Albert Shanker

Public Intellectual: The Legacy Of Al Shanker

Twenty years ago today, the legendary president of the American Federation of Teachers, Al Shanker, died. To mark the occasion, we have asked a number of individuals – some who knew and worked with Al and some who have studied his life’s work – to reflect on the continuing relevance of his ideas and his principles. We did so out of a conviction that Shanker’s ideas and principles are not simply matters of historical interest, but of real contemporary value at a time when public education, unionism and American democracy itself are in a state of profound crisis, under attack in unprecedented ways. Beginning today with this post, we will be publishing these reflections (you can find the full series here).

For a half-century, Al Shanker labored as a teacher and educator, as a unionist and as a democrat. In each of these fields, he was a political force to be reckoned with, shaping public policy and thinking in significant ways. Yet unlike most important political actors on the American scene, Shanker was a public intellectual who relished vigorous debate and reveled in the world of ideas. He brought an open mind and a penchant for critical analysis, a fierce commitment to rational discourse and logical argumentation that relied on evidence, to all that he did. His political engagement had a deeply intellectual cast.

As the executive director of the institute established by the AFT to honor Shanker by carrying on his life’s work as an engaged public intellectual, I have often thought about Al’s example. What strikes me most about Shanker the thinker was his refusal to become entrenched in his views or to allow his beliefs to harden into inflexible dogmas. One story in particular comes to mind.

Where Al Shanker Stood: The Importance And Meaning Of NAEP Results

In this New York Times piece, published on July 29, 1990, Al Shanker discusses the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and what they suggested about the U.S. education system at the time.

One of the things that has influenced me most strongly to call for radical school reform has been the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) examinations. These exams have been testing the achievement of our 9, 13 and 17-year olds in a number of basic areas over the past 20 years, and the results have been almost uniformly dismal.

According to NAEP results, no 17-year-olds who are still in school are illiterate and innumerate - that is, all of them can read the words you would find on a cereal box or a billboard, and they can do simple arithmetic. But very few achieve what a reasonable person would call competence in reading, writing or computing.

For example, NAEP's 20-year overview, Crossroads in American Education, indicated that only 2.6 percent of 17-year-olds taking the test could write a good letter to a high school principal about why a rule should be changed. And when I say good, I'm talking about a straightforward presentation of a couple of simple points. Only 5 percent could grasp a paragraph as complicated as the kind you would find in a first-year college textbook. And only 6 percent could solve a multi-step math problem like this one:"Christine borrowed $850 for one year from Friendly Finance Company. If she paid 12% simple interest on the loan, what was the total amount she repaid?"

Where Al Shanker Stood: Union-District Partnerships

In this New York Times piece, which was published on March 9, 1986, Al Shanker discusses a study suggesting that union-district partnership, not confrontation, is the best way to enact and implement reforms that will improve schools.

In the last 25 years, teachers' unions have grown in size and influence. In the minds of many they represent an establishment just as much as the local board of education and the superintendent of schools. Many critics of our schools have been eager to portray teacher unions as supporters of educationally undesirable rules and procedures, such as seniority, which were borrowed from the industrial sector. They view teacher unions as fighting for these rules at any cost and using their bargaining powers to shoot down constructive change whenever it threatens to infringe on teachers' vested interests.

But an interesting new study gives us quite a different picture of the impact that teacher unions and collective bargaining have on the reform process. In preparing Teacher Unions, School Staffing and Reform, a Harvard Graduate School of Education research team led by Susan Moore Johnson analyzed 155 contracts chosen at random from a variety of school districts around the country. And, from June of 1984 to February, 1985, they did extensive, in-depth field work in 5 of the districts, where they examined documents, sat in on meetings and interviewed 187 teachers, principals, union leaders and central office administrators.

What emerges is a valuable insight into the dynamics and complexity of the reform process, why some proposals work and why others fall flat. Though new programs tend to be formulated in legislative chambers or in governors' mansions, the key to success, the authors conclude, is what happens on the district level, within the individual collective bargaining unit. And some interesting patterns emerge.

Where Al Shanker Stood: Policymaking And Innovation

In this piece, which was published in the New York Times on December 24, 1995, Al Shanker uses a creative analogy to argue that policies require experimentation and refinement before they are brought to scale, and that some reformers mistake this process for rigidity and "stifling innovation."

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times food section ran an article about a French bread that you can make with a food processor (November 22, 1995). The article claimed that the baguette was as delicious as the kind you buy in a good bakery. I was skeptical. I have made bread for my family and friends for a number of years, and I know that a good French loaf is a real accomplishment. I had no trouble believing that the bread would be quick and easy. But delicious? Nevertheless, I tried the recipe for Thanksgiving. It was terrific!

Though making the bread was as painless as the article said, the process by which Charles van Over, a chef and restaurateur, arrived at the recipe was anything but simple. Van Over experimented over a period of several years in order to get a bread with the best possible texture, flavor, and crust - and a recipe that could be made with predictable results by other cooks. It occurred to me as I read the article that there might be some lessons for school reformers in van Over's systematic efforts to perfect his recipe for a food processor baguette.

Where Al Shanker Stood: Verbal Ability As The Key To Learning

We found this 1974 Al Shanker New York Times column to be of interest, both in terms of current debates over variations in "opportunity to learn" and implementation of the Common Core State Standards, and in regard to recent research on the importance of oral language development in early childhood (see here for more); we hope you agree. 

It is regrettable that the important work being done by the International Association for the Evaluation of Education Achievement has received such scant notice, not only in the media but in educational circles as well. It deserves better. Founded in 1959, IEA is an organization of 22 national education research centers whose basic purpose, through use of tests, surveys, questionnaires and other methods, is to develop generalizations for education throughout the world. It has done studies of achievement in mathematics, science, reading comprehension, civic education and foreign languages.

A good summary of the findings of recent IEA research is provided by Benjamin S. Bloom, Professor of Education at the University of Chicago and one of the founding members of the Association, in his article, "Implications of the IEA Studies for Curriculum and Instruction," in the May 1974 issue of the University of Chicago School Review. Bloom, to begin with, sees as a salient virtue of IEA research that its methods have been developed for the specific purpose of international comparison. In previous cross-national studies, he observes, "the evaluation instruments developed in one country typically showed that country to be superior to the other countries included in the study." The procedures which IEA has helped develop avoid such bias. The IEA studies, Bloom reports, reveal that there are vast educational differences between countries. "If school marks were assigned in the various nations on the basis of the highest nation's standards (where perhaps the lowest fifth might be regarded as failing), then almost 50 percent of the students in the lowest scoring of the developed countries would fail but about 85 percent of the students in the average developing nation would fail." In terms of grade norms, "it is evident that the attainment obtained in one year of schooling in the highest nation requires one and one-half or two years of schooling in the less favored nations. To put it in terms of time and human resources spent, it may cost twice as much for a particular level of learning in one place as it does in another."

Where Al Shanker Stood: Quick Fixes In Education

Regular Public And Charter Schools: Is A Different Conversation Possible?

Uplifting Leadership, Andrew Hargreaves' new book with coauthors Alan Boyle and Alma Harris, is based on a seven-year international study, and illustrates how leaders from diverse organizations were able to lift up their teams by harnessing and balancing qualities that we often view as opposites, such as dreaming and action, creativity and discipline, measurement and meaningfulness, and so on.

Chapter three, Collaboration With Competition, was particularly interesting to me and relevant to our series, "The Social Side of Reform." In that series, we've been highlighting research that emphasizes the value of collaboration and considers extreme competition to be counterproductive. But, is that always the case? Can collaboration and competition live under the same roof and, in combination, promote systemic improvement? Could, for example, different types of schools serving (or competing for) the same students work in cooperative ways for the greater good of their communities?

Hargreaves and colleagues believe that establishing this environment is difficult but possible, and that it has already happened in some places. In fact, Al Shanker was one of the first proponents of a model that bears some similarity. In this post, I highlight some ideas and illustrations from Uplifting Leadership and tie them to Shanker's own vision of how charter schools, conceived as idea incubators and, eventually, as innovations within the public school system, could potentially lift all students and the entire system, from the bottom up, one group of teachers at a time.

Where Al Shanker Stood: Democracy In Public Education

There is an ongoing debate in the U.S. about the role of democracy in public education. In March 1997, in his final “Where We Stand” column in the New York Times, Al Shanker addressed this issue directly. The piece, published posthumously, was an excerpt from a larger essay entitled "40 Years in the Profession," which was included in a collection published by the Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation.

Why do I continue when so much of what I’ve worked for seems threatened? To a large extent, because I believe that public education is the glue that has held this country together. Critics now say that the common school never really existed, that it’s time to abandon this ideal in favor of schools that are designed to appeal to groups based on ethnicity, race, religion, class, or common interests of various kinds. But schools like these would foster divisions in our society; they would be like setting a time bomb.

A Martian who happened to be visiting Earth soon after the United States was founded would not have given this country much chance of surviving. He would have predicted that this new nation, whose inhabitants were of different races, who spoke different languages, and who followed different religions, wouldn’t remain one nation for long. They would end up fighting and killing each other. Then, what was left of each group would set up its own country, just as has happened many other times and in many other places. But that didn’t happen. Instead, we became a wealthy and powerful nation—the freest the world has ever known. Millions of people from around the world have risked their lives to come here, and they continue to do so today.

Democracy’s Champion: Albert Shanker

Our guest author today is Richard D. Kahlenberg, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is author of Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy (Columbia University Press, 20007). 

Freedom House recently released the significant – and sobering -- results of its report, “Freedom in the World 2014."  The survey is the latest in an annual assessment of political and civil liberties around the globe.  For the eighth year in a row, the overall level of freedom declined, as 54 nations saw erosion of political and civil rights, including Egypt, Turkey and Russia.  (A smaller number, 40, saw gains.)  Despite the early hopes of the Arab Spring, democracy promotion has proven a long and difficult fight.

None of this would surprise Albert Shanker, who devoted his life to championing democracy, yet always recognized the considerable difficulty of doing so.  Around 1989, when the world was celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, Shanker took the long view:  “What we’ve seen are the beginnings of democracy.  We haven’t really seen democracy yet.  We’ve seen the overthrow of dictatorship.  Democracy is going to take generations to build and we have to be a part of that building because they won’t be able to do it alone."

Learning From The 1963 March On Washington For Jobs And Freedom

Today marks the actual calendar day of the 50th Anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In honor of that day, we republish Al Shanker’s tribute to A. Philip Randolph, the director of the March, on the occasion of Randolph’s passing in 1979. One of the themes of Shanker’s comments is the distinctive place of A. Philip Randolph in the African-American freedom struggle, distinguished from Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey, by his focus on the empowerment of African-American working people and his commitment to non-violent, mass action as the means of empowerment. One of the lesson plans the Shanker Institute has published for teaching the 1963 March focuses precisely on this distinctive contribution of Randolph. Other lesson plans look at Randolph’s close partner, Bayard Rustin, who was the organizing genius behind the March, and examine the alliance between the labor movement and civil rights movement which made the March a success. All of the Shanker Institute lesson plans can be read here.

It may be said - I think without exaggeration - that no American in this century has done more to eliminate racial discrimination in our society and to improve the condition of working people than did A. Philip Randolph, who died this week at the age of 90. 

For A. Philip Randolph, a man of quiet eloquence with dignity in every gesture, freedom and justice were never granted people. They had to be fought for in struggles that were never-ending. And progress was something that had to be measured in terms of tangible improvements in people's lives, in the condition of society generally, and in the quality of human relationships.