Reshaping the Educational Landscape
LEVIN, H.M.
Reshaping the Educational Landscape Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy By Richard D. Kahlenberg Columbia. 524 pp. $29.95. Reviewed...
...In the process, he identified and championed many of the reforms that shape the educational landscape today, such as educational standards, proficiency testing of students, merit pay, school restructuring, and an early version of charter schools—a movement that would turn against him when it became a vehicle for eliminating teacher unions from schools...
...Of course, skeptics could say that this would, not coincidentally, broaden union membership and muscle...
...Kahlenberg effectively recounts the battle in the context of the major events that marked Shanker’s rise to power, setbacks, then resurgence to the point where he achieved his stature as a national icon in educational reform...
...Shanker was a superb debater and speaker...
...Based on geography, race, religion, and ethnicity, they were hardly an effective counter to the centralized power of the school administration...
...He also recognized that the interests of civil rights movements and trade unions overlapped and their joining forces would both advance minority rights and increase employment opportunities...
...In the ’50s New York City had 106 different teacher organizations...
...It shrieked out that what had happened to them was equivalent to “unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament” of the nation in the midst of economic combat, and urged the business community and politicians to help rectify the situation...
...In 1967, at age 39, Shanker called the first UFT strike, lasting two weeks, and served a 15-day jail sentence for violating a statute forbidding walkouts by public employees...
...Thus his successful efforts to set up training and degree programs at public universities that would enable classroom aides drawn mostly from poor, minority populations eventually to assume full teaching roles...
...Undeterred, in 1968 he spent another 15 days in jail after leading the UFT in three strikes between the opening day of school and November 17...
...The outside was enemy territory that yielded regular beatings and antiSemitic threats to young Albert, prompting him to stay inside and read assiduously...
...Certainly there were many parallels between Shanker and Dewey in their values, and both cared about ideas...
...Levin William H. Kilpatrick Professor of Economics and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University WITHOUT QUESTION, Albert Shanker was one of the most visible and vigorous spokespersons for public education in the final four decades of the 20th century...
...The strikes produced a victory for the union: It ended arbitrary dismissals and watered down community control...
...Despite his fighting against racial quotas and affirmative action, Shanker strongly favored expanding opportunities for minorities...
...Dewey was a scholar...
...By 1962, audacious UFT demands and threats to strike culminated in its first contract...
...Nevertheless, he ultimately came to be considered a very knowledgeable and respected reformer whose ideas were sought by the media, by Democratic and Republican Presidents, and by governors and mayors interested in upgrading local educational policies...
...Frustration and financial pressures resulted in his leaving Columbia to take a teaching position in the New York City school system in 1952...
...But Shanker was an activist...
...These rifts took long to heal and were exacerbated by Shanker’s opposition to hiring quotas and violations of seniority status when cutting staffs in order to maintain or increase minorities in teaching...
...That triumph was followed by growth, greater legitimacy among teachers and bureaucrats, plus an alliance with the civil rights movement, putting Shanker at center stage...
...Inthe Latter part of his career Shanker was widely regarded as one of the most important advocates of educational reform...
...Here skeptics warned of a ploy that would have the highly visible AFT leadership supporting the business lobby's quest for a better-educated labor force, while the rank and file would fail to mend theirways...
...Kahlenberg does an exceptional job of detailing how Shanker and his colleagues established the single United Federation of Teachers...
...In 1968, though, the UFT was confronted by demands for community control of the schools by AfricanAmericans, and an Ocean Hill-Brownsville school expelling its white teachers...
...But he knew the pursuit of educational reform could shake loose public dollars and he continued to firmly support it...
...Yet he overstates the case toward the end when he borrows a New York Times reporter’s characterization of Shanker as a latter-day John Dewey...
...The 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report issued by a national commission was highly critical of U.S...
...As a corollary, he believed public schools required the steadfast stewardship of organized educators, namely members of the UFT and AFT...
...The author has done substantial archival research, besides conducting a large number of interviews with Shanker’s associates, family and even enemies...
...His mother was a garment worker and his father had a newspaperroute in the difficult neighborhood where they lived...
...I only wish Kahlenberg had caught more of the humor that was almost a hallmark of Albert Shanker, a complex man to whom the world was full of irony...
...Academic prowess led to competitive Stuyvesant High School, where he performed well in the classroom and was an outstanding debater...
...Before Long he started to rally his fellow teachers against the indignities inflicted by abusive and prying school administrators, poor working conditions and low salaries...
...Although often those assemblages sought only symbolic legitimacy from Shanker, he took advantage of his role by asserting the primacy of his leadership and ideas...
...He was prepared to work with the governors and others, he said to set meaningful standards for education and implement the necessary changes...
...Although he loved his studies, he stalled at the dissertation stage...
...Returning to New York, he entered a doctoral program in philosophy at Columbia University...
...The book’s title, Tough Liberal, refers to Shanker’s strong anti-Communist stance and support of civil rights, while rejecting the identity politics, multiculturalism and opposition to the Vietnam War that was common among liberals of his day...
...Kahlenberg tells the whole story compellingly...
...Both men were committed, though, to the common school and the democratic purposes of education...
...He had his initial leadership experience as a teenager in the Boy Scouts, when he became a senior patrol leader...
...His persistence earned him recognition as the goto person on “Nation at Risk” objectives, and he was appointed to every major educational reform body...
...schools...
...But Shanker and the UFT flatly opposed the ousting of teachers without due process...
...Turned down by Harvard he proceeded to the University of Illinois, majored in philosophy and engaged in Socialist politics...
...Dewey’s soft-spoken attempts at gentle persuasion were overshadowed by his affecting arguments in writing...
...Had they lived at the same time, we might have benefited from a dynamic duo consisting of a great thinker and a great strategist who shared ideas and possessed the power base and visibility to attract a much larger constituency than the smallish community of progressive educators...
...Kahlenberg presents Shanker as a highly principled activist who saw public schools not only sustaining democratic ideals, practices and institutions, but also nearly equalizing opportunity for children from different racial and social groups...
...In this well-written biography Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the progressive Century Foundation, documents Shanker’s rise as a trade unionist and unshakable advocate of public education...
...Reviewed by H.M...
...In 1976, for example, New York City was facing bankruptcy and Mayor Abraham Beame asked each of the city’s unions what it would do to raise productivity...
...As president of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT), and later the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) of the AFL/CIO, he served on almost all the powerful boards and commissions devoted to improving curriculums and classroom conditions...
...Shanker himself, born in 1928, was the product of an unhappy marriage...
...The white liberal community was split on the right of blacks to govern their own schools and select personnel by race...
...But to a certain extent it was a Pyrrhic victory, for Shanker and the UFT were characterized as racist by some liberal groups and African-Americans...
...In fact, with only a few exceptions, local inaction was the typical grassroots response to Shanker’s urging change...
...When Shanker’s turn came to explain the teachers’ productivity concessions, he was said to respond: “We’ll talk faster...
...By 1973 he had earned the dubious distinction of being satirized as a megalomaniac by Woody Allen in the film Sleeper, where the protagonist wakes up after a 200-year nap to f ind that the world was destroyed by a madman named Albert Shanker who had gotten hold of a nuclear warhead...
...Unlike the denial of the rival National Education Association, Shanker, by now head of the AFT, agreed with the thrust of the report (and perhaps its jingoism too...
...This conflict precipitated the three 1968 strikes and vitriolic denunciations, including anti-Semitic taunts of the largely Jewish teaching corps by black militants...
Vol. 90 • September 2007 • No. 5
