Educational Justice: Teaching and Organizing Against the Corporate Juggernaut

Howard Ryan’s book is a celebration of the growing ranks of educators, parents, and community organizations’ successful resistance to school closures, moribund unionism, high stakes testing, and undemocratic control of our public schools. Ryan’s portrait lifts up how regular people can reassert democracy through broad-based coalitions and rank-and-file activism.

—Jackson Potter, staff coordinator, Chicago Teachers Union

Howard Ryan’s Educational Justice provides an excellent look into the perspectives and practice of teachers struggling to preserve democracy and education in their classrooms, in the face of a well-funded privatization movement. In a format that mirrors the actual dialogue of democracy-based classrooms, Ryan provides space and context for extended discourse on the important issue of public education by the people who know it best: classroom teachers.

—Jim Randels, Executive Vice President, United Teachers of New Orleans AFT Local 527

Educational Justice is right on time. It’s an illuminating guide to the formidable coalition of corporate school deformers—that merry band of billionaires, fundamentalist marketeers, hedge fund managers, banksters—who have pushed austerity, privatization, union busting, and the reduction of learning (for other people’s children, never their own). It’s also a handbook to rally popular resistance. This is a manifesto to nail to the heavy oak doors of power, as well as an organizing manual to share with anyone fighting for justice and a revitalized public square. It will fit easily into your backpack, and when you pull it out, its truth will resound like a pistol shot fired into a quiet hall.

—William Ayers, author of Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist and Demand the Impossible! A Radical Manifesto

In the 1970s, during school desegregation in Boston, one Black parent was quoted as saying, “When we fight about schools, we’re fighting for our lives!” Increasingly, our society monetizes health, education, safety—that which has always been a social, civic right. Educational Justice reminds us that schooling in a diverse democracy is a right, not a privilege, and it is not for sale to the highest bidder. We are not going to take this without a fight—the fight of our lives!

—Gloria Ladson-Billings, Professor in Urban Education, University of Wisconsin

Lots here to praise: a clear, comprehensive, and accessible take on the hows and whys of the corporate assault on public education; detailed stories of struggles and success; and, most important, the beginnings of a vision for the schools our communities deserve that emerges from the struggle against corporate assault, toward critical pedagogy and the practice of education as liberation.

—Barbara Madeloni, President, Massachusetts Teachers Association

Howard Ryan … draws upon his many years of experience, observation and expertise to prove an impressively organized and presented study that is unreservedly recommended for community and academic library collections.

—Midwest Book Review