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The Man Who Transformed American EducationWhat Albert Shanker has to teach us today.

By Sara Mosle
Posted Monday, Oct. 1, 2007, at 12:21 PM ET
Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy.

He was the greatest union organizer of the latter half of the 20th century. In the span of a single decade, the 1960s, Albert Shanker did for public school teachers what Walter Reuther did for autoworkers. At a time when organizing public sector employees was considered virtually impossible (most civic employees were forbidden, by law, from striking), he transformed the New York Teachers Guild, the union John Dewey had founded: A 2,500-member organization with zero clout became a 70,000-member army that enjoyed collective bargaining and would strike on his command.

In the process, Shanker transformed American education. His efforts significantly boosted teacher salaries, equalized pay between men and women, assured minimal standards in schools (not least by capping class sizes), and forced the National Educational Association, the nation's most powerful teachers' union, to embrace collective bargaining. He also encouraged his sometimes reluctant membership to embrace necessary reform; the American Federation of Teachers, under Shanker's leadership until his death in 1997, backed provisions for ousting incompetent teachers, public school choice, and the standards movement. And unlike Reuther's UAW, Shanker's union has held onto its gains. Today, there isn't a teacher in America whose life hasn't been touched by Shanker's own.

Why, then, isn't Shanker better remembered as the giant he was? The answer goes some way toward explaining why now, more than ever, his legacy needs resurrecting. In the late 1960s, despite some 20 years as an ardent civil rights activist, Shanker suddenly found himself vilified as a racist and reactionary after he called a series of crippling walkouts in New York. The strikes protested the dismissal without cause of a mostly white, Jewish group of teachers by community activists, most of whom were black. The activists were demanding "local control" of their impoverished schools, and the crisis came to a bitter head in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn. Although the firings were clearly illegal, liberals (with a few exceptions, such as Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, who endured attacks within the black community for their support of Shanker) abandoned labor to side with the community activists.

Shanker survived the epithets—he was always intellectually fearless—but his reputation never quite recovered from an even worse blow: becoming a liberal joke, literally, in Woody Allen's 1973 Sleeper, as a result of the strikes. In the film, Allen's character wakes up 200 years in the future to discover that civilization, as he had previously known it, was destroyed after "a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead."

As a punch line, Shanker was the precursor to a thousand jokes on Leno and Letterman. But Shanker was ahead of his time in far more important ways. As history and hindsight eventually proved, he was right about "local control." It did not boost black achievement in poor schools, as its advocates had hoped, and the logic of the black separatists only led, as Shanker also predicted, to racial retrenchment among whites.

Indeed, as Richard Kahlenberg persuasively argues in his timely new biography, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy, Shanker was right, again and again, on the major issues of his day, though few heeded his warnings. (Disclosure: I'm thanked in Kahlenberg's acknowledgements, because he conferred briefly with me about a piece I wrote years ago about Shanker, which he cites.) Most importantly, Shanker focused with rare clarity on the intersection of race and social class, and didn't flinch at what he saw to be the policy implications.

He believed passionately in the ideal of racial equality throughout his life, in part because of the extreme anti-Semitism he encountered as a child growing up in a poor Catholic neighborhood in Queens. He opposed racial "quotas," on principle, as reverse discrimination. But that does not mean he opposed affirmative action. He did not. Shanker recognized that the legacy of racism and sexism didn't just evaporate with the passage of the Civil Rights or Voting Rights acts, and he believed there was a genuine need to redress past wrongs.

However, Shanker believed that the best measure of this legacy was poverty, and that affirmative action should be based on class instead of race or gender. Such an approach, he reasoned, would invariably cover those still suffering the worst of discrimination's effects, without alienating other Americans, many of them also poor, who were crucial to any Democratic coalition.

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Sara Mosle, a former public school teacher in New York City who has written frequently about educational issues, is finishing a book about the London School explosion in Texas in 1937.
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Remarks from the Fray:

I very much enjoyed Sara Mosle's review of Richard Kahlenberg's new biography of Albert Shanker, but disagree with something she wrote: "At the core of Shanker's prescience was a single, revolutionary, but astoundingly commonsensical, insight: Poverty causes bad schools rather than the other way around."

I don't think that was Shanker's key insight at all. Shanker's key insight--and he wasn't the first to have it--was that public education could provide poor kids, like himself, an avenue out of poverty into a world of the mind and a more general, varied world than the isolation that poverty generally imposes. Moreover, he knew that public schools should be the engine of democracy, giving all children the opportunity to become educated citizens. He recognized that too often the schools we as a society provide to poor children--and even middle-class children--do not fill that role because they are poorly organized and inadequately supported by money, good training, good curriculum, and good assessments.

To think that he ascribed bad schools to poverty in such a simplistic way is to completely misunderstand him. Kahlenberg's book gives readers a much more nuanced view than that.

--KarinChenoweth

(To reply, click here.)

Yes indeed, thanks to the NEA our public schools are where they are now. Teachers who do not want to be held accountable, instead holding on to that union bellwhether of seniority. The lessening emphasis on the importance of math and science in standard curriculum for softer disciplines, namely social 'sciences'. Leave it up to the student to choose his/her curriculum while lessening the required core for a secondary education.

Let's look at the result, in the making for the past 35 years. Loss of high-tech talent. Uppity, snotty kids and the loss of respect for authority. More emphasis on growing fashion than growing the grounds of critical thinking.

Yes, we owe many thanks to Shanker and the NEA and to the all the other union 'brothers and sisters' who have helped America grow fat and obese on super-sized handouts. The American public has by and large lost confidence in the public school system and are enlightened by holding educators to a higher standard.

--benhon3

(To reply, click here.)

(10/2)

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