A Colleague's Recollection
Passionate Leader, Ripe for Caricature

By RICHARD STEIER

When Woody Allen was writing the screenplay for his 1973 futuristic comedy "Sleeper," he used his own focus group at Elaine's Restaurant to decide who should be given credit for ending the world by starting a nuclear war, Richard D. Kahlenberg wrote in his new biography of Albert Shanker.

The Chief-Leader/Eric Weiss SEEING THE BIGGER PICTURE: Former United Federation of Teachers Brooklyn Borough Representative Ann Kessler says that Albert Shanker made it a priority to organize the city's Paraprofessionals because 'he felt it was very important to work with parents. He believed the way to make them understand what we were doing was to bring them in.'

Among those whose names Mr. Allen tossed out, Mr. Kahlenberg wrote, Mr. Shanker's elicited the biggest laugh, as it later would in movie theaters throughout the city when he was identified as having destroyed civilization after he "got hold of a nuclear warhead."

Strikes Made Him Famous

It was a hilarious allusion to the 1968 city Teachers strike, when Mr. Shanker led the United Federation of Teachers in three separate walkouts consuming 36 days of the school year in reaction to the repeated efforts by the experimental Ocean Hill-Brownsville school board to fire many of the district's white Teachers.

Mr. Shanker was not among those laughing, however, Ann Kessler recalled last week.

"He was hurt," the 90-year-old former Teacher, who is still working part-time as a UFT liaison to the City Council, recalled following Mr. Kahlenberg's presentation to an audience of past and present union officials and Teachers at the UFT's lower Manhattan headquarters. "He tried not to show it, but he was hurt that the city would have that picture of Al as a monster."

The school board administrator, Rhody McCoy, egged on by fellow militants such as Sonny Carson, contended that white Teachers were harming rather than helping their black students and that community control of the district required that he pick its Teachers and get rid of those who were part of the problem.

Mr. Shanker objected on two primary grounds. One was that the proposed firings violated the due-process rights to a hearing of the Teachers; the other was that he viewed this use of community control as a device by which any school board, whether black and militant or white and conservative, could get rid of Teachers whose race or political views were different from the board's.

At the time, Ms. Kessler was teaching at P.S. 181 in East Flatbush, "the school from which I graduated as a child." Her son had died in an accident at age 20 nearly a decade earlier, and to cope, the daughter of a seamstress and a father who "was a boss but he was a Socialist" had thrown herself into union work.

She said she felt "awful" at having to tell the other Teachers at her school that they were going on strike, but she and they believed it was a necessary step.

Was she surprised that they wound up on the street for so long?

'Tough to Be Hated'

"No," Ms. Kessler replied. "I was with Al. If you were with the man, you understood. It was very tough to have people hate us whose kids we taught. They thought we were bringing down the city."

To defend himself against charges that he was inflaming racial tensions with the job actions, Mr. Shanker enlisted the support of Bayard Rustin, a close adviser to the late Dr. Martin Luther King, and Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters President A. Philip Randolph, the most influential black labor leader in the U.S. He had worked closely with them five years earlier on the March to Washington where Dr. King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, chartering hundreds of buses that brought minority residents as well as Teachers to the rally.

But the militancy of Mr. McCoy managed to out-shout the reasoning of the older black leaders, who were accused of being out of step amid the anger in the black community that still smoldered four months after Dr. King's assassination. Mr. Shanker, hoping to swing the debate by showing how extreme some of those pushing for community control were, had an anti-Semitic flyer reprinted and widely distributed. This shifted overall public sentiment in the UFT's favor, but he was vilified in some newspapers for adding to the polarization.

Ms. Kessler said that she and her union colleagues never questioned Mr. Shanker's strategy.

'We Had to Do This'

"There was a tremendous amount of fear the Teachers had of losing their jobs," she said, if Mr. McCoy's brand of community control took root. "But there was also the feeling that Al gave us: that we had to do this.

"One day," she continued, "we received a call from the other side - Sonny Carson and his group - that they wanted to meet at a school to see whether we could work this out. Once we got in, they locked the doors. And I was petrified, because these guys were crazy. Al tried to talk to them, but we soon realized these weren't people you could talk to. Al said, 'You can't do this,' and one of them said, 'Oh yes we can.'''

The third strike ended in mid-October; eventually Mr. Shanker would be sentenced to 15 days in jail for violating the Taylor Law. Even before he began serving his time the following May, he had begun another battle, which also wound up being decided in Ocean-Hill/Brownsville: this one was to organize school Paraprofessionals.

Triumphed Over DC 37

It was also an uphill struggle, with District Council 37 seeking to represent them as well and its leader, Victor Gotbaum - who bitterly criticized Mr. Shanker for the tenor of the 1968 strike - making the UFT's frayed relations with the black community a prime issue during the organizing drive. Remarkably, as Mr. Kahlenberg notes in the book, the UFT narrowly won the election when ballots from Ocean-Hill/Brownsville, cast by paras hired by Mr. McCoy, swung the vote narrowly in Mr. Shanker's favor.

That was just one of the complexities in that battle, and in the strike that Mr. Shanker threatened the following year in an attempt to significantly improve conditions for his newest members.

'Many Didn't Want Them'

Ms. Kessler noted, "One of the things he was proudest of was organizing paras - and he fought his own Teachers to do it, because many of them did not want them coming into the classroom."

There was a certain amount of self-interest in bringing the paras into the UFT: as Mr. Kahlenberg noted, besides the added dues income, it provided insurance against a future situation in which city officials might attempt to cope with a Teacher strike by having the paras provide classroom instruction.

Ms. Kessler argued that the greater concerns for Mr. Shanker had to do with his beliefs about both public education and race relations.

"He felt it was very important to work with parents - and basically paraprofessionals then were parents. He believed the way to make them understand what we were doing was to bring them in."

Resounding Contract Win

Eight months after winning the organizing drive, Mr. Shanker used the threat of a strike by paras - which was overwhelming supported in a vote by Teachers as well - to win wage terms that more than doubled salaries for the paras and won them the right to be released from their classroom duties half a day each week to attend high school equivalency or college classes at city expense.

Ms. Kessler became the UFT's Brooklyn borough representative, and she would later serve as one of its lobbyists in Albany, helping to steer to passage a bill granting paras a pension plan.

When she called Mr. Shanker after the measure was signed, Ms. Kessler recalled, "He was just thrilled. The paras were going to be just like the Teachers."

As she spoke, a short film celebrating Mr. Shanker's life was coming to a close on several small screens in the UFT auditorium. As if to offer a coda, Ms. Kessler said, "Having paras become Teachers and not have to pay to go to school for it - remarkable. And that was Al Shanker."