Albert Shanker did nothing wrong

“Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy” is a book by Robert D Kahlenberg, a senior fellow of the liberal Century Foundation. Albert Shanker (1928-1997) was the controversial president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Kahlenberg is mostly supportive of Shanker´s agenda, which he dubs “tough liberalism”. Critics may call it Cold War liberalism or State Department socialism. While Shanker wasn´t formally a member of the Social Democrats USA, his political line was virtually identical with theirs, and he saw prominent SDUSA leaders Max Shachtman and Bayard Rustin as his political mentors. Shanker worked closely with the SDUSA and I frankly suspect that he *was* a leading member of the group de facto, while nominally being a regular Democrat, perhaps for tactical reasons. Shanker was also a leading official of the AFL-CIO, working closely with AFL-CIO presidents George Meany and Lane Kirkland. One thing I didn´t know before reading Kahlenberg´s book is that the AFT was one of the most important AFL-CIO affiliates, due to the gradual decline of the more traditional working class unions. Teachers, by contrast, are heavily unionized, either in the AFT or the NEA (not a member of the AFL-CIO).

Shanker became notorious during the “New York City teachers´ strike”, actually a series of strikes in 1968 directed against “community control” of public schools, a policy supported by both the New Left, Black activists and…the capitalist Ford Foundation. The Black-controlled school district of Ocean Hill-Brownsville had fired White and Jewish teachers, probably on racial grounds. The Shanker-led United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the AFT´s New York City local, responded by taking out over 50,000 members in a series of city-wide strikes which effectively shut down most public schools in the Big Apple. As a result, racial tensions between Jews and Blacks reached a fever pitch. Kahlenberg acknowledges that most New York City teachers were Jewish, that Shanker was Jewish himself, and that most Blacks supported the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district. The few Blacks who stood by Shanker included SDUSA leader Bayard Rustin and legendary civil rights leader A Philip Randolph. 

Shanker also alienated many on the left. Despite his union militancy (at the time, teacher strikes were illegal in New York), he stood far “to the right” of the emerging New Left or campus left, which had also began to organize within the Democratic Party. Shanker opposed racial quotas in hiring and firing, wanted the Democrats to repudiate the campus left in favor of the traditional labor movement (which was seen as mostly White and male by many leftists) and supported the US war in Vietnam, and the Cold War in general. Shanker and the SDUSA were heavily involved in the centrist wing of the Democratic Party around anti-Communist liberal Henry “Scoop” Jackson and the Coalition for a Democratic Majority.

During the 1980´s and 1990´s, many felt that Shanker had begun to abandon his early union militancy, too. The reason was Shanker´s support for so-called education reform, actually a common sense policy aimed at making US public schools more similar to European ditto (which were usually much better). I knew that American public school education sucked, but I clearly didn´t know half of it, since proposals for a "long" six hour school day, national standards or any kind of curriculum whatsoever were considered controversial by many. (In Sweden, a normal school day is around 8 hours, and even private schools must follow government-imposed national standards. Shanker would have loved Sweden! OK, maybe not our foreign policy.) Even more shocking is the rooster of people opposed to national standards. It includes essentially everyone, from right-wing proponents of “local control” and New Left agitators for “identity politics” to parents angry at schools giving their kids bad grades and…the teachers themselves. Shanker probably angered even some of AFT´s own members when he said that it must become easier to fire incompetent teachers, including “veteran” teachers, and that teachers should be periodically evaluated by peer review panels and tests. A Shankerite proposal condemned by the competing NEA was that disruptive students should be removed from the classroom! Wow, imagine that. (I´m sure Shanker didn´t want to use napalm on them, despite his Shachtmanite proclivities.) 

Kahlenberg believes that Shanker was really trying to save the public schools (and the unions) by pushing for education reform. One of Shanker´s big fears throughout his political career was the conservative proposal for school vouchers, which could potentially destroy the public school system entirely. By meeting the Republicans and the business community halfway, securing quality in the public school system, Shanker hoped to defuse any moves towards vouchers. Less surprising was Shanker´s insistence that the national standards should be “Eurocentric” (as his opponents would probably have put it), which was in line with his constant repudiation of “identity politics” and “community control” in favor of a colorblind form of liberalism, the purpose of which was to weld a united nation and democratic polity out of disparate ethnic and racial communities. For instance, Shanker had always been an opponent of bilingual education. This was obviously anathema to the multi-culturalist left.

Considering Shanker´s “tough liberal” or even “conservative” stances on education issues, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that he was also interested in alternative pedagogy. Shanker had apparently been an “untraditional” learner himself, and so were his two sons. When Shanker expressed support for so-called charter schools, his reason for doing so was to free the teachers to experiment with alternative and innovative ways of teaching – something obviously at variance with his adamant insistence on national standards and more federal control. Shanker even claimed that the “factory model” of education only works for about 20% of all students, the remaining 80% being untraditional learners. This sounds counterintuitive on the face of it – surely, it´s the other way around? It´s frankly strange to hear Cold Warrior badass Albert Shanker suddenly sounding like a flim flam rad-libber or Waldorf teacher!

“Tough Liberal” was an interesting read (or is – I still haven´t read all chapters, untraditionally beginning somewhere in the middle), for several reasons. I have been looking for some time for a good book on the SDUSA, not finding any. This was a suitable substitute, since Shanker backstage probably was one of the SDUSA´s leaders. The near-permanent education crisis in the United States never ceases to amaze me. Finally, “Tough Liberal” very clearly shows that the present conflicts in American society aren´t particularly new. The transition from labor-supported “tough liberalism” to the multi-culturalist campus liberal maze, where privileged middle class groups control disadvantaged minorities through the state apparatus while excluding the White workers, began already during the late 1960´s. 

No surprise really, but this book shows how far the process had went already by that time, the Democratic Party becoming the voice of these sectors, while the European Social Democratic parties seemed to have undergone this transition only within the last 25 years or so. The phenomenon of angry White workers voting for right-wing populist candidates isn´t new either – George Wallace and Ronald Reagan being examples from the 1970´s. Shanker feared that the White workers (then an important voting bloc) would turn to the Republicans if the Democrats would embrace “the New Politics” – which of course they did. Today, the same phenomenon is represented by one Donald J Trump. As for the SJWs, they are simply the new New Politics, and seem strikingly similar to the old version, perhaps with a few new “identities” tacked on (although I´m sure even those existed in California back in the days).

In the end, however, there was a blank spot in Shanker´s worldview, and probably in the author´s, as well. As far as I can tell, Shanker didn´t oppose mass immigration to the United States, instead counting on public education to turn all comers into good American (and slightly Eurocentric) citizens. With that little reflection on my own, I end this review of “Tough Liberal”.