Labor Leader's Courage, Complexity

Author and Education Sector Nonresident Senior Fellow Richard D. Kahlenberg met the prominent labor leader Albert Shanker in 1995, while writing a book on affirmative action. Kahlenberg, who argued preferences should be based on class, not race, found his allies overwhelmingly conservative. That is, except for Shanker, who appeared to be the only voice on the left opposed to race-based preferences.

Kahlenberg's attraction to Shanker's odd brand of liberalism led to his new biography of the labor leader, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy. During a recent Education Sector author talk, moderated by Co-director Thomas Toch, Kahlenberg and educator-writer E.D. Hirsch Jr. spoke about the legacy of the eminent teacher unionist.

Their recollections of Shanker portrayed a complex man: an Ivy League intellectual who championed workers' rights, a racial integrationist denounced by black power leaders, a leftist who fought communism and supported national defense.

"He was always a liberal in that he did not take the traditional, well-trod path of New York socialist turns into neoconservative," said Kahlenberg, who is also a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. "He had some overlap with neocons on certain issues, but he was a liberal; he stood until his death for those two great institutions: public education and trade unionism."

As head of New York City's United Federation of Teachers in the 1960s, Shanker won fair wages and working conditions for ill-treated teachers and encouraged the rapid unionization of public school teachers nationwide. He rose to the national stage in 1974 as president of the American Federation of Teachers, where he influenced every major education debate until his death in 1997.

An integrationist who marched with Martin Luther King Jr., Shanker defied an effort by black power leaders and white liberal allies to replace white teachers with blacks in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn in the late 1960s. The battle resulted in the shutdown of the entire New York City school system and fissure between the black and Jewish communities. Shanker's efforts to protect workers from race-based firings, Kahlenberg said, ironically were branded as racism.

"For me, it illuminated this whole period I lived through without quite understanding, this current between old-line liberals like Al and the New Left," Hirsch said of Tough Liberal. "[Shanker] was able to follow the implications of an argument, while so many people in the world of education seem to be operating on slogans."

Shanker, who denounced a curriculum colored by extreme multiculturalism, stood by Hirsch in advocating one set of content standards that students need to know. Hirsch recalled the last time he and the union leader spoke. Hirsch, Shanker, and another academic were being interviewed on a radio show about the teaching of ebonics.

"I said, 'Yes, I see your point, but everyone has to learn the formal code,' and so on," Hirsch said. "I was scared to say what I really thought. When it was Al's turn, he said, 'I think it's a terrible idea.' The courage this guy had to say unpopular things and come out against this fellow liberal was, to me, inspiring."

It was always the democratic interests of the union and its members, Kahlenberg said, that drove Shanker's ideology of seeming contradictions.

"He wanted to go back to the roots of the Democratic Party, which was a class-based coalition of low-income and working-class people across the country," he said. "We don't have that today. The Democratic Party is a coalition of, well, people like me—upper-middle class liberals—and people of color, and that yields you a very different politics than the kind that Al Shanker stood for."

When questioned about the impact of his labor strikes on students in 1968, Shanker abruptly replied: "I don't represent children. I represent teachers."

But he later repented, realizing the two interests were intertwined. Shanker came to believe large-scale reform was necessary to protect public education from privatization. In later years, he advocated charter schools (that were teacher-led), performance pay, and national content standards—reforms many of his fellow unionists continue to resist.

Susan Traiman, director of education and workforce policy at the Business Roundtable, asked Kahlenberg what Shanker would have thought about the contemporary label "progressive" displacing the ill-favored "liberal."

Kahlenberg replied that he had purposefully chosen the book's title. "I think the term 'liberal' has to be reclaimed, and I would hope that Al Shanker would agree with that."