The Global Assault on Teaching, Teachers, and their Unions


Book Description

Public education's character is increasingly under assault as privatization of education is advanced. This collection of essays by noted scholars, teacher activists, and teacher's union leaders from around the world fuses insights with background and analysis to make real the goal of quality education for all the world's children.




The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education


Book Description

This title provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between power, knowledge, education, and schooling.




Teacher Unions in Public Education


Book Description

While much mainstream educational research maintains that teacher unions should be outlawed or their powers greatly reduced, Bascia and her contributors, including many of the leading teacher union researchers working today, challenge this position. Instead, they recognize the important role teacher unions must play in defending public education and in minimizing the damage wrought by ill-thought-out educational policies. By avoiding idealization of these organizations and recognizing their limitations, Teacher Unions in Public Education demonstrates the necessity for union renewal for a successful education system.




Teachers' Unions and Education Reform in Comparative Contexts


Book Description

Teachers’ unions have long been controversial and divisive organizations, but criticism and distrust of them may be at an all-time high. This volume considers the prevailing assumption that unions successfully block change in education because they are primarily motivated to protect members’ interests. It challenges the conceptualization of teacher union motivation and provides a more nuanced account of unions’ interests, power and impact. Through a series of international cases from the United States, Finland and the Canton of Zürich, this volume examines the hot-button issue of performance-related pay reform and compensation. It argues that a better understanding of the union-management relationship may be the key to securing more meaningful change and reform. It will be of use to scholars, policy-makers, union leaders, teachers and citizens who are interested in the possibilities for the union-management relationship, rather than the limitations.




The Future of Our Schools


Book Description

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 .




Handbook of Urban Education


Book Description

This second edition of the Handbook of Urban Education offers a fresh, fluid, and diverse range of perspectives from which the authors describe, analyze, and offer recommendations for urban education in the US. Each of the seven sections includes an introduction, providing an overview and contextualization of the contents. In addition, there are discussion questions at the conclusion of many of the 31 chapters. The seven sections in this edition of the Handbook include: (1) Multidisciplinary Perspectives (e.g., economics, health sciences, sociology, and human development); (2) Policy and Leadership; (3) Teacher Education and Teaching; (4) Curriculum, Language, and Literacy; (5) STEM; (6) Parents, Families, and Communities; and (7) School Closures, Gentrification, and Youth Voice and Innovations. Chapters are written by leaders in the field of urban education, and there are 27 new authors in this edition of the Handbook. The book covers a wide and deep range of the landscape of urban education. It is a powerful and accessible introduction to the field of urban education for researchers, theorists, policymakers and practitioners as well as a critical call for the future of the field for those more seasoned in the field.




Organizing the Curriculum


Book Description

Contemporary American youth live in a culture that ignores or denigrates labor unions. Mainstream media cover labor issues only sparingly and unions no longer play much of a role in popular culture texts, films, or images. In our schools labor has been limited to a footnote in textbooks instead of being treated seriously as the most effective force for championing the rights of working people—the vast majority of the citizenry. Teachers have been convinced that to bring up class or to teach about the labor movement may be construed as “taking sides,” while the all-pervasive presence of corporate America in our schools is rarely questioned. So for all the talk of schools preparing young people for the work world, we are failing to teach them even the basics of how that world is structured or how they can be empowered through collective action. Organizing the Curriculum: Perspectives on Teaching the US Labor Movement is the first book-length treatment of this blind spot in contemporary curriculum and pedagogy. Contributors to this collection—unionists, activists, teachers, teacher educators, and academics—interrogate the ways in which knowledge is constructed in school discourses, conceptualize pedagogical strategies and curricula that open discussions around class analysis and political economy via studies of the labor movement, and put forward an activist vision of education that truly engages young people beyond the classroom walls.




The Wiley International Handbook of Educational Foundations


Book Description

Promotes a model of critique for teachers, scholars, and policy makers to challenge established educational practice in a global context. The Wiley International Handbook of Educational Foundations features international scholars uniquely qualified to examine issues specific to their regions of the world. The Handbook provides readers with an alternative to the traditional texts in the foundations of education by taking aim at the status quo, and by offering frameworks from which teachers and scholars of education can critically evaluate schools and schooling. Throughout, the essays are grounded in a broad historical context and the authors use an international lens to examine current controversies in order to provoke the kinds of discussion crucial for developing a critical stance. The Handbook is presented in six parts, each beginning with an Introduction to the subject. The sections featured are: Part I. Challenging Foundational Histories and Narratives of Achievement; Part II. Challenging Notions of Normalcy and Dominion; Part III. Challenging the Profession; Part IV. Challenging the Curriculum; Part V. Challenging the Idea of Schooling; and Part VI. Challenging Injustice, Inequity, and Enmity. The Wiley International Handbook of Educational Foundations offers unique insight into subjects such as: Educational reform in India, Pakistan, and China The global implications of equity-driven education Teacher education and inclusionary practices The Global Educational Reform Movement (G.E.R.M.) Education and the arts Maria Montessori and Loris Malaguzzi Legal education in authoritarian Syria The Wiley International Handbook of Educational Foundations is an important book for current and aspiring educators, scholars, and policy makers.




Where Are The Unions?


Book Description

The start of the twenty-first century has been marked by global demands for economic justice. From the pink tide and Arab spring to Occupy and anti-austerity, the last twenty years have witnessed the birth of a new type of mass mobilisation. Where Are The Unions? compares, for the first time, the challenges faced by movements in Latin America, the Arab world and Europe. Workers’ strikes and protests were a critical part of these events, yet their role has been significantly underestimated in many of the subsequent narratives. This book focuses on the complex interactions between organised workers, the unemployed, self-employed, youth, students and the state, and critically assesses the concept of the ‘precariat’. With contributions from across four continents, this is the most comprehensive look at the global context of mass mobilisation in the twenty-first century.




Education Policy and the Australian Education Union


Book Description

This book focuses on the politics of teacher resistance to the formation and implementation of neoliberal education policies in Australia. It argues that policies such as publishing examination test results online amounts to auditing teachers’ work, and assumes incompetence from teachers, which ultimately results in diverting teachers from their true professional responsibilities. The book outlines the rise of transnational networks that promote market-oriented methods of achieving social objectives, such as good education for all students, and considers a range of explanations for why this education policy was strengthened in Australia in 2010. It also reviews a range of arguments about professional unionism, and reflects on the history of the Australian Education Union and its capacity to resist social neoliberalism. The book concludes by reporting on a case-study in which principals, teachers and parents at two ordinary schools in Australia have managed to keep market forces at bay. It will appeal to students and researchers in the fields of education and sociology, particularly those interested in education policy, political ideology, unionism, and schools.