Where We Stand

Al Shanker died, after a long battle with cancer, on February 22, 1997. Al's first Where We Stand column appeared over 25 years ago on December 13, 1970. His final one is taken from an autobiographical essay, "Forty Years in the Profession," which originally appeared in Reflections: Personal Essays by 33 Distinguished Educators (Phi Delta Kappa, 1990). In the essay, Al talks about his lifelong dedication to "gaining collective bargaining rights for teachers and using the collective bargaining process to improve teachers' salaries and working conditions." He also makes it clear that the teacher union movement always had an equally important aim: making schools work better for kids. His tireless efforts, during the past 15 years or so, on behalf of high standards of conduct and achievement and against the fads and follies that threaten to destroy public education were not an "about face" but a logical extension of his trade unionism.

Archived Where We Stand Articles

March Mar18, 1990

A Big Step Backward in California: Honig Seeks Strike Ban

Bill Honig, California's superintendent of public instruction, is one of education's best and brightest. So I was shocked and disappointed to find that he is sponsoring legislation (along with Assemblyman Jack O'Connell) that will ban strikes by teachers and school employees and create a new collective bargaining structure culminating in binding arbitration.

March Mar11, 1990

Shared Decision Making: The Question of Power

What goes around, comes around ... Last week, as I was debating the former school superintendent of one of our largest cities on schools, I suddenly felt as though I had stumbled into a time warp. I was back in the early '60s, in the midst of one of those debates about whether or not teachers and other public employees had the right to engage in collective bargaining and, if they did, what this would do to the balance of power.

March Mar4, 1990

Quality Education for Minorities: A Question of Survival

When people talk about fixing what's wrong with the way we educate America's poor, minority children, they often make it sound like an act of charity, something we really ought to do -- if we can afford it.

February Feb25, 1990

The Peer Evaluation Program: Trashing a State Treasure?

It often looks as though no good deed goes unpunished. The latest example is the threat facing the
Toledo Federation of Teachers' peer evaluation program.

February Feb18, 1990

Mother Theresa, Machiavelli and a CPA: A Winning Combination

The Committee for Economic Development, a business group that has already put out two excellent reports, one about school improvement and the other about the problems of disadvantaged and at-risk children, began meeting on a third report the other day, and I was particularly struck by one speaker's comments on the obstacles that bureaucracy puts in the way of innovators.

February Feb11, 1990

Impossible Dreams?: National Goals for the Year 2000

The decision to set national education goals was perhaps the most important result of the Education Summit last September. Now we have them: In his State of the Union speech, the President unveiled six goals for America to accomplish by the year 2000. How do they look?

February Feb4, 1990

How They Do It in West Germany: Connecting School With Work

Where will U.S. business and industry find the well-qualified workers we need to make our nation competitive in the new world-economy? Everybody is asking that question as they look at the shrinking labor pool and the generally low level of skills among current high school graduates. One answer is to forge closer links between work and school.

January Jan28, 1990

A Curriculum of Fragmentation: The Sobol Revort

We're seeing increased pressure these days to teach more history, but whose history? Just how difficult it can be to deal with that issue becomes obvious when you take a look at the report on multicultural education produced for New York State Commissioner of Education Thomas Sobol by his Task Force on Minorities: Equity and Excellence.

January Jan21, 1990

Underestimating Children: Disadvantaged Doesn't Mean Dumb

If you've ever spoken to principals about the problems in their schools, you've probably been told that people on the outside can't really understand what goes on in school. At a meeting of teachers, you'd hear the same thing: "If you haven't walked a mile in our shoes ... " And of course they're all right. Fixing what's wrong with our schools means looking at problems from as many angles as possible. But one group whose opinions probably would not be solicited as the students who are unsuccessful in school. That's too bad.

January Jan14, 1990

NAEP On Reading and Writing: Students Flunk Again

Our students have just gotten another set of very poor grades. I'm talking about the reports on reading and writing skills among American school children issued this week by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). These reports show no significant progress in raising the low reading levels of our students between 1971 and last year and no progress at all in raising their rotten writing levels.

January Jan7, 1990

Reflecting on Eastern Europe: Is Democracy Safe At Home?

As we begin the final decade of the twentieth century, I keep thinking about a song that was popular during the Second World War - "When the lights go on again, all over the world" is how it began. This was what everyone was looking forward to, and it happened in 1945. But the peace was darkened by 45 of fear and uncertainty. Now, suddenly - and almost miraculously -- events in Eastern Europe seem finally to have removed the shadow.

December Dec31, 1989

Educating Poor Children... It's More Than Fixing Schools

When Ebenezer Scrooge opened his heart and his bank account to the poor but deserving Cratchit family in Charles Dicken' s A Christmas Carol, he did more than solve all their problems -- he also led us to believe that you solve social problems the same way you deal with individual ones: Find the simple solution and go with it. The trouble is, complicated problems -- like drug abuse or welfare dependency don't have simple solution.

December Dec24, 1989

An Alternative to Tracking Technology Holds the Key

Why do the schools in other industrialized countries produce a much greater percentage of students who are able to write competent essays and letters, read complex and sophisticated materials and solve twostep math problems? There are a number of differences between these school systems and ours, but one of the most obvious is that all the other systems engage in earlier and more systematic tracking of students than we do.

December Dec17, 1989

Student Tracking: Lessons from the One-Room School

Last year, many people in the U.S. were shocked when our 13-year old students came out on the bottom in an international math and science assessment that compared them with students in South Korea, Spain, some Canadian provinces, Ireland and Great Britain. If other comparisons had been made, we'd have been shocked again.

December Dec10, 1989

A School Restructuring Story

It's a shame, what's happening in Boston now. For a number of years, if you'd asked people what they associated with Boston's public schools, they'd probably have come up with a pretty unfavorable list of things - like school desegregation marked by racial conflict and violence and a school committee considered racist and corrupt. But in the past several years, we've begun to hear that Boston schools are turning around.

December Dec3, 1989

A Critical Mass?

School districts that have begun to restructure their schools face some extraordinary challenges. Like Poland, East Germany or Hungary, they must create new and viable institutions to replace old ones that are dying. And they have to muster and maintain support for the risks they're taking. But one of the biggest problems for school leaders in these districts is isolation.

November Nov26, 1989

Incentives Can Work ... But They Don't Have To

Incentives make people move. They get us to be creative in figuring out how to achieve a goal, and they give us the extra energy to get there. We're all familiar with the use of incentives in the business world - indeed, they're one of the foundations of our economic system. And recently we've heard some promising ideas about using incentives to encourage serious attempts at school restructuring.

November Nov19, 1989

Linking School and Work

Many youngsters have no idea of how school connects to the world of work. It's true that kids whose parents are doctors or lawyers can probably see that school is the first step toward entering their parents' professions. But for most children, school must seem irrelevant to what adults do at their jobs: How does plane geometry connect with driving a bus? Or world history with being an insurance underwriter? Would their mothers and fathers have been more successful in their work if they had studied harder?

November Nov12, 1989

Welcome, Lech Walesa! Democracy Owes You

Welcome, Lech Walesa! As you make your first official visit to the United States this week and meet with fellow trade unionists at the AFL-CIO convention, you'll undoubtedly talk about the help Solidarity got from people and organizations in the U.S. during its long struggle with Poland's communist regime. You'll thank organizations like the AFL-CIO and the National Endowment for Democracy, and you'll probably ask for more help in rebuilding the institutions of a free society and free economy in Poland.

November Nov5, 1989

NYC 's Mayoral Race No Doubts about Dinkins

There's no doubt that David Dinkins, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, has gained the respect of a large and diverse group of supporters -- and deservedly so. But there's also little doubt that some voters are having second thoughts about Dinkins because of two notorious men who were briefly associated with his campaign. That's a mistake.