The Revolution Will Not be Standardized
Thursday, 11 July 2013 09:33By Owen Davis, Waging Nonviolence | News Analysis
The ground under education reform is beginning to shift. Families, chafing under years of state and mayoral control, are demanding a return to democratic processes. There’s the feeling of something lurching under the public education system, and with it our understanding of how resistance should look in the years to come. As high school students take to the streets, unions must do the same or fade into irrelevance.
Two incisive essays on education reform in the latest issue of Jacobin attempt to situate this moment ideologically and historically. In “The Strike that Didn’t Change New York,” Megan Erickson surveys contemporary teacher unionism and asks how resistance to elite education reform can transition from disparate local actions to a “unified national agenda.” Shawn Gude, in “The Industrial Classroom,” examines the parallels between contemporary education reform and industrial reforms of the late 19th century.
Their essays come at a crucial time. Chicago has just announced the largest mass closing of schools in American history. Unions everywhere face implicit threats of charter school proliferation and increased test-based evaluations, as well as the