Remembering Al Shanker
Five years after his death, Al Shanker's tough liberalism looks better than ever.
When Albert Shanker, the legendary leader of the American Federation of Teachers, died five years ago this month, he was eulogized by Bill Clinton and Al Gore, but he was also lauded by education conservatives like Chester E. Finn Jr. and Diane Ravitch. One might be tempted to think Shanker's cross-cutting appeal anticipated George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism, except Shanker's tough liberalism was in many respects the mirror opposite: pro-public schools, pro-labor, and unerringly colorblind.
At the time of his death, Shanker's worldview looked decidedly out of place, with the voucher movement growing, labor crumbling, and political elites making their peace with affirmative action in education. Today, however, with the nation under attack, the very principles that Al Shanker championed look particularly appealing, as Americans may be gaining a new appreciation for certain enduring values: the unifying power of public schools, the solidarity of labor, and the need to avoid the dangers of racial and ethnic balkanization.
Al Shanker's unusual brand of liberalism was forged in childhood, when the New York City public schools of the 1930s and 1940s gave him and many of his immigrant classmates the chance for social mobility, and, as an adult, in the 1960s, when he was caught up in the fight over community control of schools in Ocean Hill- Brownsville in Brooklyn. The educationally sound impulse to give more power to local educational communities took a bad turn in 1968, when militant leaders in the predominantly black ghetto of Ocean Hill-Brownsville decided to dismiss 13 white school teachers. Shanker, then the president of the local United Federation of Teachers, said the teachers shouldn't be removed without due process, and closed down the entire New York City school system in a strike lasting more than a month. Some of the community-control protests turned violent and anti-Semitic; as Yale University's Alexander Bickel noted, where in Little Rock, white parents had shouted at black students for integrating schools, now black militants were shouting at white teachers for...
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