Second City Teachers Top Five Books of the Year
By Jim Vail
We at Second City Teachers would like to recommend to our readers our Top Five books of the year. Only one book was actually published this year, the rest are oldies but goodies that we discovered and highly recommend.
These books focus on public schools and the politics that swirls around them. A couple were written about the history of the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Public Schools and one was written by a fantastic writer who spent a lot time trailing a group of refugee students at a North Side High School.
Happy Holidays everyone!
No. 1 - The Chicago Schools: A Social and Political History by Mary Herrick, 1971
I finally learned about the history of the Chicago public schools and the Chicago Teachers Union when dynamic high school teacher Ed Hershey recommended a few fantastic books about our history. This book gives a fascinating history going back to the beginning of Chicago and how the public schools were formed. Mary Herrick did incredible research to tell the stories behind amazing heroes who helped build up the Second City public schools, including William Wells (Wells High School), Albert Lane (Lane Tech High School) and Ella Flagg (Ella Flagg Elementary School). This is a must read book for any teacher or follower of the Chicago public schools to know our true history. You can find this book in the library or purchase it online. We wrote a review in our Oct. 3, 2022 issue.
No. 2 - Teachers and Reform: Chicago Public Education, 1929 - 1970 by John Lyons, 2015.
This is the best book I have read so far about the history of the Chicago Teachers Union. The research goes back to the early days when the Chicago Federation of Teachers led by Margaret Haley was first formed and then transformed into the Chicago Teachers Union by the 1930s. The story of John Fewkes is one that is not well known in our union. He was the first CTU President who was a reformist militant who helped led protests against the city leaders for teachers to get paid after the Great Depression cut salaries dramatically. He also led a very conservative and anti-communist union that did not embrace the Civil Rights movement like their brothers and sisters in New York. But his fight and story is still powerful. Second City Teachers featured a 3-part series based on the book in our July 2022. issues.
No. 3 - Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights and the NY City Teachers Union by Clarence Taylor, 2011
This is yet another fascinating history of the NY Teachers Union and the influence of the Communist Party that helped make it the leader in fighting racism and demanding better conditions for the poor inner city students. It also broadened our scope of the McCarthy Red Scare communist witch hunt that included the NY Board of Education and its purging of activist teachers in the NY Teachers Union who were at the forefront of fighting racism in the schools.
No. 4 - A Fight for the Soul of Public Education: The Story of the Chicago Teachers Strike by Steven Ashby and Robert Bruno, 2016. This is a must-read book for a contemporary history of the powerful Chicago Teachers Union who led the first teachers strike in 25 years in 2012. The authors are history professors who did a nice research job and filled in the blanks about how the teachers union got into the mess of privatization with Mayor Richard Daley's Renaissance 2010 and Barack Obama's Race to the Top - all hell bent on destroying the teachers union and public schools via corporate reform. The question I had on my mind was how in the hell did the Chicago Teachers Union just give up all its hard-earned union rights and allow this madness to nearly destroy us all? The authors pinpoint the time when CPS lawyer James Franzek on behalf of the business class threw a few silver coins at the union leaders to look the other way as collective bargaining and pension payments exited and non-union charter schools flooded in.
Truly disgusting!
No. 5 - Refugee High by Elly Fishman, 2021.
This is the best book I've read about the lives of student refugees in a Chicago Public High School. Fishman wrote a riveting account of several students who hailed from Syria, Burma, Guatamala and the Congo and how they had to navigate the gangs, the violence and learning English. She followed the students' footsteps everywhere to give us the inside scoop of what life is like for the immigrants in a rough and tumble Sullivan High School on the North Side. These are the lives we as teachers need to know about, because what happens in a student's home, affects what happens in the student's classroom.
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