An Updated Political Education

• In Event: Learning From Chicago's Decentralized, School-Based Decision Making Regarding the Role of Police in Schools

Abstract

In 2012, Chicago’s school year began with the city’s first teachers’ strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest intentional mass closure of public schools in recent U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran Black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from Black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style reform could set the struggling school system aright.

Elizabeth Todd-Breland’s 2018 book, A Political Education, reveals the hidden history underlying this battle and the racial politics of education reform from the late 1960s to the present. Her research analyzes Black education reformers’ community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and Black teachers’ challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. It reveals how these strategies collided with the corporate reorganization of the public sphere during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of Black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.

After the books’ publication, Todd-Breland was appointed to the Chicago Board of Education, serving since June 2019. On this panel she will discuss how her historical research informed her actions as a Board member—particularly in relation to intensified calls to remove police from schools beginning in summer 2020—and how Chicago’s complex politics and history produced the city’s unique locally controlled approach to school police reform.

Author

• Elizabeth Todd-Breland, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Presenting Author