Justice, Justice

The Author: Daniel H. Perlstein is a historian at the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley. After working as a high school teacher and teachers union activist in New York City, he attended Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. in history and education. He is the author of numerous scholarly works examining the interplay of social inequalities and democratic aspirations in the history of American educational politics and practices.

"Daniel Perlstein’s gripping interdisciplinary examination of the New York school wars of the 1960s teaches us much about the complex and shifting interactions of politics, ideology, race, social class, and unionism when social change is attempted. This is the way educational history should be done. Perlstein must now be viewed as one of the eminent social theorists of our time."
William Watkins, author, «The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865–1954»

"Like a ghost, the 1968 New York teachers strike continues to haunt America’s fractured political and educational landscape. Daniel Perlstein’s long-awaited account of the strike demonstrates the enormous range of meanings that black and white Americans affixed to terms such as ‘community’, ‘freedom’, and ‘equality’. Even better, Perstein shows how our present-day dilemmas over race and education reflect the very same controversies that the strike unleashed. Eminently fair and respectful to every side of the dispute, this wise book will force its readers to grapple anew with the ghost of 1968. If the history that Perlstein presents is often frightful, the costs of ignoring it are even scarier.
Jonathan Zimmerman, author, «Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools»