Badass Teachers Unite!: Reflections on Education, History, and Youth Activism

An academic exposes how dominant education reform policies destabilize low-income communities. In this incisive collection of essays, educator and activist Mark Naison draws on years of research on Bronx history and his own experience on the front lines of the education wars to unapologetically defend teachers and students from education “reform” policies that undermine their power and creativity. Naison shows how dominant education policy systematically hurts the very children it claims to support and instead forces them to “race to the top.” He exposes the Duncans, Rhees, and Gateses for schemes that intensify racial and economic inequality. And he refocuses the conversation on teaching and organizing strategies that should be implemented in communities everywhere. Praise for Badass Teachers Unite! “Mark Naison has woven a series of provocative essays into a powerful book. No traditional scholarly treatise, Badass Teachers Unite! is an education manifesto for the people’s school reform movement. With clarity, verve, and passion, Naison outlines the challenges we face in transforming public schools and he forges a guide to our actions. This book is must reading for anyone concerned about the plight of public schools in the USA today.” —Henry Louis Taylor Jr., director, UB Center for Urban Studies, University at Buffalo “Mark Naison is a badass?and it took one to write this rousing pronouncement to the militancy emerging among today’s schoolteachers . . . . Mark Naison’s Badass Teachers Unite! brings back the attitude we need to confront the corporate reform bullies and reclaim our schools.” —Jesse Hagopian, history teacher, Garfield High School, Seattle, Washington, and associate editor for Rethinking Schools magazine