ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews key changes in teacher unionism as they relate to urban education in the neoliberal project of mass privatization of public education, weakening of teachers unions, and gutting of public worker benefits and pensions. The intensely negative impact of neoliberal reforms on teachers’ work is studied a great deal; yet what the architects and proponents of the reforms have named as probably the most dangerous impediment to success of its project, teachers unions studied very little. The rationale in support of neoliberal educational policies supported in the United States (US) is by both Democrats and Republicans as a method of ameliorating educational inequality through increased high-stakes standardized testing, takeover of local school boards of education, district takeovers, the proliferation of pre-packaged corporate curricula, and the proliferation of charter schools and urban public school closures. The researcher becoming the researched, the phenomenon under investigation and the central unit of analysis, is the staple of autoethnography.
