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.

• Acknowledgments – Worldviews in Collision – Race, Class, and the Triumph of Teacher Unionism – The Ambiguities of Identity: Whiteness, Ethnicity, and the Racial Politics of Schooling – Teachers for Community Control: The Limits of Anti-Racism – Up Against the Leviathan: Teaching for Democratic Community – The Case Against Community: Bayard Rustin and the Black Proletariat – Milton Galamison and the Integrationist Ideal – From Community Organizing to Community Control: Sonny Carson and the Redefinition of Black Community – Visible Men: Black Teachers and the Curricular Implications of Black Power – Schools and Social Justice in the Post-Liberal City – Notes – Index.

"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»