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Book Review: We Are One: Stories of Work, Life, and Love, edited by Elizabeth R. Gottlieb

Worth Striking for effectively explains these four educational purposes and folds this seamlessly within CTU’s strike demands against the CPS. Creating these connections made union action more palatable to citizens, sharing their success broadly across Chicago. The book is less effective in providing a template for other disaffected teachers to engage in similarly successful labor protests. CTU President Karen Lewis’s impressive leadership informed her membership, unified them, and advocated for a position that resonated with the public. Faced with phlegmatic intransigent union leadership, similarly politically invested teachers may feel they have nowhere to go. This book may not be useful at directing their accumulated frustration toward constructive ends. Although this book’s portrayal of the CTU’s work is inspirational, public education is in an incredibly compromised position. The essentialist philosophical argument has seized control of education and broader political discourse—heightened accountability, increased numbers of charter schools, stronger municipal control, broader school choice, increased testing, and more union busting are assumed to improve student outcomes. Although this may prove illusory, this reasoning has gained undeniable political currency. Politics are negotiated within a poisonous discursive space with little appetite for deep coverage. Complex and legitimate counterarguments to the prevailing corporatist agenda do not fit tidily within media’s preference for sound bites—especially during a rancorous presidential election. Although the authors longingly wish to reframe the educational debate, the headwinds are strong and the maelstrom they stir may be impossible to escape from. Those concerned with neoliberalism’s impact on education and the society that public schools serve should read Worth Striking for. Teaching is a political act whether you think so or not—the pedagogical is the political, even if its political nature is ignored. A robust democracy requires a vibrant countervailing response to the dominant discourse to sustain itself—in this case responding to the relentless march toward privatization. This book provides educational stakeholders with intellectually honest philosophical underpinnings to inform their teaching and discussions with the wider citizenry regarding public education. This worthwhile book inspires educators to pick up this heavy, daunting, but essential, gauntlet.