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…

Summarized testimony heard at the public hearings held by the Educational Service Region of Cook County (March 1, 1973) is presented in this document. In addition to being printed in narrative form, the comments are also analyzed in tables according to content and response to key issues centered around collective bargaining. An opening letter by…

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…

An objective record is presented of the processes that led to faculty collective bargaining at Chicago State University (CSU), based principally on the published proceedings of the Board of Governors of State Colleges and Universities of the State of Illinois. The study presents chronologically the official record of the CSU faculty-governing…

Although Illinois has not enacted a comprehensive bargaining statute, school districts have been using the collective bargaining process to determine teacher salaries, benefits, and conditions of employment for more than a decade. Nevertheless, since the 1977-78 school year, Illinois public schools have experienced 139 teacher strikes. The purpose…

Conclusions about public school labor relations advanced in this report are based on analysis of data from a two-phase study. The first phase consisted of case studies conducted during entire collective bargaining cycles in eight school districts--four in Illinois and four in California. The second phase of the research expanded the work into 65…