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.

| Cover Title Contents Introduction: From Labor Liberalism to Neoliberalism 1. "A New Era of Labor Relations": Teachers and the Public-Sector Labor Problem 2. Teacher Power, Black Power, and the Fracturing of Labor Liberalism 3. "Who Is Going to Run the Schools?" : Teacher Strikes and the Urban Crises of 1972–73 4. Dropping Dead: Teachers, the New York City Fiscal Crisis, and Austerity 5. The Pittsburgh Teachers Strike of 1975–76 and the Crisis of the Labor-Liberal Coalition 6. The "Fed-up Taxpayer": St. Louis, Philadelphia, and the Eclipse of the Labor-Liberal Coalition Conclusion: Teacher Unions and the American Political Imagination Notes Bibliography Index | First Book Award, International Standing Conference for the History of Education, 2018
Herbert G. Gutman Award, Labor and Working-¬Class History Association (LAWCHA), 2014 — International Standing Conference for the History of Education
First Book Award, International Standing Conference for the History of Education, 2018
Herbert G. Gutman Award, Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA), 2014 — Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA)
|Jon Shelton is an assistant professor of democracy and justice studies at University of Wisconsin Green Bay.