Marjorie Murphy tells the fascinating story of the unionization of public school teachers, from the 1902 Clarke School strike to the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike; from the first steps toward unionization in the late nineteenth century to the acceptance of collective bargaining at the end of the 1960s and beyond. Murphy pays particular attention to two fundamental and divisive conflicts the unions were forced to address—the classic power struggle between neighborhood-based teachers and citywide administration, and the controversy over whether teachers were employees or professionals. In tracing the history of unionization and of the development of teachers' professional ideology, Blackboard Unions provides an unforgettable account of the realities of public school classroom teaching.Drawing on a wealth of original research, Murphy focuses on the evolution of the leading teachers' organizations—the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—and on the complex, sometimes competitive, relations between them. Murphy demonstrates that chronic fiscal crisis, episodes of redbaiting, and community opposition to the ideology of professionalism all help explain the slow pace of unionization before the explosion of teacher unionism that coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement in the sixties. In conclusion, Murphy considers the response of the teachers' unions to the financial duress imposed by the tax revolts of the 1970s.This vivid and provocative book will be welcomed by anyone concerned with the past and future of American public education, including historians working in American labor history, public sector unionism, or women's history.