Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy (Columbia Studies in Contemporary American History)

In Woody Allen's 1973 film, Sleeper, a character wakes up in the future to learn that civilization was destroyed when a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead. Shanker was condemned by many when he shut down the New York City school system in the bitter strikes of 1967 and 1968, and he was denounced for stirring up animosity between black parents and Jewish teachers. Later, however, he built alliances with blacks, and at the time of his death in 1997, such figures as Bill Clinton celebrated Shanker for being an educational reformer, a champion of equality, and a promoter of democracy abroad.

Shanker lived the lives of several men bound into one. In his early years, he was the George Washington of the teaching profession, helping to found modern teacher unionism. During the 1980s, as head of the American Federation of Teachers, he became the nation's leading education reformer. Shanker supported initiatives for high education standards and accountability, teacher-led charter schools, and a system of peer review to weed out inadequate teachers. Throughout his life, Shanker also fought for tough liberalism, an ideology favoring public education and trade unions but also colorblind policies and a robust anticommunism--all of which, Shanker believed, were vital to a commitment to democracy.

Although he had a coherent worldview, Shanker was a complex individual. He began his career as a pacifist but evolved into a leading defense and foreign policy hawk. He was an intellectual and a populist; a gifted speaker who failed at small talk; a liberal whose biggest enemies were often on the left; a talented writer who had to pay to have his ideas published; and a gruff unionist who enjoyed shopping and detested sports. Richard D. Kahlenberg's biography is the first to offer a complete narrative of one of the most important voices in public education and American politics in the last half century. At a time when liberals are accused of not knowing what they stand for, Tough Liberal illuminates an engaging figure who suggested an alternative liberal path.

"'Century Foundation senior fellow Kahlenberg, who has written previously about the public school wars (All Together Now), paints a gripping portrait of the iconoclastic and often contradictory teacher's union leader Albert Shanker (1928 — 1997). Born to working-class Russian-Jewish parents on New York's Lower East Side, Shanker worked on a doctorate in philosophy at Columbia by night while teaching by day in East Harlem. During the late '50s he was involved in organizing New York City's United Federation of Teachers, becoming its president in 1964. In 1974 he also became president of the national American Federation of Teachers. In this perceptive biography, Kahlenberg shows that the firebrand union militant who led illegal strikes that closed New York City's public schools in 1967 and 1968 was at the same time a forward-looking educational reformer who, despite pronounced liberal credentials, pushed initiatives that are today associated mostly with conservative educational agendas. Among Shanker's passions were lofty standards, teacher accountability and charter schools. Kahlenberg applauds all this, along with Shanker's fervent anticommunism and his many efforts — regardless of the black-Jewish antagonism the school strikes engendered — to reach out to people of color. The reader comes away admiring a man who navigated troubled times deftly and left behind a record of great accomplishment. (Sept.)' Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"When he died 10 years ago, Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was probably the most powerful union leader in America. At a time when the spreading Rust Belt was reducing once-mighty industrial unions to skeletons, the AFT's astonishing growth — from 70,000 members in 1961 to nearly a million in 1997 — bucked the trend. The private sector is becoming a union-free zone,... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) but 70 percent of America's public school teachers are covered by collective bargaining agreements.

Shanker did not single-handedly engineer the explosive growth of teachers unions. Union organizers everywhere saw the public sector as an inviting target, and teachers were ripe for the picking. Still, it is hard to deny that Shanker played a central role in the rise of teacher unionism. His strategic vision and tactical skill, wedded to a formidable intellect and no-holds-barred debating style, helped transform the tiny United Federation of Teachers, the bargaining agent for New York City's 50,000 public school teachers, into the biggest union local in America. That the UFT had more members than the rest of the AFT put together made Shanker's rise to the presidency of the national union all but inevitable. After winning that prize in 1974, however, Shanker did not stand still. He led the AFT from strength to strength, and used its political clout to influence national debates about school reform and educational standards.

In the late 1960s, Shanker acquired a reputation as an overbearing bully whose strike-happy militancy needlessly disrupted the lives of millions of parents and children. He was also accused of deliberately playing up the issue of anti-Semitism during an ugly confrontation in New York's Ocean Hill-Brownsville area between teachers, most of whom were Jewish, and advocates of community control, most of whom were black.

If Shanker was sometimes needlessly pugnacious, however, he needed to be tough. Growing up in 1930s New York, he encountered raw anti-Semitism. In one horrifying incident, the 8-year-old Shanker was blindfolded by classmates and almost underwent a mock lynching for being a 'Christ-killer' before being rescued by his sister. When he became a teacher in 1952, he entered a system in which the power of the principal and the low status of teachers fostered a kind of institutionalized bullying. Only through strikes could teachers break this system, and Shanker twice served jail time for defying anti-strike laws. No wonder he fought hard to defend teachers' employment rights when Black Power militants tried to oust white teachers in the name of community control. Understanding how tenure and seniority shielded Jewish teachers from anti-Semitism, he was both a passionate supporter of the civil rights movement — he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala. — and a tenacious opponent of race-based affirmative action.

Shanker was certainly tough, but was he a liberal? According to Richard D. Kahlenberg's sympathetic biography, Shanker rooted his politics in the liberalism of the New Deal, in which organized labor played a central role, and in the principled anti-communism of Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy. This class-based liberalism, when wedded to a resolute foreign policy that promoted democratic values abroad, enabled the Democratic Party to dominate national politics until the 1960s and, in so doing, to improve the lot of all American workers.

However, the reaction against the Vietnam War and the rise of identity politics weakened that tough liberalism and delivered a substantial portion of the white working class to the Republican Party. If the Democrats are to reconstitute their majority, Kahlenberg argues, they should go back to the policies and values espoused by Albert Shanker.

A reader looking for a nuanced explanation of the Democratic Party's decline will be disappointed. Castigating the 'peaceniks,' 'limousine liberals' and 'New Politics type candidates' whom Shanker loathed, Kahlenberg resorts to stereotypes that preclude serious analysis. And his overly dogged defense of virtually every position Shanker took sometimes challenges credulity. Kahlenberg's hostile treatment of the AFT'S rival, the National Education Association, is blatantly partisan, and his justification of Shanker's hawkish position on Vietnam ignores decades of historical scholarship. 'Tough Liberal' is a spirited and readable biography, but it is not the last word on the remarkable Albert Shanker."

Reviewed by Adam Fairclough, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Professor of American History at Leiden University and author of 'A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South', Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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