Richard D. Kahlenberg. Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy . Columbia University Press. 552 pages. $29.95
It was a Monday in late February 2004 when Education Secretary Rod Paige called the National Education Association (nea), the nation’s largest teachers union, a “terrorist organization.” Reaction came swiftly. The union’s president, Reg Weaver, labeled Paige’s statement “morally repugnant” and demanded that President Bush fire him. The nea’s union rival, the American Federation of Teachers (aft), joined the critique of Paige’s analogy, describing it as “indicative of the way this administration and this secretary paint with a broad brush and attack anybody that disagrees with them. ” Editorial boards and pundits piled on. Paige apologized, copiously.
A blip in history, a tactless statement blown out of proportion. But an incident that nonetheless illustrates a serious and growing divide between two educational camps: the “reformers” who favor implementing in the public-school arena new and controversial ideas (merit pay, school choice, charter schools), and the unions who mostly oppose them. Stuck in the middle, of course, are the students.
How did we arrive here, where education reformers like Paige find themselves squarely at odds with teachers unions, and where the trust gap between the two sides is perilously wide and ever-yawning? Albert Shanker would certainly wonder.
A leader of teachers unions for his entire adult life, Shanker grew famous for his ability to forge coalitions with unlikely partners, and because he embraced some practices that were anathema to his union colleagues. He pushed hard to implement a system of standards-based reform in the public schools, he was at the forefront of the charter-school movement, and he advocated a system of teacher peer review. What ’s more, Shanker took all those stands while president of the aft. He provided hope that education reformers and teachers unions could be partners in the quest to build a better education for American students. And he was, by most accounts, the most important educator of the twentieth century ’s latter half.
That, at least, is how some — like Richard Kahlenberg, author of the biography Tough Liberal — see Shanker. Others have less charitable views. Education consultant Gerald Bracey in 1996 told the Los Angeles Times about Shanker, “He goes where the power is.” And Bracey is by no means the first to put forth those sentiments, nor the first to dispute that Shanker was really as upright and straightforward a man as he himself claimed to be.
Released a decade after Shanker’s death, Tough Liberal does a fine job of tracking the union leader’s immersion in the world of education. For the better part of 35 years, Shanker’s life was defined by educational events, many of his own making, and his public reaction to them. Kahlenberg ’s account of Shanker’s life year by year lacks punch and panache, but brims with valuable research.
Trouble is, Shanker’s involvement in education is well-known; his 35 years in the public eye and the hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles written about him (not to mention his own long-running, paid column in the New York Times) made his ideas and actions common knowledge. More difficult to answer is who was Shanker, and what will be his educational legacy? Unfortunately, Tough Liberal doesn’t offer a satisfactory response to either question, partly because Kahlenberg neglects to investigate in detail
Shanker ’s private life, and partly because Shanker’s legacy remains undefined — indeed, his legacy currently hangs in the balance.
Shanker was born in New York City in 1928 to Eastern European Jewish immigrants; his father, Morris, was a newspaper deliveryman, his mother, Mamie, a garment worker. When Shanker was not yet two years old, after the birth of a sister, his family moved from their cramped Lower East Side apartment to a neighborhood in Queens. “Ours was the only Jewish neighborhood for blocks,” he wrote. “On Sundays, I’d walk down the street and could hear Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic sermons coming through the windows.” Shanker had no friends growing up, and he endured chronic religious discrimination (including a traumatic experience in which he was blindfolded, bound, and nearly hoisted up a tree by neighborhood boys). He spent a lot of time by himself, reading; Kahlenberg notes that as a teenager “Shanker would read six or eight newspapers a day.”
Childhood experiences seem to have made quite an impression on Shanker. He never forgot the ostracism he experienced as a boy, or how the working-class families he lived amongst were often exploited by their employers. His mother might work as many as 70 hours a week, in terrible circumstances, and his father would work two shifts every day, delivering the morning papers from 2 a.m. until 7 a.m., and the afternoon papers from 10 a.m. until evening. His family were avowed socialists who revered Franklin Delano Roosevelt, organized labor ’s champion, and his New Deal: An 8-year-old Shanker marched in fdr parades.
Politically-minded though he was, the future educator was no natural student. In his early years, he struggled academically. But as Shanker grew older he began to do well at the city public schools he attended and became an especially avid and talented debater (and continued to be one his entire life). He wasn ’t one for competitive sports, though. A 1967 New York Times profile by A. H. Raskin described the 6 foot 3 Shanker as a “gangling youth, utterly devoid of muscular coordination,” and noted that “no athletic coach ever tried to divert him from the class struggle to the gridiron. ” After attending the University of Illinois, where he majored in philosophy, Shanker returned to New York to pursue a doctorate in the subject at Columbia University.
Shaky finances forced him to quit school, though, and in 1952, just shy of receiving a Ph.D. at the age of twenty-four, Shanker became a public-school teacher. Shortly thereafter, he began his work for the unions, and in 1959 he quit his teaching job to become a full-time organizer for the New York Teacher ’s Guild, an aft affiliate which would soon become the United Federation of Teachers (uft).
Shanker’s first battle came in late 1960, when the newly organized uft decided, in no small part because of his efforts, to strike for collective bargaining privileges for New York City ’s teachers. Earlier that year, the uft had secured several promises from Mayor Robert Wagner, among them that a collective bargaining election would be held (so teachers could choose whether they wanted to be represented by a union in contract negotiations). At that time, a combination of factors — in most states it was illegal for public employees to strike, teachers were ill-organized, and many educators resented being involved with blue-collar unions — made collective bargaining rare and teachers unions powerless.
By November, though, it became clear to Shanker that Wagner had little intention of fulfilling his promises. So on the seventh day of the month, the uft went on strike. The school board relented, and by 1961, the
city ’s teachers were represented in contract negotiations by the uft. That was the beginning; teachers unions have had collective-bargaining powers ever since.
Kahlenberg observes that before Shanker pushed for collective-bargaining privileges, “only a tiny percentage of teachers were organized.” But now, in twenty-first-century America, “more than 70 percent of public-school teachers are covered by collective-bargaining agreements — ten times the rate of private-sector workers. Public-school teaching is among the most highly unionized occupations in the country. ” Tough Liberal depicts this evolution as a positive one, one for which the nation owes Shanker much gratitude. Unasked, however, is whether collective bargaining for teachers is really worth celebrating.
It’s true that before the 1960s, public-school teachers were overworked and underpaid and, in general, not treated as professionals. But today, the bargaining power of teachers unions is undeniably a major impediment to improving public schools, and students are worse-off because of it. The uft and Shanker started it all with the first collectively-bargained New York City teacher contract.
That 1962 uft contract constructed a rigid, uniform pay scale based on seniority. It required all teachers to enroll in the union and to have dues deducted directly from their paychecks. Modern teacher contracts are structured in much the same way, although they ’ve grown ever longer and more tedious, averaging over 100 pages. They make it difficult if not impossible to fire incompetent educators; they don’t allow for good teachers to earn more money than bad ones; they determine the length of school days and school years; and their lock-step, seniority-based salary schedules reward longevity rather than skill. It ’s debatable whether public-school teachers should even have the right to bargain collectively (they are paid by citizens ’ tax dollars, not private corporations), much less whether teachers in certain states should be forced to join a union.
For a man who claimed throughout his career to be fighting for democratic principles, it ’s worth noting that Shanker’s first fight in 1960 was waged in an undemocratic way and yielded undemocratic results. Only about 5,000 of New York City’s 50,000 teachers participated in the 1960 strike — 45,000 teachers crossed the picket lines. After collective bargaining was established, though, the uft represented all 50,000 Big Apple educators, whether they liked it or not.
After the collective bargaining battle, Shanker’s next big fight, one that still conjures visceral feelings, came in 1968. New York City had begun to experiment with community-controlled schools (which decentralized educational operations and allowed local parents more input in their neighborhood classrooms) at a time when racial issues were at the fore of public thought and when racial tensions were peaking. In April, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. In May, while the inner-cities of many American metropolises were literally and metaphorically smoldering, Rhody McCoy, the black administrator of Brooklyn ’s predominantly black Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools, dismissed without cause 19 educators. Eighteen of them were white and Jewish. Kahlenberg writes that the one black teacher was “mistakenly included in the list because his name was similar to that of a white teacher, ” and his dismissal “was rescinded almost immediately after the mistake was discovered.”
Shanker, then the uft president, demanded the teachers be reinstated, but McCoy declined — with support from an unlikely coalition of local-control conservatives, “limousine liberals” (who were sensitive to minority concerns but insensitive to concerns of working-class whites), and mostly-minority community activists. The uft went on strike three times before the situation was resolved. In the end, over a million New York City kids were out of class for about one-fifth of the school year. Shanker himself said that the strikes “resulted in a dramatic decline in citywide reading scores.”
Shanker’s three drawn-out strikes seemed radical, but in truth were not unreasonable. He believed that community control over schools signaled a retreat from longstanding liberal principles, and that just as it permitted minority school districts like Ocean Hill-Brownsville to discriminate against white educators, it would allow white districts to discriminate against minorities. One major purpose of teachers unions, in Shanker ’s view, was to protect all educators from arbitrary dismissal and racial or religious discrimination. Decentralized schooling would ruin all that; working-class people of different races would attack each other rather than forge bonds to create a stronger union and better schools.
Despite Shanker’s principled stand, the 1968 strikes had unfortunate consequences. Students suffered, of course, from a political mess that was not of their making. Jews continued to claim that anti-Semitism was rife in the schools; blacks claimed racism was. And Shanker was distinctly portrayed (in large part, distinctly wrongly portrayed) in the media as a man who was perhaps a bit racist, and who thirsted after power and would use most any means to get it. When Woody Allen in his 1973 movie Sleeper wakes up in the year 2173 after having been frozen, he learns how civilization came to an end: “a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”
Shanker’s image problem was one of the reasons that, in late 1970, he began producing “Where We Stand,” his paid column in the Sunday New York Times. This weekly opinion piece gave the country a direct view into the mind of Shanker, a man most had come to know only from unflattering articles about striking teachers. “Where We Stand” — it was often a royal “we,” noted author and educator E.D. Hirsch, Jr. — was a showcase for Shanker’s ideas, and it permitted him a forum to illustrate that thoughts, not thuggery, motivated his approach to organizing educators. Shanker could reveal that he was, as he said, “a practical political man who deals with the possible.”
Not that some of Shanker’s detractors cared. A headline on the front page of the July 2, 1973, New York Times screamed “N.E.A. Speaker Denounces Shanker Over Racial Split.” The speaker in question — not Woody Allen, this time, but Jonathan Kozol — said of events surrounding the 1968 strikes, “Shanker openly encouraged and exaggerated the animosity that was developing between Jewish and black people.”
Shanker’s image did eventually recover, however, and in 1974 he also became president of the aft (he continued to serve as uft president until 1986). He was thus positioned to influence schooling on a national level. The rabble-rousing union organizer came to Washington. Over the next decade, the aft president shifted his emphasis from union tactics to policy. He began focusing on big-picture reforms of the teaching profession but, of course, he never lost his fighting spirit in the process — even when that meant fighting against his friends.
Shanker supported Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s candidacy to represent New York in the U.S. Senate, both in the Democratic primary (Shanker called Moynihan ’s primary opponent, a former teacher, a “scab”) and in the 1976 general election, which Moynihan won. But in Washington, the two men clashed almost immediately when Moynihan introduced legislation to provide tax credits to families who enrolled their students in private and parochial schools — essentially, vouchers.
Moynihan’s proposal attacked two institutions that Shanker, according to Kahlenberg, “cared about more than practically any others: unions and public schools,” institutions Shanker was determined to defend. Initial signs, however, favored the New York senator: in 1978, a tuition tax credit passed the House, and Moynihan’s bill passed the Senate Finance Committee on a 14 to 1 vote. Shanker figured that the intellectual and policy arguments against tuition tax credits, which he had been tirelessly making, would not get the job done. He decided to play hardball: “This is it,” he warned legislators. “If you’re not right with us [the aft] on this issue, you’re not right with us period.” In the end, tuition tax credits failed to pass the Senate.
This voucher fight deserves more consideration than Kahlenberg affords it. Shanker was undoubtedly a man of ideas, someone who sought out intellectual debate. But when he lost such debates, when it became clear that his perspective wouldn ’t carry the day, he was supremely comfortable with leaving the forum and calling in the muscle. He did it as head of the uft, and he did it in Washington as aft president. He was a man who understood power — he knew how to get it and he knew how to use it. “Shanker,” former assistant education secretary Chester Finn Jr. once said, “is a gifted reader of political entrails.”
Kahlenberg’s overall presentation, it must be noted, is not unbiased. He paints voucher advocates as seriously misguided, and Shanker ’s fights with them as battles to preserve public education. Nowhere in Tough Liberal are the merits of vouchers or tuition tax credits given any serious consideration — not even Moynihan’s proposal is evaluated on its merits. In a section titled “Preserver of Public Education,” Kahlenberg writes that Shanker’s “biggest accomplishment of all was surely to preserve a system of public education against those who would see it dismantled in favor of a system of private-school vouchers.”
To characterize voucher proponents who are seeking to provide an adequate education for poor students trapped in lousy public schools as advocates of dismantling public education is unfair in the extreme. Kahlenberg ’s ode to government-run k-12 classrooms — “The United States has the most market oriented economy in the world, and yet 90 percent of its students attend what critics call ‘government-sponsored’ public schools.” — is undercut by just how bad many of America’s public schools are, and how bad they remain, despite decades of union-demanded funding increases. If protecting a public-school institution is
one ’s goal, a just-say-no-to-vouchers attitude makes sense. If providing a solid education for America ’s students is one’s goal, such a stance becomes illogical.
So where did Shanker stand? Was he more concerned with his union or with the education of children? The easy answer, the one many seem to pick, is that he cared about both. Kahlenberg and other Shanker admirers portray the union leader as a straight-talker who followed the facts to their logical conclusions. “If I come to believe something just isn’t going to work, I am not going to ritualistically stick with that,” Shanker said. Yet throughout his life, he was firmly committed to getting more money for public schools, even when the evidence suggested that more money did not automatically lead to high-quality education for students or job satisfaction for teachers.
Shanker garnered a great deal of praise from centrist elements of both the left and the right; but today, it seems, those centrists have been marginalized. In 2007 it is the nea, not the aft, that sets the teachers-union agenda in America. Anyone who doubts this has only to dig up news coverage of the nea convention in July, and check out the remarks of the Democratic presidential candidates who visited. And on the right, the local control forces — the federalists — are making quite a racket, especially in Congress. The No Child Left Behind law is being attacked from both the far left and the far right. The nea hates it because it holds teachers and schools accountable for performance, and libertarians and federalist conservatives hate it because it means more federal spending and Big Government control.
Shanker’s supporters are in the lonely middle. They believe in standards and accountability, in a federal role in education, in strong public schools and increased funding for them. What will his legacy be? During his life, he undoubtedly helped institute and strengthen many practices which are, today, stymieing progress in schools. But he also did great things, had chutzpah, and showed it was possible for teachers unions and their natural opponents to have civil, intellectual discussion and, in the end, to reach reasonable conclusions that benefited teachers and students. We will probably know, within the next five or ten years, whether the best of Shanker ’s contributions will endure. We must hope they do.
