Student Organizing
The 2012 Quebec Student General Strike
Street Politics 101 (film on 2012 Quebec strike)
Learning to Resist: Student Struggles Against Capital & the State (video)
School’s Out: Student Struggles Against Capital & the State (video)
Student Worker Organizing Within and Beyond the Law
Teacher & Educator Organizing
Angry Education Workers (blog)
To Transform Work, Start with School
Teachers Make Gains When They Make Trouble
How NYC Teachers Ran a Slate to Build Member Power
Behind the Chicago Teachers Strike
How Chicago Teachers got Organized to Strike
How West Virginia Teachers Defied the State – and their Unions
The Sick-Out: Education Workers take Direct Action
Non-Tenure Track Faculty Organize and Win
“It’s up to us”: A Reflection on the LAUSD Strike and Contract with Teacher Tammy Matz
General Education Organizing & Issues
An interview with the Puget-Sound IWW General Education Union
What is Emotional Labor – and how do we get it Wrong?
As Heatwaves Intensify, Tens of Thousands of US Classrooms will be too Hot for Students to Learn in
Books on Organizing in the Education Sector
In less than two years, newly-elected leaders transformed the 27,000-member Chicago Teachers Union. Learn how they organized as rank-and-file members then ran for office to chart a new direction for their union.
This book details how they engaged thousands of members to tackle problems on the job and to build a stewards network that became the backbone of their 2012 citywide strike. Find out how they worked with their communities, trained new leaders, and ran a contract campaign that became a model for unions across the country.
Strike! Twenty Days in 1970 When Minneapolis Teachers Broke the Law (2022)
This book recreates twenty days in April 1970 when a then-illegal strike by Minneapolis’s public school teachers marked a singular moment of cultural upheaval—and forever changed the city’s politics, labor law, educational climate, and the right to collective bargaining.
The University and Social Justice: Struggles Across the Globe (2020)
Higher education has long been contested terrain. From student movements to staff unions, the fight for accessible, critical and quality public education has turned university campuses globally into sites of struggle.
Whether calling for the decommodification or the decolonisation of education, many of these struggles have attempted to draw on (and in turn, resonate with) longer histories of popular resistance, broader social movements and radical visions of a fairer world. In this critical collection, Aziz Choudry, Salim Vally and a host of international contributors bring grounded, analytical accounts of diverse struggles relating to higher education into conversation with each other.
Featuring contributions written by students and staff members on the frontline of struggles from 12 different countries, including Canada, Chile, France, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Occupied Palestine, the Philippines, South Africa, Turkey, the UK and the USA, the book asks what can be learned from these movements’ strategies, demands and visions.
Workers Inquiry and Global Class Struggle – chapter 5 (2020)
Rumours of the death of the global labour movement have been greatly exaggerated. Rising from the ashes of the old trade union movement, workers’ struggle is being reborn from below.
By engaging in what Karl Marx called a workers’ inquiry, workers and militant co-researchers are studying their working conditions, the technical composition of capital, and how to recompose their own power in order to devise new tactics, strategies, organisational forms and objectives. These workers’ inquiries, from call centre workers to teachers, and adjunct professors, are re-energising unions, bypassing unions altogether or innovating new forms of workers’ organisations.
In one of the first major studies to critically assess this new cycle of global working class struggle, Robert Ovetz collects together case studies from over a dozen contributors, looking at workers’ movements in China, Mexico, the US, South Africa, Turkey, Argentina, Italy, India and the UK. The book reveals how these new forms of struggle are no longer limited to single sectors of the economy or contained by state borders, but are circulating internationally and disrupting the global capitalist system as they do.
Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order (2017)
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.
Books & other Classroom Resources for Teachers and Educators
Lessons in Liberation: an abolitionist toolkit for educators (2021)
Born from sustained organizing, and rooted in Black and women of color feminisms, disability justice, and other movements, abolition calls for an end to our reliance on imprisonment, policing and surveillance, and to imagine a safer future for our communities.
Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators offers entry points to build critical and intentional bridges between educational practice and the growing movement for abolition. Designed for educators, parents, and young people, this toolkit shines a light on innovative abolitionist projects, particularly in Pre-K–12 learning contexts.
Sections are dedicated to entry points into Prison Industrial Complex abolition and education; the application of the lessons and principles of abolition; and stories about growing abolition outside of school settings. Topics addressed throughout include student organizing, immigrant justice in the face of ICE, approaches to sex education, arts-based curriculum, and building abolitionist skills and thinking in lesson plans.
Black Lives Matter at School: an uprising for educational justice
Black Lives Matter at School succinctly generalizes lessons from successful challenges to institutional racism that have been won through the BLM at School movement that began at one school in 2016 and has since spread to hundreds of schools across the country. This book will inspire many hundreds or thousands of more educators to join the BLM at School movement at a moment when this antiracist work in education could not be more urgent.
Contributors include Opal Tometi who wrote a moving foreword, Bettina Love who has a powerful chapter on abolitionist teaching, Brian Jones who writes about centering BLM at School in the historical context of other struggles for racial justice in education and several prominent teacher union leaders from Chicago to Los Angeles and beyond who discuss the importance of anti-racist struggle in education unions. The book includes essays, interviews, poems, resolutions, and more from educators, students and parents around the country who have been building Black Lives Matter at School on the ground.
Rethinking Schools
Rethinking Schools is a nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization dedicated to sustaining and strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism. Our magazine, books, and other resources promote equity and racial justice in the classroom. We encourage grassroots efforts in our schools and communities to enhance the learning and well-being of our children and to build a broad democratic movement for social and environmental justice.
MASSolidarity.org 