Chapter 4: Educators’ Working Conditions are Students’ Learning Conditions: Differences in the Literature With and for Contemporary Educator Movements

In February 2011, Wisconsin educators across the state participated in mass sickouts and a weeks-long occupation of the state capitol building after then-Governor Scott Walker (R) proposed legislation that would disallow public sector unions from bargaining collectively for health care and pension benefits (Davey & Greenhouse, 2011).¹ Wisconsin had long been a state where public school advocates were fighting bipartisan efforts to proliferate school choice and privatization, efforts deeply enmeshed in urban gentrification schemes (Davis & Oakey, 2013). While the 2011 state uprising did not succeed in blocking Walker’s antiunion legislation, many scholars suggest it contributed to sparking the political conditions that, in part, made possible the Occupy Movement (Buhle & Buhle, 2011), garnered popular support for the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike led by its Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), and marked a new era of struggle for social welfare and against the increasingly upward redistribution of wealth.