Virginia, and those with a unionized workforce—followed them over the next year. From Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma to Colorado and California, teachers announced to state legislators that not only their abysmal wages but the deplorable conditions of their work and the increasingly straitened circumstances of public education were unacceptable. These recent teacher walkouts affirm public education as a crucial public benefit and understand the rampant disinvestment in public education not simply as a local issue affecting teacher paychecks but also as a danger to communities and to democracy. Strike for the Common Good gathers together original essays, written by teachers involved in strikes nationwide, by students and parents who have supported them, by journalists who have covered these strikes in depth, and by outside analysts (academic and otherwise). Together, the essays consider the place of these strikes in the broader landscape of recent labor organizing and battles over public education, and attend to the largely female workforce and, often, largely non-white student population of America’s schools.

Explores the spiritual dimension of education, and discusses ways to nourish the spiritual development of adolescents in public schools without violating anyone's legal rights.

This book examines an important aspect of the relationship between higher education and the public - especially secondary - system of schooling in Britain. Higher education has influenced secondary schools in a number of ways, and not least in the development of school examinations. The contributors to this book – each of them experts in their fields analyse the contributions made by some university luminaries, most of them still household names. These personalities have contributed in a variety of ways such as: becoming Ministers of Education contributing powerfully to successive reform movements using their status as members of that mysterious class called 'the great and the good' to mould public policy and to chair prestigious commissions choosing to centre their own research and scholarship on matters related to schooling. Using Oxford University as its chosen case study, this book places these studies in the wider context of the role of Oxford in public and political life, and in an international context. It examines critically the overall contribution of one university to the formulation of national policies, questions the extent to which that contribution has been unique and beneficent, and offers explanations of the contemporary decline in that influence. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Oxford Review of Education.