October 2007

Albert Shanker: Madman or Visionary?

Woody Allen’s 1973 science fiction comedy Sleeper depicted teacher union leader Albert Shanker as a madman who destroyed the world, but a new biography finds Shanker to have been a complex and visionary figure whose life story offers timely lessons for contemporary debates over education, labor, civil rights, foreign policy, and the future of liberalism. Shanker, the legendary president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) from 1974 to 1997, was a founding father of modern teacher unionism and a leading advocate of education reform. Although a militant unionist, he was also a strong proponent of standards-based reform, teacher-led charter schools, and the professionalization of teaching. Shanker had an unusual ability to work with both liberals and conservatives and a unique world view--what might be called "tough liberalism"-that stood firmly for public schools and trade unionism on the one hand but departed from traditional liberal orthodoxies on issues like affirmative action, bilingual education, and national security on the other.

Shanker is the subject of a new biography, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2007) by the Century Foundation's Richard D. Kahlenberg. The book raises several important questions relevant to today’s education debates: Can a teacher union leader simultaneously be an innovative education reformer? Is it possible, in today’s polarized environment, for union leaders to work with the business community and conservatives to find common ground on some issues while disagreeing on others? What is Al Shanker’s legacy for teacher unionism today, both at the AFT and the National Education Association?

This discussion with the author was hosted by AEI and cosponsored by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Center for American Progress.

Richard D. Kahlenberg
The Century Foundation

Albert Shanker did three big things in his life. In the 1950s and '60s, Shanker became a founding father of the modern teachers union movement. Among the 106 teacher organizations in New York City at the time, organized along different religions, subject matter and grade levels, Shanker worked with others to create the United Federation of Teachers, the New York affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). He argued that unionizing would help professionalize teaching and that there would be room under unionization for civil disobedience. The AFT reaped substantial wage and benefit increases, prompting the National Education Association to turn its position in favor of collective bargaining.

Second, in the 1980s and '90s, Shanker became the leading education reformer in the United States. He launched a paid advertisement in the New York Times called "Where We Stand" through which he released essays on education, prompting Education Week to state that he was running the AFT more as a think tank than as a traditional union. He embraced the controversial A Nation at Risk report in 1983 and got behind the movement toward excellence in education by backing peer review among teachers and rigorous teacher examinations as well as by proposing what became the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards that allowed greater pay for highly accomplished, board certified teachers. He also supported charter schools early on as teacher led institutions that would allow for greater creativity.

Third, throughout his life Shanker advocated a unique political philosophy, "tough liberalism," which combines the fight for social mobility with a tough-mindedness about the realities of human nature. Shanker stood firmly for public schools and trade unionism, but he departed from traditional liberal orthodoxies on issues like affirmative action, bilingual education, and national security. What connected these seemingly liberal and conservative views was a profound commitment to democracy. He believed that public schools were important not only as a place to train future employees but as a place to train American citizens.

The Honorable Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.)
U.S. Senate

Despite the vehement opposition of the National Education Association, Albert Shanker embraced Tennessee's Master Teacher Program, the first state program to pay teachers more for teaching well, and he created the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, which provided a mechanism for paying good teachers more.

Shanker was a union man. He also kept his feet in the real world. He knew that in the early 1980s, women had options for working outside the home other than as teachers and nurses and that a flat pay scale would not keep the best teachers in the classroom. Shanker was an advocate for charter schools, which he believed would give teachers freedom from state, federal, and union rules to help children learn what they needed to know. Shanker was an advocate for accountability and never wavered.

Shanker was an old-fashioned, anti-communist liberal who understood and cared about what it means to be an American. He believed that the rationale for the public school is that it was created to teach immigrant children reading, writing and arithmetic, and what it means to be an American--with the hope that they would go home and teach their parents. Perhaps Shanker's greatest legacy--along with higher standards, charter schools, master teachers, and putting American history and civics in our schools--is the promotion of greater national unity.

John Cole
American Federation of Teachers

Shanker believed that all ideas should be judged on their merit, not their source. Almost everyone in the teachers unions denounced the A Nation at Risk report because it came from the Reagan administration. Yet Shanker read it, took it at face value, and said that it was the most important document produced by any president. Furthermore, Shanker did not mind if people disagreed with him. He kept people on the council who argued with him on every issue and he encouraged all of us to look at ideas on their merits rather than along party lines.

The reason that Albert Shanker believed in public schools so strongly is because of his belief that everyone should have equal opportunities. In America, we have a wide social range, from recent immigrants to individuals instituted in American society for generations. Public schools are the one place where the coal miner's daughter and the banker's son can sit next to each other and where both have an equal chance. Shanker left behind more than just his thoughts and ideas. In the AFT, he created an institution that continues to carry on his work.

Chester E. Finn Jr.
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation

Albert Shanker envisioned higher standards, higher achieving kids, and a content-rich curriculum for American children. In 1988, when a commission recommended that the National Assessment of Educational Progress be reconstituted to include state-by-state reporting, Shanker helped get Congress to enact it, altering the way we understand achievement in American schools today. Shanker envisioned teaching as a true profession. His receptivity to merit-based pay was an example of his vision for teaching to become an honored and respected profession. Shanker also imagined democratic education in Eastern Europe. After the Iron Curtain fell, he and a handful of supporters did a great deal to help those newly free countries develop education programs that included democracy education.

But although Shanker was an early visionary of charter schools, he saw them as instruments for teachers to express their professionalism, not for parents to exercise educational choice. Furthermore, he did not envision the ways in which the teachers unions' own behavior at the bargaining table, on strike, and in state politics was undermining his own teacher-professionalism agenda. Nor could Shanker begin to foresee that the unions in 2007 would be the chief forces of resistance to a dozen worthy education reforms.

What made Shanker interesting was that it was possible to agree and disagree with him at the same time. He was strategic with allies and opponents, but he did not personalize his disagreements, a practice healthier than today's personality politics.

John Podesta
Center for American Progress

Shanker's work demonstrates the critical role that unions had in improving conditions for both teachers and students. Most education reformers today are troubled by their current positions, but this book reminds us what the conditions were like before Shanker helped create the AFT. In his early experience teaching, Shanker was more of a truant officer than a teacher in terms of what the schools were expecting of him, the role of the principal, and the arbitrariness and lack of teamwork in the system. That experience led him to be both a trade unionist and an education reformer.

Shanker not only created teacher unionism, but he also created a whole new brand of teacher unionism. He began from the perspective of what unions meant in the old economy. But although he saw unions as safeguards for their members, he invested unions with far more responsibility for the quality of the teaching profession. Few people achieve so much during their lives, and Shanker's successes are a testament to someone who could work and think about a problem. We remember Shanker as a militant unionist who was not afraid to strike, but he was also a reformer who saw the interests of teachers intertwined with the success of public education.

AEI research assistant Juliet Squire prepared this summary.