Tensions of the Shanker Era: Departed Foes on Decentralization
Within six months of each other, the leading adversaries in the bitter struggle over New York City school decentralization in 1968McGeorge Bundy and Albert Shanker--have died. Between the two deaths, the New York State legislature sharply rolled back the plan that 20 years ago was intended to reform the city's public schools. ( "Crew Packs Arsenal of New Powers in N.Y.C.," Jan. 15, 1996, and "The End of an Era," March 5, 1997.)
Perhaps their passing offers an opportunity to better understand how two men of goodwill clashed in pursuit of what each believed to be the path to improvement of the education of New York's schoolchildren. Mr. Bundy, after the trauma of White House duty during the escalation of the Vietnam War, had been the president of the Ford Foundation for a year when Mayor John V. Lindsay asked him to chair a blue-ribbon panel to devise a plan to decentralize the schools. Lost in the embers of the ensuing conflagration is the fact that in return for more state financial aid to the schools, the legislature required that the system be reorganized. Mr. Shanker, of course, was the president of the United Federation of Teachers, the local teachers' union, whose confidence was at an all-time high with a strong new contract. The UFT, which had broken away from a Communist-dominated teachers' union in the mid-1930s, had been recognized as the bargaining agent for the city's teachers only in 1961.
Their backgrounds could not have been more different, but they shared certain values. McGeorge Bundy was a Boston Brahmin, educated in private schools and at Yale University. Albert Shanker, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, attended New York public schools and graduated from the University of Illinois. Mr. Bundy had majored in mathematics, and Mr. Shanker began his professional life as a math teacher. Mr. Shanker was an ally of the civil rights movement, and Mr. Bundy, as soon as he arrived at the Ford Foundation, greatly expanded its engagement...
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