A Political Education - Justice, Power, and Politics by Elizabeth Todd-Breland Hardcover

About the Book

"In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle"--

Book Synopsis

In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party.

Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.

Review Quotes

"Elizabeth Todd-Breland has written a brilliant book exploring how neoliberalism impacted the education provided to children, in particular black and brown children, in Chicago. Tracing struggles for educational reform in Chicago since the 1960s, Todd-Breland reveals how even in the midst of severe disinvestment from black communities through neoliberalism, there continued to be significant resistance to such policies in these same communities. In this work, Todd-Breland takes black subjects as serious political actors and details how the collective resistance of teachers, students, and parents in black communities, often invisible in studies of urban politics, helped to reshape both black and urban politics in a city. Anyone seeking to understand how neoliberalism has shaped public education and how members of marginalized communities and their allies have resisted must read A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago Since the 1960s. This is an important book!" --Cathy J. Cohen, University of Chicago

"Recounts [Chicago's] educational history in vivid detail."--New York Review of Books

"This is a brilliant and necessary exposé of a collision that we all know too little about. Using Chicago as a case study, Elizabeth Todd-Breland shares the devastating collision between Black community-based education reformers and corporate education reformers since the 1960s. Black education organizing comes alive-- and fights on and on against all odds-- in this expertly framed and vividly told book." --Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning

"Todd-Breland skillfully establishes the major activists and players in the major movements and uses their biographies to illustrate broad context, changing social currents, and the shifts in power and discourse over time. . . . [Her] clear-eyed yet sympathetic portrayal of the movement is a vital and refreshing approach."--South Side Weekly

"Todd-Breland's critically acclaimed book . . . is especially impressive in its fluent engagement with numerous strands of the historical literature. A Political Education not only engages with but also contributes to the fields of urban history, Black History, labour history, women's history, educational history, political history, and intellectual history. . . . It is precisely because the book is about making connections and showing continuity that Todd-Breland can masterfully take her readers around a nebula of educational reform movements."--Historical Studies in Education