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Class Action
American public schools are increasingly seen by politicians, business people, and philanthropists as a sorting facility where children either seize limited opportunities or surrender them. Education “reformers” like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein rhetorically connect standards and accountability to egalitarianism, using liberal language to advocate for a radically conservative reform agenda which consists of union busting, merit pay, and school privatization.
With the emergence of a new movement against corporate education reform, most significantly with the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike, we saw signs of what can happen when teachers and their allies fight back against this agenda and put forward an alternative. The CTU’s fight for “the schools our students deserve” shows that tens of thousands of ordinary people are willing to take action to defend the right to a public education.
Inspired by the fightback in Chicago, Jacobin magazine partnered with the Chicago Teacher’s Union’s CORE caucus to produce Class An Activist Teacher’s Handbook, a tool for those engaged in public education struggles around the country. Haymarket Books is proud to bring this important book back into print.
Contributors include CTU President Karen Lewis, economist Dean Baker, writer Joanne Barkan, education professor Lois Weiner, Jacobin editors Megan Erickson, Shawn Gude, and Micah Uetricht, and many others. Class Action also features documentary photography by Katrina Ohstrom and bears Creative Director Remeike Forbes's signature design.
With the emergence of a new movement against corporate education reform, most significantly with the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike, we saw signs of what can happen when teachers and their allies fight back against this agenda and put forward an alternative. The CTU’s fight for “the schools our students deserve” shows that tens of thousands of ordinary people are willing to take action to defend the right to a public education.
Inspired by the fightback in Chicago, Jacobin magazine partnered with the Chicago Teacher’s Union’s CORE caucus to produce Class An Activist Teacher’s Handbook, a tool for those engaged in public education struggles around the country. Haymarket Books is proud to bring this important book back into print.
Contributors include CTU President Karen Lewis, economist Dean Baker, writer Joanne Barkan, education professor Lois Weiner, Jacobin editors Megan Erickson, Shawn Gude, and Micah Uetricht, and many others. Class Action also features documentary photography by Katrina Ohstrom and bears Creative Director Remeike Forbes's signature design.
- GenresEducation
114 pages, Paperback
Published December 6, 2016
1 person is currently reading
21 people want to read
About the author
Jacobin Magazine
13 books11 followersJacobin is an American political magazine based in New York. It offers socialist perspectives on politics, economics and culture. As of 2023, the magazine reported a paid print circulation of 75,000 and over 3 million monthly visitors.
The publication began as an online magazine released in September 2010, expanding into a print journal later that year. Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara describes Jacobin as a radical publication being "largely the product of a younger generation not quite as tied to the Cold War paradigms that sustained the old leftist intellectual milieux like Dissent or New Politics, but still eager to confront, rather than table, the questions that arose from the experience of the left in the 20th century".
In 2014, Sunkara said that the aim of the magazine was to create a publication which combined resolutely socialist politics with the accessibility of titles such as The Nation and The New Republic. He has also contrasted it to publications associated with small leftist groups, such as the International Socialist Organization's Socialist Worker and International Socialist Review which were oriented towards party members and other revolutionary socialists, seeking a broader audience than those works while still anchoring the magazine in a Marxist perspective. In an interview he gave in 2018, Sunkara said that he intended for Jacobin to perform a similar role on the contemporary left to that undertaken by National Review on the post-war right, i.e. "to cohere people around a set of ideas, and to interact with the mainstream of liberalism with that set of ideas". In 2016, the Columbia Journalism Review called it "most successful American ideological magazine to launch in the past decade".
Jacobin's popularity grew with the increasing attention on leftist ideas stimulated by Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, with subscriptions tripling from 10,000 in the summer of 2015 to 32,000 as of the first issue of 2017, with 16,000 of the new subscribers being added in the two months after Donald Trump's election.
In late 2016, Jacobin's editorial team unionized, including a total of seven full- and part-time members. An associate editor and co-chair of the union explained that Jacobin had only recently had enough full-time members to warrant unionization.
In spring 2017, Jacobin launched a peer-reviewed journal, Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, which is today edited by New York University professor Vivek Chibber and a small editorial board. As of 2022, Catalyst claims a subscriber base of 7,500.
In November 2018, the magazine's first foreign-language edition, Jacobin Italia, was launched. Sunkara described it as "a classic franchise model", with the parent publication providing publishing and editorial advice and taking a small slice of revenue, but otherwise granting the Italian magazine autonomy. A Brazilian edition appeared in 2019, and a German version started publishing in 2020; the latter grew out of Ada, an independent online magazine established in 2018 which primarily published translations of Jacobin articles. The first issue of the German edition featured interviews with Kevin Kühnert and Grace Blakeley. A Spanish-language version of Jacobin, Jacobin América Latina, was also launched in 2020.
In April 2020, Jacobin launched its YouTube channel featuring the Weekends program with Michael Brooks and Ana Kasparian. Brooks died suddenly in July 2020.
In May 2020, some time after Bernie Sanders suspended his 2020 presidential campaign, Sanders' former adviser and speechwriter David Sirota joined Jacobin as editor-at-large.
In 2020, Jacobin became an affiliated member of the Progressive International.
The name of the magazine derives from the 1938 book The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C. L. R. James in which James ascribes the Haitian revolutionists a greater purity in regards to their attachment to the ideals of the
The publication began as an online magazine released in September 2010, expanding into a print journal later that year. Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara describes Jacobin as a radical publication being "largely the product of a younger generation not quite as tied to the Cold War paradigms that sustained the old leftist intellectual milieux like Dissent or New Politics, but still eager to confront, rather than table, the questions that arose from the experience of the left in the 20th century".
In 2014, Sunkara said that the aim of the magazine was to create a publication which combined resolutely socialist politics with the accessibility of titles such as The Nation and The New Republic. He has also contrasted it to publications associated with small leftist groups, such as the International Socialist Organization's Socialist Worker and International Socialist Review which were oriented towards party members and other revolutionary socialists, seeking a broader audience than those works while still anchoring the magazine in a Marxist perspective. In an interview he gave in 2018, Sunkara said that he intended for Jacobin to perform a similar role on the contemporary left to that undertaken by National Review on the post-war right, i.e. "to cohere people around a set of ideas, and to interact with the mainstream of liberalism with that set of ideas". In 2016, the Columbia Journalism Review called it "most successful American ideological magazine to launch in the past decade".
Jacobin's popularity grew with the increasing attention on leftist ideas stimulated by Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, with subscriptions tripling from 10,000 in the summer of 2015 to 32,000 as of the first issue of 2017, with 16,000 of the new subscribers being added in the two months after Donald Trump's election.
In late 2016, Jacobin's editorial team unionized, including a total of seven full- and part-time members. An associate editor and co-chair of the union explained that Jacobin had only recently had enough full-time members to warrant unionization.
In spring 2017, Jacobin launched a peer-reviewed journal, Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, which is today edited by New York University professor Vivek Chibber and a small editorial board. As of 2022, Catalyst claims a subscriber base of 7,500.
In November 2018, the magazine's first foreign-language edition, Jacobin Italia, was launched. Sunkara described it as "a classic franchise model", with the parent publication providing publishing and editorial advice and taking a small slice of revenue, but otherwise granting the Italian magazine autonomy. A Brazilian edition appeared in 2019, and a German version started publishing in 2020; the latter grew out of Ada, an independent online magazine established in 2018 which primarily published translations of Jacobin articles. The first issue of the German edition featured interviews with Kevin Kühnert and Grace Blakeley. A Spanish-language version of Jacobin, Jacobin América Latina, was also launched in 2020.
In April 2020, Jacobin launched its YouTube channel featuring the Weekends program with Michael Brooks and Ana Kasparian. Brooks died suddenly in July 2020.
In May 2020, some time after Bernie Sanders suspended his 2020 presidential campaign, Sanders' former adviser and speechwriter David Sirota joined Jacobin as editor-at-large.
In 2020, Jacobin became an affiliated member of the Progressive International.
The name of the magazine derives from the 1938 book The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C. L. R. James in which James ascribes the Haitian revolutionists a greater purity in regards to their attachment to the ideals of the
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 1, 2018
Today, wildcat teacher strikes are popping up across the nation; particularly in states with the most consistently underfunded schools. These schools have lost even the most basic and essential tools for learning and the legislature is still cutting teacher pay, benefits, and budgets. Austerity in public education seems to be the new rule, particularly in the most vulnerable, low-income counties, but not exclusively. Teacher pay has stagnated nationwide and there is a growing teacher shortage crisis as class sizes grow and bureaucratic testing standards strip any joy out of curriculum writing.
Most Americans understand this is happening. Most Americans, regardless of their politics, love their public school or they at least love the public school model. It is a model we know works when it’s given the proper tools to succeed. Which prompts most Americans to wonder why they aren’t given those tools. The answer is simple.
Capitalism hates your public school.
The public school model as we know works (just look at how our adequately funded and supported school districts compare globally) is one completely devoid of a profit motive. To a political economy that requires constant, unsustainable growth, models with no profit motive are seen as investment opportunities. This is why our nation’s politicians and powerful business leaders have waged a secret war against public education since the early 1990’s.
Anyone can go read about the expansion of for-profit charter schools, the application of corporate methodology to the classroom, slimy educational technology deals, the trojan horse Teach for America, and the proliferation of standardized test supply companies. But nothing comes close to the importance of Class Action, a tight, little booklet published as a joint venture between Jacobin Magazine and the Chicago Teachers Union.
What makes Class Action so important is its willingness to lay the blame entirely on capitalist forces. Doing so is necessary because, as Class Action also demonstrates, the only strategy that can effectively save our schools is one that resists efforts to inject a profit motive into the model. Although it’s short, it’s packed with the context and history of school corporatization as well as winning strategies for resistance as exercised by the CTU in their 2012 strikes.
Americans need to know that the seemingly benign “solutions” pushed by business opportunists are part of the overarching strategy of breaking the public school model. Class Action is a good read for fostering this awareness, but it also offers strategic insights on building coalitions of parents, teachers, and community leaders.
The best news is that you don’t have to be a card-carrying socialist to read this book, it won’t burn your hands.
Most Americans understand this is happening. Most Americans, regardless of their politics, love their public school or they at least love the public school model. It is a model we know works when it’s given the proper tools to succeed. Which prompts most Americans to wonder why they aren’t given those tools. The answer is simple.
Capitalism hates your public school.
The public school model as we know works (just look at how our adequately funded and supported school districts compare globally) is one completely devoid of a profit motive. To a political economy that requires constant, unsustainable growth, models with no profit motive are seen as investment opportunities. This is why our nation’s politicians and powerful business leaders have waged a secret war against public education since the early 1990’s.
Anyone can go read about the expansion of for-profit charter schools, the application of corporate methodology to the classroom, slimy educational technology deals, the trojan horse Teach for America, and the proliferation of standardized test supply companies. But nothing comes close to the importance of Class Action, a tight, little booklet published as a joint venture between Jacobin Magazine and the Chicago Teachers Union.
What makes Class Action so important is its willingness to lay the blame entirely on capitalist forces. Doing so is necessary because, as Class Action also demonstrates, the only strategy that can effectively save our schools is one that resists efforts to inject a profit motive into the model. Although it’s short, it’s packed with the context and history of school corporatization as well as winning strategies for resistance as exercised by the CTU in their 2012 strikes.
Americans need to know that the seemingly benign “solutions” pushed by business opportunists are part of the overarching strategy of breaking the public school model. Class Action is a good read for fostering this awareness, but it also offers strategic insights on building coalitions of parents, teachers, and community leaders.
The best news is that you don’t have to be a card-carrying socialist to read this book, it won’t burn your hands.
Displaying 1 of 1 review