In his engaging, originally conceived, and well-researched study of teacher union activism in the 1970s and early 1980s, Jon Shelton provides a new angle on the origins of public school privatization: the role of teacher strikes in these two decades. This is not Teacher Strike’s first or most direct goal, however. Instead, it focuses foremost on the way teacher strikes, which occurred across East Coast and Midwestern cities in the 1970s with great regularity, fractured the labor-liberal coalition that had thrived since the New Deal. The story of teachers in the 1970s is the story of teacher unions; 72 percent of teachers belonged to one at the beginning of the decade. A political powerhouse in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by the 1980s, teacher unions possessed few allies and little local influence, a development that, deserved or not, would change arguments about school reform in fundamental, long-lasting ways.

In contrast to most teacher union histories, this book traces teacher activism in multiple cities at once, including Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York, Newark, Chicago, and St. Louis. As a result, Shelton is able to re-create a powerful sense of national dissent and chaos across the 1970s that makes the 1967–1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville strikes, which have received the greatest attention in the extant literature, seem almost tame by contrast. For example, he charts how, in 1973, teachers in Chicago, St. Louis, and Philadelphia struck separately but simultaneously. Three enormous public school systems were shut down for weeks. The six cities he examines are diverse in region and character, but they share a history of postwar white flight and a corresponding loss of revenue that, along with the national inflation crisis of the 1970s, strained city budgets and kept teacher salaries low. Some of the unions Shelton examines struck for pedagogical improvements, like smaller class sizes and an increase in prep periods, but all of them struck for better pay. To the public, unions’ willingness to demand better salaries appeared audacious, reckless, and entirely self-interested.

There are two things that Shelton demonstrates particularly convincingly. The first of these is that the rising number of injunctions and statutes that made public union strikes illegal in the 1970s contributed significantly to a view of teacher unions as lawless and illegitimate. Leaders were jailed and unions charged large sums to compensate for school days lost. At a time when school violence and discipline issues ruled public perceptions of schools, many citizens saw teachers as criminal, incapable of setting an ethical example for their students. One editorial by WCAU-TV in Philadelphia captured this opinion especially well when it asked, “Who wonders how many of these same people have whined and cried about the lawlessness of their students. … What kind of teacher is it who teaches—by personal example—in open defiance of the law?” (p. 99). This question was echoed by individual citizens throughout the decade.

Second, Teacher Strike reveals how important newspapers were to shaping public perception and to giving citizens a space in which to voice it. Few urban residents who sounded their opinion come across as liberal, even if they were white, middle-class, and still lived within city limits. This was especially the case as they likened teachers to poor urban residents, both of whom critics saw as a drain on public resources. Of one New York City resident who wrote to complain about unions, Shelton deftly concludes, “Teachers, in her estimation, were also takers” (p. 135). Shelton characterizes these critiques in the language of “productivity” and argues that majority white teaching forces, black activists, and welfare recipients became viewed as an “‘unproductive’ coalition buttressed by a liberal state in victimizing hardworking, law-abiding citizens” (p. 75).

But the state comes across as increasingly illiberal over the 1970s; in St. Louis, it became illegal to even bargain with teacher unions, strike or no (p. 104). In contrast to the previous decade, when liberal theories assumed that the “rational administration of government policy should solve conflict and ensure government services” and that unionization “was necessary to counteract the excessive powers of the employer,” municipal governments in the 1970s treated teacher unions as the enemy (p. 44). This distinction culminated in a pattern of strikes and corresponding waning public support that teachers either reproduced or became victims of, depending on how one views it. Shelton is empathetic toward unions, but after the first several strikes he analyzes, one wonders whether individual unions might have been able to learn lessons or change their strategies in the face of others’ struggles. Small victories, including some bumps in pay, appear to have taken precedence over a larger coordinated strategy. Teacher Strike is interested in the sum of many local stories, but it might have been helpful to readers to have a better grasp on the conversation within the national union (the American Federation of Teachers) and to see how aware local unionists were of the larger national scene that Shelton re-creates.

Regrettably, the focus in the 1970s was on teachers’ behavior rather than school systems, and this had consequences for teachers, unions, and schools. On a 1972–1973 Philadelphia strike, Shelton writes, “The teachers’ violation of the law effaced the citywide discussion about the fundamental flaws of funding schools” (p. 86). By the time people really did start thinking about solutions almost a decade had passed and teachers had lost political favor. Now residents and politicians imagined a new solution to the problem: privatization. After a 1981 strike in Philadelphia, Shelton notes, all alternatives “revolved around market-based systems: new schools with nonunionized teachers, private schools as competition, tuition or head taxes, or, to bring it all together, a system of ‘vouchers’ to instill competition by allowing students to attend whatever school their parents chose” (p. 185). Public school systems became seen as a waste of tax dollars, largely because of the actions of the teachers who worked in them. Shelton's concluding argument focuses on one of the most distinctive features of charter schools, their reliance on nonunionized novice teachers. Teacher Strike traces the foundations of this aspect of current school trends with great clarity and insight, offering readers an original way of thinking about teachers, public opinion, and school reform.