Biography of Late UFT Leader
A Nuanced Look at Al Shanker

By RICHARD STEIER

The photograph on the cover of Richard D. Kahlenberg's biography of Albert Shanker captures the late Teachers union leader in his most controversial moment: leading his members in a march against the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district, as they carry signs that say "Stop Teaching Race Hatred to Children," during the 1968 citywide Teacher strike.

A SINGULAR FIGURE: The late Albert Shanker, who his biographer calls 'the founding father of modern Teacher unionism in this country,' stubbornly held to his principles even as he was alternately called a civil rights crusader and a racist. He was a labor leader who several times led strikes to protect his members' rights but publicly acknowledged that not all Teachers were up to the task.

The introduction to the 524-page book begins with a reference to the pop-culture moment that summed up the perception of many New Yorkers about the biography's subject: Woody Allen's movie "Sleeper" explaining the destruction of the world by noting that "a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead."

The Chief-Leader/Eric Weiss 'HE CAPTURED AL'S COMPLEXITY': Richard Kahlenberg, the author of the first biography of Albert Shanker, stands with the late union leader's widow, Eadie, and United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who said the book 'captured Al's complexity; Al's strengths and Al's weaknesses.'

A Complex Man

Over the course of the book, however, Mr. Kahlenberg attempts to show that this caricature, a hilarious gibe at a man not known for a keen sense of humor, fell far short of capturing Mr. Shanker's essence. The man who established the United Federation of Teachers as a dominant player in New York City life and then went on to make the American Federation of Teachers a force in the national education debate could not be neatly pigeonholed, Mr. Kahlenberg argues.

That claim, which his book goes a long way in backing up, brings a certain irony to its title: "Tough Liberal," which those further to both the left and right might argue is an oxymoron.

Mr. Shanker was criticized sharply by other liberals for matters ranging from his truculence during that 1968 Teacher strike to his embrace of a 1983 report from a commission created by President Reagan calling for the restoration of strict educational standards. He supported the Vietnam War even after it became apparent to most Americans that it was an exercise in futility that produced little and cost nearly 60,000 U.S. soldiers their lives, and led a Teacher strike when the city was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy in 1975, then agreed only grudgingly to the concessions that helped restore fiscal normalcy.

But during an appearance at UFT headquarters Sept. 10 - with more than a few people in his audience sporting the gray hairs that marked them as contemporaries of Mr. Shanker - Mr. Kahlenberg contended that all these positions were consistent with a world-view that pivoted on moral beliefs that were not rooted in ideology. Randi Weingarten, who began working for the UFT as a lawyer during Mr. Shanker's final days there more than 20 years ago and today is its president, agreed with him.

"Al believed to his core in two movements, maybe three," she told the crowd, made up primarily of past and present union officials and including Mr. Shanker's widow, Eadie.

"The trade-union movement, the labor movement, was the engine from which ordinary people could live better lives," Ms. Weingarten said. "He also believed that the other movement that was essential was common public schools ... that gave people the wherewithal to dream their dreams. Those two movements could lead people to realize the dream of not just American democracy but worldwide democracy."

'Educational Conscience'

Ocean Hill-Brownsville, she said, "is not Al's defining moment." Rather, she continued, he had established the UFT as "the conscience of New York City when it comes to poor children and their educational needs on matters like smaller class size." When she was faced with difficult situations, Ms. Weingarten said, she often asked herself "what would Al have done."

Mr. Kahlenberg said Ms. Weingarten "is really continuing in Al Shanker's tradition," noting that the two charter schools the UFT has established in Brooklyn's East New York section over the past couple of years revive a movement that he actually began before it was altered by conservatives seeking an alternative to traditional public schools, often because of the freedom it offered from union contracts.

The biographer called Mr. Shanker "the founding father of modern Teacher unionism in this country" who later in life became a leading education reformer. He noted that President Clinton said at his memorial service 10 years ago, "Al Shanker would say something on one day that would delight liberals and infuriate conservatives. The next day, he would make conservatives ecstatic and liberals would be infuriated."

'A True Visionary'

"Al Shanker was a true visionary," Mr. Kahlenberg said, in addition to being "a colorful and complex character."

Mr. Shanker was the son of a newspaper deliverer and a seamstress who had a tense marriage and often seemed cold towards their son. Growing up in Long Island City, he found himself a target of the anti-Semitism that was not uncommon during the era before World War II, and on one occasion only his sister's scream and a stranger's intervention saved him from being hanged by some neighborhood youths who said they were trying to avenge the killing of Christ.

Uncomfortable in his house, on the streets, and at school, where he was an indifferent student, Mr. Shanker found his niche as a member of the Boy Scouts, displaying as a teenager his ability to organize people and carry out plans.

A Turn Toward Teaching

He went to college at the University of Illinois, a choice made in part because it took him out of his parents' home, and while there became active in the civil rights movement in its nascent stages. He also became a socialist, but one who was also, Mr. Kahlenberg told the audience, "a fierce anti-communist" who was critical of the Soviet Union dictatorship.

After graduating and marrying his first wife in 1949, Mr. Shanker enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Columbia University, but when he got bogged down in writing his doctoral thesis, he decided it was time to begin earning a living. In the fall of 1952, he became a substitute math Teacher in East Harlem.

There, Mr. Kahlenberg said, he lost the sense of indecisiveness that stalled his thesis. "He was particularly struck," he said, "by the poor pay of the Teachers and the dictatorial power of the Principals."

By the following year, teaching now at a junior high school in Astoria, Mr. Shanker became active in what was known as the New York Teachers Guild, an AFT affiliate that he believed was the most effective of the 106 different organizations representing some segment of the city teaching force at that time. By the fall of 1960, Mr. Shanker, who by then had divorced, was a leading figure in the organization, and played a pivotal role in a strike that would gain it the right to collectively bargain its first contract two years later. Even before that pact was reached, the strike shifted the balance so that the union, which had merged with two other groups to form the UFT, became the bargaining agent for all 50,000 of the city's Teachers, where just a few years earlier it represented only 2,500.

Civil Rights Activism

In 1962, the union negotiated a raise of nearly $1,000 a year for Teachers, a figure Mr. Kahlenberg noted was at least four times the norm in previous years. Mr. Shanker, expanding on contacts in the civil rights movement he had made dating back to his college years, was heavily involved in the 1963 March on Washington, arranging to have union-chartered buses transport black city residents as well as UFT members to the nation's capital to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. give his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Within a few years, however, the growing militancy of parts of the black community in Brooklyn placed Mr. Shanker in conflict with Robert "Sonny" Carson, who headed the borough's chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality. Demands for community control of neighborhood schools led to the creation of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experimental school district, headed by another militant named Rhody McCoy. Mr. Carson made statements that were overtly anti-Semitic; Mr. McCoy merely sought to fire white Teachers employed by the district.

The tensions that were created led to a brief Teacher strike in 1967, and three separate walkouts that lasted a total of 36 days in 1968.

Didn't Suffer Sonny

Mr. Shanker did not quietly suffer the racially charged rhetoric and attempts at physical intimidation of Mr. Carson and his allies; at one point he ordered a mass reprinting of an anti-Semitic flyer, and took every opportunity to point out the nature of some of the most outspoken advocates of community control. In return, he was skewered for exacerbating tensions, in forums that ranged from editorial pages to Mr. Allen's satire; even after his death, there were those who contended that he escalated the verbal rhetoric so sharply that the divide between blacks and Jews that was created still remained three decades later.

Yet the Mayor at the time, John Lindsay, sought to placate Mr. Carson but never satisfied him. And more than 20 years later, David Dinkins became the first African-American mayor of a big city in the United States not to gain re-election in no small measure because he was seen as too indulgent of Mr. Carson during the Korean grocery boycott and the Crown Heights riots that it was widely believed were kept going by youths from outside the neighborhood whom Mr. Carson had imported.

Kids Not His Clients

Mr. Shanker opted instead for a verbal street-fight with Mr. Carson and Mr. McCoy, and occasionally made statements that, while they reflected his blunt honesty, were not wise politically. Mr. Kahlenberg noted that when the UFT leader was asked about the impact that the 1968 job actions were having on the city's schoolchildren, he replied that "he would start representing kids when they started paying union dues."

The author argued, however, that one of Mr. Shanker's strengths was his ability to learn from his mistakes, and to respond to issues based on their merits. In 1983, President Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education decried "a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people ... We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament."

Mr. Reagan was known for supporting school vouchers for parents sending their children to private schools, school prayer, and the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education. Mr. Shanker by then headed the AFT as well as the UFT, and those positions were vehemently opposed by both unions. But the commission's report made no recommendations in favor of those matters; instead it focused on ending social promotion, enriching the basic educational curriculum, and paying Teachers more and giving them more professional development and more say in developing the school curriculum.

Aligned With Reagan

Those were all matters that the two unions supported, and Mr. Shanker, concerned that unless public education improved it would face increasing competition from the private sector, gave his support to the commission's findings despite his misgivings about the President to whom it reported. He would also join Mr. Reagan in supporting the contra forces in Nicaragua because of his outrage at the beatings administered to union leaders by the Sandinistas who had taken control of the country.

Mr. Kahlenberg also noted that the Teacher union leader over the years in his columns that ran as paid advertisements in the New York Times "was willing to admit there were some lousy Teachers in the profession." When Eadie Shanker asked him about the political repercussions of saying such a thing, Mr. Kahlenberg remarked, Mr. Shanker replied, "No Teacher who read that thinks I'm talking about them."

Backed Merit Pay

He also went against the grain of many unions' thinking by supporting merit pay for Teachers, predicated on there being controls to ensure that it was not granted primarily to those who pleased Principals without regard to the achievements of their students.

Mr. Kahlenberg described Mr. Shanker as "a believer in affirmative action but an opponent of racial preferences." He marched with Dr. King for civil rights in Selma, Alabama at a time when protesters routinely were greeted with fire hoses and angry dogs, and occasionally, with more murderous violence, but the UFT leader was "branded a racist" during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville war.

Amid the nuances of his political positions, Mr. Kahlenberg said, there was a consistent thread. If there was a message Mr. Shanker would give to Democrats seeking in next year's elections to articulate just what they stand for, he said, it would be "political and economic democracy."