Albert Shanker, Image and Reality

I came across this by TJC's Swerdlow and Wainer written shortly after Shanker died in 1997.

"The Shanker-Feldman vision has so weakened teacher unionism that government officials can now openly consider the privatization of public education. Therefore, the future of [public] education may depend on the ability of rank-and-file members to challenge the Unity/Progressive Caucus and replace the union's rhetoric of professionalism with a strategic vision of militance, solidarity and democracy."

Ten years later, we can see the results as the very future of public education and the power of teacher unionism at the school level is threatened like no time before. The combination of iron tight Unity Caucus control of the UFT and by proxy, the AFT, combined with Weingarten's strategy of coopting the main opposition - New Action - has left ICE and TJC to attempt to resurrect some semblance of opposition to Unity from scratch.

And I'm sure some people may have some critiques of their critique, so fire away.

The entire article can be accessed at Norms Notes at this link.

One more note: I've read interesting stuff TJC people have written that does not get out to the general membership. I think TJC people limit their scope by keeping apples and oranges separate. More openness would have mitigated the impact of Unity's "Red Scare" attack on Kit Wainer in the last election.

"Where is Al Shanker when we need him most?"

NOT!!

I have just finished reading Kahlenberg's book (Tough Liberal) and will be co-writing a review for New Politics and Shanker could have written whole chunks (he probably did) of NCLB. Like, he believed schools not performing on high stakes tests should be closed. And he would have endorsed the merit pay deal made this week.

I will be writing a lot more about Shanker and the roots of the standardization movement which has resulted in the reversal of so many teacher gains made under the first incarnation of Shanker in the early 60's. The deskilling of teachers, as TJC has been phrasing it, and the almost total loss of teachers' power to take control of their classrooms along with attacks on so many teachers by administrators, has placed teachers in the most precarious situation they have faced since the days Shanker actually taught in the mid-50's. (Of course the UFT Delegate Assembly rejected TJC's attempt to address this issue this past Wed. Read their resolution and my commentary here.)

Add that public education faces its biggest threat ever while Kahelnberg talks about how the major thrust of Shanker's policies were in defense of public education and you have an immense contradiction around the man who started one movement (teacher unionism), followed by another (standards, charter schools, etc) that has almost destroyed the original movement. Oy, do I have a lot to write.

This column appeared in The Wave on October 5. Here are some excerpts:

Where is Al Shanker when we need him most?
by Norman Scott

This was the question posed by Wave editor Howard Schwach recently.

“He would have never let the UFT get away with some of its more recent activities and acquiescence to Department of Education foolishness had he still been alive.”

Schwach points to Shanker’s core beliefs: “He believed in educating students to become citizens. He did not believe in educating students on how to take a test.”

In writing a review of Richard Kahlenberg’s new book on Shanker, Tough Liberal, I am immersed in “All Shanker, All the time” as I wade through this fascinating pro-Shanker tome.

Shanker was the founder of the standards/let’s test all the time movement in the early 80’s when he embraced the Nation at Risk report. Shanker was also the originator of the idea of Charter schools, a concept that is so Balkanizing the nation’s schools. Ironically, Shanker used the same word to criticize community control in the late 60’s and early 70’s. (Dealing with issues related to the 1967 and 1968 strikes, my first two years in the system, would take 5 columns. I’ll leave it alone for now.)

Shanker was in favor of total centralized control and would have been very comfortable with mayoral control, which Randi Weingarten also supports. Close examination of both of Shanker and Weingarten would show the leaf has not strayed too far from the tree – other than in terms of style. Oh yes, and foreign policy - maybe. But more on that later.

Howie is making the same error so many people make about the current union leadership or the current BloomKlein administration: they listen to what they say, not watch what they do. Looking at Shanker’s career, there are enormous contradictions between his stated core beliefs and his actions.

The very unionism Shanker helped build in the 50’s and 60’s that finally gave teachers some protection from authoritarian principals has to a great extent been undermined by the very policies Shanker pushed in the name of educational reform.


Oh, and I don’t have time to go into what is one of Shanker’s greatest contradictions. The supposed believer in democracy and the fighter against Communist (only) totalitarian governments (Chile’s Pinochet was ok) established one of the most totalitarian union regimes in the labor movement with his Unity Caucus’ total control of every instrument of power within the UFT.

Read the entire column in The Wave archive here.

Today's Quickies

October 11, 2007 (updated 12 pm)

Reminder that today is the High Stakes Forum at Fordham at 6PM. It's pretty well booked but if you are in the area, check in (see details in post below.) I am doing the videography, so SMILE!

Baltimore teachers are calling for the resignation of Supt. Andres Alonso just 2 months after he left Tweed to fly on his own. The day he got the job we predicted problems with the teachers union. Of course he appointed a general to help him run things. (Do a search of this blog to read the Alonso stories.) Alonso seems to be at a big disadvantage compared to Klein. He actually is facing a non-collaborationist union with some spine. Follow their actions at http://md.aft.org/btu/. As an AFT local expect them to be advised by their new president next July that collaboration is the way to go with old UFT pal Andres. I posted the article from the Baltimore Sun on Norms Notes.

Baltimore teachers stood up to Alonso's bullshit almost from day one while the UFT praised and sucked up to Klein. People in Baltimore are already raising governance issues that led to Alonso being appointed with a general as an assistant.

When Klein was appointed we heard nothing from the UFT but praise and when Children First was announced, Randi's "It's all breathlessly possible." Even at this time there has been no call for Klein's resignation or a vote of no confidence which about 98% of the teaching staff (and a hell of a lot of principals and even admins above them) would sign on to.


The Bronx High School of Science "Quack" story has been humming as the mainstream press seems to be getting involved after our post a few days ago. It has been interesting following the postings of the kids at the school as some seniors worry about revenge by school administrators and guidance counselors in relation to getting into college while others talk about leaving their legacy so future generations do not forget the "quacking" story. One former student commented that his favorite Reidy quote was "Asians speak Asian." The animosity towards Reidy by the kids seems to be more intense than that of teachers. And I received an email from a parent leader that indicates many of them feel the same. WOW! Reidy has united parents, teachers and students.

Call it for the revenge of Bob Drake, the untenured PhD chemistry teacher who Principal Valerie Reidy hounded out of the system. Drake enjoys a job at a public school in Conn. at mucho times the salary. THANK YOU, VALERIE REIDY! Betsy Combier has a bunch of stuff on Drake and Science on her parentadvocates web site. The cartoon from the Riverdale Review, which has done a number of stories on the case, was posted by the students on facebook. Andy Wolfe in the NY Sun did a piece in May 2005 and we should see some articles today or tomorrow in some the NY Dailies. And check out the blog of a former student here.


I posted an old but very worthwhile piece by Lois Weiner on Albert Shanker's Legacy on norms notes. Lois is a former NYC teacher and UFT delegate and she fleshed out some of the missing pieces in Kahlenberg's recent book - 10 years ago. I guess Kahlenberg somehow missed talking to people like Lois or citing her work. I'll revert to the old standby "I'm shocked, shocked to find out there's gambling going on here." Look for the Shanker apologists to start counter attacking. Kahlenberg will be appearing on a symposium with Diane Ravitch (closely tied to Shanker) and Debbie Meier (who if I remember correctly was a critic) at NYU at the end of October. I'm hoping to attend.

Lois recruited Bruce Markens and me to review the Kahlenberg book for New Politics. Lois also wrote a wonderful piece on neoliberalism in 2003 and education which illuminates many connections between the actions of the Democrats, BloomKlein, Gates, Broad, Weingarten (posted on the norms notes blog recently.) I am 2/3 through the book and it is must reading to get a full picture of what is going on today. Personally, I do not take the black and white (partially a joke if you know Shanker's views on race & quotas) view of Shanker and am finding a lot to agree with - in theory. But when you put it all in context, the angle changes. I'm still sorting it all out and hope to meet with Bruce and Lois (who I've never met) next week.


Did you see the Time-Warner full-page ad on the back page of the NY Times metro section lauding their award to five outstanding principals in NYC? Money that could have gone to help teachers and kids. But maybe the Times gave a big discount for a promotion of BloomKlein.

Competition and Education

The idea that making the public schools more competitive will somehow improve education is as ridiculous as saying having public fire, police and sanitation departments compete with private competitors will lead to better service.

It's like saying that if we allocated public money to send a competing army over to Iraq, led by, say, Haliburton or Blackstone, the war would have run smoother. Oh, yea, been there, done that. See how well it worked out?

Yet that is exactly what has become the national mantra in what should loosely be termed "education reform" – very loosely. When the voucher idea didn't get enough traction, the charter school idea was seized upon. What is behind all of this is the opportunity for a lot of people to shake loose a lot of public ed money and divert it into the private sphere. And that means the undermining public schools.

Richard Kahlenberg makes the point many times in his book, Tough Liberal, how often Al Shanker spoke about the support of rigorous public schools as being essential to the maintenance of a democratic society, ironically, not to be applied to the idea of a democratic union. Doubly ironic, since Shanker was the father of the concept of Charter Schools. I'm not up to that chapter yet, but I will assume at this point that Shanker did not mean them in today's incarnation. What would he think of the 2 UFT charter schools draining public and private money (Broad foundation, etc.)

This post inpired by:
"We seem to live in an era of privatization. Here in NYC the mayor believes in privatizing and so does Joel Klein. There is this mantra that private is better. I think that the Iraq war is the first privatized war. I think that history will show that it was one of the most inefficient corrupt wars ever conducted..," says blogger Life After the Rubber Room.

Lois Weiner on Shanker, NCLB and Neoliberalism

Right wing conservatives have turned the term "liberal" into a dirty word. To the left, neoliberals are even worse.

Former UFT'er Lois Weiner wrote a great piece on Neoliberalism a few years ago for New Politics. I posted the entire article with a link to New Politics on Norms Notes. Here is the section on Al Shanker:

Although Albert Shanker, AFT's longtime chief, died in 1997, his organizational stranglehold on the union, his political compact with social conservatives, and his leadership of the segment of the AFL-CIO that has collaborated with the U.S. government in subverting popular movements throughout the globe, were continued by his co-thinker and replacement, Sandra Feldman, who recently resigned the AFT presidency due to poor health. (Readers can find a fuller discussion of Shanker's politics in the obituary of him Paul Buhle wrote in New Politics, or the one I wrote in Contemporary Education, Summer 1998. ) The similarities between Shanker's vision for school reform, which because of his iron-clad control of the union were de facto those of the organization, and the neoliberal program manifested in NCLB are apparent in his article, published posthumously, in the Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy (Fall 1997).

If we ignore the article's curmudgeonly asides and focus on its main argument, Shanker's agreement with the major portion of the neoliberal educational program is apparent. First, Shanker contends that U.S. schools are far worse than those in OECD nations because we offer too much access to higher education, or as he formulates the problem, we have an insufficient amount of academic "tracking." We don't start early enough to put students into programs that prepare them for their vocational destinies, so he advocates putting all students into vocational tracks sometime between grades 5 and 9. In their earlier grades, they should have a curriculum based on E.D. Hirsch's project for "cultural literacy." Although he maintains that in these tracks students must all be held to "high standards," his use of Hirsch's curriculum signifies that instead of engaging first-hand with primary sources, reading, appreciating, and perhaps creating literature, students will memorize facts about the "great" (white men) of history, the arts, and science. He bemoans the absence of a system of high-stakes tests with really harsh penalties for failure, the absence of mandatory national curriculum standards, and the presence of far too much tolerance for student misconduct. Shanker assails the laxity of the pre-NCLB curriculum standards, which were additionally problematic for being left to the states to execute.

Shanker adds that some standards can be too "vague -for example, ‘Learn to appreciate literature.'" Note how Shanker's breezy dismissal of the standard about appreciating literature echoes the OECD's rejection of international assessment in "reading for literary experience." Although Shanker used his weekly column in the New York Times, paid for by the membership, to ridicule the national standards developed by professional organizations of teachers of the arts, rejecting them as grandiose and unrealistic, his own children attended school in a suburban district with excellent arts programs -- and no E.D. Hirsch curricula. Union members had not formally endorsed many of the positions Shanker adopted, for instance rejection of the standards in the arts, and recent surveys of teachers, in cities, suburbs, and rural schools find even less support now than there was at the time Shanker advocated many of his positions about standards and testing. Yet because of the AFT's bureaucratic deformation, of which the indictments for graft in the Miami and Washington, D.C. locals are shamefully graphic illustrations, the opposition to the AFT's vocal, unwavering support for testing and "high standards" scarcely registers at the national level. Most of the biggest locals are so bureaucratic that rank and file challenges to the leadership must be about fundamental practices of democracy, in order for classroom teachers' voices on issues of educational policy to be heard.

The NEA generally can be counted on to adopt liberal positions on the important political issues of the day, although its positions do not necessarily represent those of its members because its organizational structure is also bureaucratic -- but in a different way from the AFT. The AFT is a federation of locals so the state organizations have small staffs and little power. The AFT constitution contains no term limits for its president who has little direct control of local functions. Shanker masterfully exploited the post of AFT President to promote himself and to trumpet his political views on a wide-range of opinions. He did so by using his domination of the massive New York City local to leverage control of the state and national organizations, ensuring that his political views received a formal stamp of approval from the union's executive council while never being debated at the local level. Shanker ruled the national staff with an ideological iron fist, employing only people who agreed with him -- or were fired.

Maybe It Wasn't Shanker After All - Updated

Read the additional update below from the AFT blog with an addendum from me and brief history of the opposition in the UFT from Shanker times on.

Posted by Alexander Russo on September 20, 2007 on his edweek blog.

"One of the most interesting of the 20-something mostly irate comments on my Huffington Post article claims that Shanker doesn't deserve credit for unionizing the teachers because David Selden was the true visionary and was replaced by Shanker in a power struggle along the lines of Stalin and Trotsky. Hmm. Guess I skipped that chapter in Kahlenberg's book."


Ahh! Now we're getting to the source of Jeff Zahler's red-baiting attack on Kit Wainer who ran against Randi Weingarten in last spring's UFT election. I am into just the 2nd chapter of Kahlenberg's book ("Tough Liberal") and there are many themes and contradictions emerging. Like Shanker's "commitment" to democracy and vehement opposition to totalitarianism, while at the same time setting up the Unity Caucus system of governing the UFT that would make your average run of the mill dictator envious. Kahlenberg's index doesn't even mention Unity Caucus. Maybe it's a figment of all our imaginations.

I won't even go into the issues of his support for all the very things that have led to the undermining of the very union structure he helped build. Reading an account of Shanker's humiliating experience as a teacher in the 50's sounds so much like today. But then the UFT leadership would say he didn't have big, bad BloomKlein to deal with in those early years of organizing (Maybe it really was Selden). Poor babies, they have it so hard.

Not that I am new to this stuff since I was part of the opposition to Shanker in the 70's and even attended Shanker's coronation as AFT President at the AFT convention in Toronto in 1974 where Shanker stabbed Dave Seldin in the back and turned the AFT into an agent of his foreign policy.

We'll be doing a lot more on Shanker as I am working with Bruce Markens on a review of the Kahlenberg book for New Politics. Bruce was in this thing from the early 60's and ended up being the only elected UFT District rep that kept beating the Shanker machine (even though it was run by Feldman at the time.)

I hear old timers say that Shanker must be turning over in his grave over saw what is happening to teachers in schools today. I don't agree. He would be perfectly comfortable as it is a system inherited from him.

And in many ways, Randi Weingarten is more adept at selling this kind of stuff to the members. She's much more socially adept than Shanker (or Feldman) and much more of a politician - in the Clinton "We feel your pain" sense.

When Feldman/Shanker chose their successor, they knew exactly what they were doing. And it is in this sphere where Weingarten is far behind them - never secure enough to cultivate someone strong enough to run the UFT effectively in her absence. That may prove to be her bete noire.

Posts on Unity Caucus red-baiting can be found here, here, and here

Also check out the Century Foundation slightly biased roundtable discussion on Shanker's legacy. There are some powerful political forces behind the Shanker resurrection. And none of them bear well for teachers.


UPDATE from AFT blog:

Shanker in Our Times
September 21, 2007 12:28 PM

I am currently reading the new Shanker biography the Washington Way--I am looking up names in the index and then seeing what people said, or what is said about them, in the text. (C'mon, I work here, it's all part of the intrigue.) So, who did I start with? Bella Rosenberg. And, in the short section on NCLB, Bella says:

"Al believed in eradicating achievement gaps, group distinctions . . . But Al also knew that since the beginning of time, there had been individual variability," so a performance standard which requires 100 percent proficiency by a certain date "is just a human impossibility."

In reading over that section, I thought, gee that sounds familiar. Who was it, who was it, oh yeah, it was Amy Wilkins at Ed Trust who recently said in press release a on the Miller-McKeon bill:

"The 2013-14 deadline for proficiency is a powerful disincentive to raising standards. If we are going to ask states – and students – to climb a higher mountain, we need to give them more time to get there . . ."

So, it only took Wilkins five years and half years of NCL to realize what Shanker knew intuitively over ten years ago. He was a man ahead of his times. To read some of the reviews of his biography, click here.

Oh, and if you really want to understand what makes the AFT tick, read the sections on the Social Democrats with care. I, myself, never realized that Yetta Barsh, Shanker's assistant, was married to Max Shachtman.

Ed Notes comment:
Back in the 70's we used to talk about certain ironies in the fact that Yetta Barsh held the gateway to Shanker.

It is worth reading the Wiki about former Trotskyite Shachtman to get a picture of the underlying roots of the UFT/AFT.

Here's a piece:
Social Democracy. After Shachtman's death in 1972, many social democratic Shachtmanites rose to prominent positions in government and organized labor. Supporters of Social Democrats USA (SDUSA) in the labor movement included Albert Shanker (president of the American Federation of Teachers), as well as AFL/CIO presidents George Meany and Lane Kirkland.


The Opposition in the UFT: A brief, down and dirty history

With the main opposition to Shanker coming from Teachers Action Caucus, a Communist Party dominated group, the Stalin/Trotsky wars were being fought out in the UFT beneath the surface. With the rise of the New Left in the 60's and 70's, new groups of Trotsky derivatives began to surface in the UFT. As oppositionists, they could not work with TAC and therefore became part of the opposition independent of TAC.

TAC was opposed to the '68 strike and for years were branded as strike breakers, an unfair label, as that strike had so many connotations beyond labor issues.

The group I was with (Coalition of NYC School Workers), independent left-wing but anti-left political party - by this I mean, we viewed people who joined left political parties came into a group with a priority of organizing for their party and not for the group – occupied a middle position within this milieu and anti-CP (Communist Party) leftists gravitated to us.

Ultimately (1975-6), some of the Trot party people saw they weren't going to get anywhere and split off into New Directions along with others who felt the CSW were too cerebral and not action oriented. The dichotomy in New Directions led to a split there with the Trot party people left out in the cold and they ultimately formed a group called Chalk Dust while ND was left with the more middle of the road right wing elements. Eventually, ND and TAC merged (around 1990) into what is currently New Action and some of the Chalk Dust people evolved into Teachers for a Just Contract. New Action still has the old TAC/New Direction dichotomy with the NA core people still coming from the old TAC.

Thus, the roots of why New Action and TJC would find it impossible to work together go a long way back.

ICE (Independent Community of Educators) was formed 4 years ago from the original people involved in the old CSW from the 70's and people who worked with Education Notes, which began publishing around 1996 as an alternative point of view to New Action and TJC. The word "Independent" in the name of the organization was very important, reflecting those same feelings from the 70's when the CSW was in the middle of the ideological battles between the Social Democrats, CP and Trots.

That battle still goes on, as does the red-baiting on the part of Unity Caucus.