Shanker Biography Depicts Evolution of AFT Leader

Book chronicles his days as both an ardent unionist and a prominent champion of education reform.

When A Nation at Risk came out in 1983, the National Education Association and other notable education players rushed to criticize the report, which was commissioned by the Reagan administration and warned that the nation’s education foundations were being eroded “by a rising tide of mediocrity.”

Not so Albert Shanker. In a new biography of the late union leader, the scholar Richard D. Kahlenberg describes how the then-president of the American Federation of Teachers, after reading the watershed report, shocked everyone, including AFT colleagues: He said the report was right.

In the coming months and years, Mr. Shanker would publicly express support for ideas that were once anathema to teachers’ unions: merit pay, peer review, and testing of veteran teachers, among them. He would also endorse teacher-run charter schools, a national exam for new teachers,...