Richard Kahlenberg: How the Left Can Avoid a New Education War

How the Left Can Avoid a New Education War
A battle is brewing between portions of the civil-rights community and teacher unions over the future of liberal education policy.
Richard D. Kahlenberg | July 9, 2008 | web only

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=how_the_left_can_avoid_a_new_education_war

Just as Democrats have finally settled on a nominee and begun to unite, a major new fight has broken out between competing factions in the liberal education-policy community. One group argues that poverty should not be used as an excuse for failure and sees teacher unions as a major obstacle to promoting equity through education reform. The other group says education reform by itself cannot close the achievement gap between rich and poor and black and white without addressing larger economic inequalities in society. The battle, which can broadly be characterized as one between portions of the civil-rights community and teacher unions, is a movie we've seen before -- most explosively in the New York City teacher strikes of the 1960s -- and it doesn't end well. Sen. Barack Obama should follow the lead of legendary teacher-union leader Albert Shanker and recognize that both sides in the debate need to bend.

The first coalition, led by the self-described "odd couple" of the Rev. Al Sharpton and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein of New York City, casts the debate in civil-rights terms. Calling itself The Education Equality Project, this faction, which also includes Mayor Cory Booker of Newark and Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee of Washington, D.C., sees recalcitrant teacher unions as a major impediment to poor- and minority-student achievement, and alleges that unions care more about their own members than they do about students. Sharpton remarked, "If we're going to move forward, we're going to have to be able to have new alliances here -- that might mean some old relationships with teacher unions, principal unions, and all are going to be a little troubled."

Sharpton's animosity toward teacher unions dates back to a key confrontation 40 years ago. Sharpton has said he was inspired as a teenager by black community-control activists who in May 1968 fired several white teachers in New York City's black ghetto of Ocean Hill-Brownsville. Black Power advocates at the time, in an unlikely alliance with upper-class whites such as Mayor John Lindsay of New York City and the Ford Foundation's McGeorge Bundy, blamed white teachers for the low achievement levels of black students. Bundy called for preferences in hiring black teachers, who he said would be more sensitive to the needs of black students, and the local Ocean Hill-Brownsville superintendent, Rhody McCoy, made clear he wanted an all-black teaching force in the community.

In response, Shanker, the head of the United Federation of Teachers, led what was then the longest and largest teachers' strike in American history, lasting 36 days. Although Shanker had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and advocated school integration, many liberals branded him a racist and a madman. In the 1973 science fiction comedy Sleeper, Woody Allen's character wakes up 200 years in the future and is told that the world was destroyed when "a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead." In fact, Shanker was a thoughtful union leader who recognized that the Black Power community-control movement was just another version of "separate but equal" that was bad for kids.

Meanwhile, as the union/civil-rights alliance withered, New York City schools deteriorated. One big lesson from the dispute was that teachers and the civil-rights community should be allied to fight for equal opportunity and better funding of public schools. Indeed, even some of the reforms the Sharpton/Klein group wants -- like bonuses to attract good teachers to high-poverty schools -- cost a fair amount of money.

On the other side of the current debate is a second group, organized by the labor-friendly Economic Policy Institute, which recently put out a statement (in full-page ads in The New York Times and The Washington Post) calling for "A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education." The No Child Left Behind Act and other traditional school reforms are failing, the EPI argues, because such programs take a "schools alone" approach and ignore the importance of societal inequality that prevents the narrowing of the achievement gap between affluent whites and low-income minorities. This group's thinking also has roots in the 1960s -- namely the legendary 1966 Coleman report, authored by sociologist James Coleman, which found that the biggest predictor of academic achievement is the socioeconomic status of the family in which a child grows up, not the quality of the school she attends.

Moving forward, Sen. Barack Obama would do well to agree in part and disagree in part with combatants on both sides of this old war -- something Shanker himself showed was possible by strongly defending the role of teacher unions in education but also challenging union orthodoxy where he believed it was bad for children. The Sharpton/Klein group is right to say schools matter and that teacher unions too often block needed efforts to get rid of bad teachers and encourage great educators to teach in high-poverty schools. Shanker forthrightly acknowledged these problems, supporting bonuses to attract good teachers to low-income schools and backing a "peer review" plan in which teachers judge one another and fire incompetents. Under such programs, more teachers are terminated than when principals evaluate teachers because every good teacher is hurt by the presence of bad teachers in a school.

What Shanker never did, however, was demonize teacher unions or say teachers alone should be held accountable. Oddly missing from the Sharpton/Klein mission statement is any call for student accountability. Why, as Shanker asked, would kids work hard to do well when told: If you fail this test, we won't punish you, but we will punish your teacher? Kids going to selective colleges have a strong incentive to do well, but for the vast majority of students who attend nonselective colleges, or go straight into the work force, doing well academically doesn't really matter that much.

Still, the Sharpton/Klein group, which includes sensible education reformers like Andrew Rothertham, Kati Haycock, and Roy Romer, is right as a practical political matter to lead with a focus on education. Polls have long found that Americans view poverty mostly as a result of personal failings and are hesitant to provide generous welfare and housing assistance to poor adults. But Americans are more willing to give poor kids – who don't choose their parents – a break through our public education system.

Having said that, Obama should recognize the importance of EPI's argument, as Shanker would have. The statement, put together by highly regarded academics and practitioners led by Helen Ladd, Pedro Noguera, and Tom Payzant (and including former Shanker aide Bella Rosenberg), is backed by decades of research suggesting that economic inequality has a substantial impact on achievement and that we've not done enough to address it. To their credit, some civil-rights leaders, like Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP, and former National Urban League President Hugh Price signed on to the "Bigger, Bolder" approach, realizing that low-income students need support and eschewing Sharpton and the divisive legacy of Ocean Hill-Brownsville.

Conservatives, including Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, favor the Sharpton/Klein approach. New York Times columnist David Brooks praised the Sharpton group and labeled EPI's manifesto the "status quo" approach, because "most of us" are already for such programs as expanded pre-K. This would presumably be a surprise to the thousands of kids who can't get into underfunded high-quality pre-K programs and who don't have access to good health care and the like under the "status quo."

Shanker understood the importance of addressing larger issues of societal inequality, which is why he insisted that the American Federation of Teachers be part of organized labor. Though he realized the political challenges, Shanker wanted the AFT to be part of the coalition fighting for better health care and housing and a higher minimum wage -- all of which would make teachers more likely to be successful in reaching low-income students. By contrast, the National Education Association has refused to become part of the AFL-CIO, worried that labor affiliation would be "unprofessional."

Rather than listening to Brooks (who oddly finds himself advocating for Al Sharpton over James Coleman), Obama should keep two critical ideas in his head at once, as Shanker did. Teacher unions need to go along with much needed reforms of the schools to rid the system of bad teachers and connect low-income students with the very best educators. And self-styled civil-rights activists like Sharpton need to acknowledge that poverty -- not unions -- is the biggest impediment to low-income and minority achievement. A repeat of the civil-rights/teacher-union wars of the 1960s will only help the right wing and will do nothing to advance the cause of poor and minority kids.

NY Teacher review of Kahlenberg Shanker book

Book shows a tenacious fighter, warts and all

by Michael Hirsch

Sep 20, 2007 3:40 PM

UFT President Randi Weingarten discusses the Albert Shanker biography with author Richard Kahlenberg.

Nobody’s as big as their myth, but Al Shanker comes close. The son of impoverished Jewish working-class parents, themselves immigrants from Tsarist Russia, Shanker came on the 1950s scene at a time when teachers in New York City had no power, and fully half were at-will employees serving at the whim of a principal and paid less than car washers.

A lifelong democrat, economic liberal and widely acknowledged as a brilliant tactician, Shanker — who presided over both the UFT and the AFT throughout much of the 1960s through the 1990s — believed that public education and unions were essential in maintaining democracy at home and abroad and in growing a middle class. He also believed unions were necessary checks and balances on corporate and government power, even as he saw democratic government, as he wrote in 1982 in his weekly New York Times column, “Where We Stand,” as “the indispensable instrument of human progress.”

Successful people are fortunate to be known for one big thing; Shanker is known for at least three: one of the founders of the modern teacher union movement, an “education reformer” and a cogent exponent of what author Richard Kahlenberg calls a “tough” and unapologetic liberalism. All Shanker’s strengths and weaknesses as UFT President Randi Weingarten attested at a recent UFT book-signing party for Kahlenberg, [see p.4] are portrayed in Kahlenberg’s “Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy,” (Columbia U. Press) a finely tuned, must-read biography of a singular union leader.

Shanker was a defender of public schools who sought not only to protect teachers’ livelihoods but to build a good school system and defeat parasitic private initiatives that could have eliminated the common school. Kahlenberg calls the late union leader “arguably the single individual most responsible for preserving public education in the United States during the last quarter of the 20th century. It’s a fair portrayal.

Shanker came into his own at a time when some thought professionalism and unionism didn’t mix, when strikes by public employees were not only illegal but career-ending, and when teachers in New York were scattered over 106 teacher organizations, including two other unions. He and others soon led the UFT — a merger of the old Teachers Guild with the newly formed Community for Action Through Unity — through two strikes for collective bargaining in 1960 and a first contract in 1962 and through divisive fights over community control of schools in 1967 and 1968 that had nasty racial and religious overtones.

In the 1980s, Shanker became an education reformer and advocate of national education standards. A fierce critic of vouchers, he pioneered the idea of teacher-led charter schools as an alternative, though not as for-profit entities capable of sucking public money away from public education. He saw them instead as centers of learning in which teachers had room enough and time — with small classes, adequate resources, professional development opportunities, mentoring — to be their best in innovative settings.

As president of the AFT from 1974 until his death in 1997, Shanker presided over the AFT’s shift toward political involvement, making the union a first-rate player on the national level. His Times column, running as a paid ad, was widely read.

Kahlenberg succeeds in explaining just how much the country has changed in the last 40 years and what Shanker and his fellow UFTers did to make that happen. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. needed help organizing the civil rights movement, Shanker and the UFT were there; they donated station wagons and wrote a check for $10,000. They gave King the union’s John Dewey Award.

Shanker, tough liberal that he was, also took his civil rights crusade on the road, marching from Selma to Montgomery at a time when the Klan, the county sheriff or the governor of Alabama would just as soon shoot a New York Jew as a Southern black.

Kahlenberg also has an excellent description of the battle over school decentralization in Brooklyn’s impoverished Ocean Hill-Brownsville section. There, Shanker, a longtime and valued supporter of desegregation and backer in 1966 of the controversial independent Civilian Police Review Board, which would have investigated allegations of police misconduct, was unfairly branded a racist for fighting the firings of teachers discharged simply because they were white. He supported affirmative action as an aggressive outreach and recruitment program, but not as the system of racial preferences and quotas it later often became.

Shanker insisted that due process and a union contract were sacrosanct but he also led the fight to increase the number of minority teachers by both organizing paraprofessionals and negotiating a career ladder for them to become classroom teachers. Civil rights veteran Bayard Rustin called the successful organizing of the city’s mostly black and Hispanic (and notoriously low-paid) paraprofessionals “the most effective affirmative action effort in the nation.”

Too hard on Beame

The chapters on New York City’s near default in 1975, in which union pension funds were invested in city bonds that kept the city fiscally afloat, accurately reflect the pressures on city workers, though Kahlenberg goes too hard on Mayor Abe Beame, a former public school teacher and union rep who understood poverty and joblessness, and too easy on the city bankers for laying off teachers and other city workers during the fiscal crisis.

The section on the early education standards movement is also superb, as is his depiction of Shanker’s focus on school safety, where removing chronically disruptive children from the classroom — something he insisted had to be done so that other children were not prevented from learning — also meant offering them first-rate alternative educational settings.

If there’s a weakness to the book, it’s Kahlenberg’s blurring the lines between biographer and advocate. Lilies don’t need gilding. Shanker and other liberal “hawks” weren’t alone in respecting trade union rights and soberly assessing the totalitarian aspects at the heart of international communism. But respecting democracy and rejecting totalitarianism didn’t have to equal supporting the American military policy in the Vietnam War, backing the defense buildup under Ronald Reagan or arming the fascist yet-anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua. Plenty of critics of unilateral U.S. intervention around the world were good trade unionists, too.

Representing Shanker’s essential view that independent unions are necessary worldwide is one thing, as Kahlenberg does well, especially in his section on the AFT’s backing for Poland’s independent national trade union, Solidarity, and in its support for teachers unions in developing countries. But caricaturing the views of former Shanker allies such as socialist leaders Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington — who actively supported the UFT in its earlier fight with racial separatists in Brooklyn, but who then broke with him over the Vietnam War — as insufficiently tough on left-wing dictatorships is not. Right or wrong, Shanker was free to believe, for example, that George McGovern’s campaign slogan, “Come Home, America,” was “a left-wing version of traditional right-wing isolationism,” but not for Kahlenberg to uncritically accept the description of George McGovern as anti-labor. (He wasn’t; he had a 93 percent AFL-CIO approval rating.)

According to the book, Shanker believed that McGovern supporters were “an elitist upper-middle-class movement” that sought to take over the party from its traditional base of working-class and poor voters. If so, he missed union stalwarts, such as UFT Vice Presidents George Altomare and John Soldini, who were pro-labor and pro-McGovern even as they were critics of U.S. militarism in Vietnam.

Excessive blame on ‘New Left’

If the book has a flaw, then, it’s an overload of blame placed on the “New Left,” or the “New Politics” or “McGovernites” for splitting the New Deal/liberal/labor coalition, causing the Nixon landslide in 1972. Shanker was free to believe the demise of labor, the country’s swing to the right, the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan and the rebirth of the Republican Party were due to the excesses of the Left rather than the race-baiting of the Right and the irreconcilability of the guns and butter politics that dominated Cold-War liberalism. Kahlenberg, as biographer, however, needn’t be an uncritical booster for the idea.

One last caveat: Kahlenberg makes Shanker appear like “super Al,” who did it alone. In fact, he had lots of help. There was minimally a core of 100 dedicated veteran teachers who assisted first UFT President Charles Cogen and organizer and later AFT President David Selden. Altomare calls Cogen the real George Washington of the UFT, with Shanker as Thomas Jefferson and Selden a founding father, too.

UFT veterans remember Shanker repeatedly acknowledging that without Selden, there would be no UFT, something Shanker also said publicly at the 1974 AFT convention after defeating Selden in an acrimonious contest. Shanker was clearly singular, but like the Roeblings — father, son and daughter in-law, builders of the Brooklyn Bridge — he didn’t do it alone.

If there’s a fitting coda to the Shanker story, it was given by teacher Rhoda Cohen. She told The New York Times at a Shanker commemoration in Washington, D.C., in 1997: “He made teachers go from being people who took orders, who had very little impact on their careers, and who felt threatened by administrative authority, to being people who were respected and gained self-respect.”

That’s no myth.