Tensions of the Shanker Era: A Speech That Shook the Field

In the spring of 1985, Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, warned a teachers' convention in Niagara Falls, N.Y., that the quality of the nation's public school teachers was declining, and that if the influence of industrial-style unionism in teaching weren't reduced, the problem would probably get worse.

Mr. Shanker's statements stunned his audience. For it was Albert Shanker, the New York-born son of Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrants, who had led the crusade to unionize public school teaching two decades earlier. He had won the nation's first collective bargaining contract as a militant leader of the local United Federation of Teachers in New York City; twice he had been jailed for leading strikes during the 1960s that erupted in violence and tore the city's social fabric. By the time he was elected president of the AFT in 1974, teaching had become the nation's most unionized occupation--and many public schools had taken on the labor-management cast of old-style factories.

But the Niagara Falls speech was classic Albert Shanker. To many, the gangly 6-foot-3-inch former philosophy student with a baritone voice and dour demeanor would always be an obstreperous unionist. In truth, he was a pragmatist. He had called for change in Niagara Falls because public education had been attacked in widely publicized national reports for failing to give many students a decent education. It was in the unions' self-interest, he argued, to do what was necessary to improve the performance of the public schools. "It doesn't do you much good being a strong man on a sinking...