Recent union-supported teachers' walkouts and strikes across several U.S. states and cities highlighted union-led and grassroots efforts to amplify teachers' voices. Yet, the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, "Janus v. AFSCME, Council 31," provides a strength test for teachers' unions and members engaging in social justice/equity work…

This article considers the 2012 Chicago Teachers Strike in light of John Dewey's "The Public and Its Problems." It engages Dewey's conceptualization of practical reason to challenge the educational reform movement's commitment to technocratic decision-making.

As school closures are increasingly used as a remedy to budget woes and a solution to failing schools in many cities, debates are intensifying about their effect on student performance and well-being, on district finances, and on communities and the processes districts use to choose which schools will be shuttered. Student and parent groups in…

This piece explores questions of power, conflict, and community in education through a story of Chicago educators engaging in experiential inquiry processes. One of these processes is a "Theatre of the Oppressed" exercise for dealing with conflict in education settings. The other process described here focuses on a text that emerged from…

Chicago teachers voted last week to suspend a 7-day-old strike, sending some 350,000 students back to the classroom and paving the way for the teaching force to vote on a tentative contract. But for many in the Windy City, the contract has raised another potentially tall hurdle: how the cash-strapped district will manage to pay for it. District…

When former U.S. congressman and Obama administration chief of staff Rahm Emanuel marched triumphantly into the Chicago mayor's office in 2011, he promised to revamp Chicago Public Schools (CPS) in ways that had barely been contemplated in 16 years of mayoral control over the city's sprawling public-school system. This article discusses and…

A strike last week by some 29,000 teachers in Chicago pushed long-simmering tensions over deeply divisive school improvement ideas--including changes in teacher evaluation and the takeover or closure of underperforming schools--into the national spotlight. A framework for a tentative agreement emerged last Friday, and the union's house of…

Once as familiar in the back-to-school ritual as falling leaves, teacher strikes seem headed for a winter freeze. According to the nation's largest teacher's union, about 15 of the National Education Association's (NEA) 14,000 local affiliates have gone on strike since the start of this school year. In Pennsylvania--a traditional union…

In 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka," the South Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side was home primarily to Polish and Czech immigrants. In the decades since, South Lawndale has undergone dramatic change. Eastern Europeans moved out, and people of Mexican…