Teaching Toughness

Al Shanker was more than just a punchline. He embodied a noble strain of liberalism that deserves a second look.

Albert Shanker, the combative leader of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) during the 1970s and 1980s, should rank with Horace Mann and John Dewey as a great champion of American public schooling. The first strong leader of New York’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in 1964 and, from 1974, leader of the million-member AFT for 23 years, he fought tirelessly for both public schools and teachers’ unions (upon whose electoral clout schools’ funding and regulation depend). He fought against ideologues left and right, adversaries high and low, and dangerous social undertows. More than a power broker, he was at times a visionary reformer of trade unionism itself and of the nation’s understanding of what’s at stake in its public schools.

Yet these days Shanker, who died in 1997, is little remembered, owing as much to what has become of education as to what became of him in the school wars of his time. In his new biography, Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, works impressively, if also a bit hagiographically, to repair Shanker’s reputation and shore up his “tough liberal” faith, which for 20 years has been sitting, punch-drunk, at the edge of a ring taken over by meaner ideological combatants, particularly on the right. It’s a daunting challenge, but Kahlenberg’s efforts to vindicate that faith can only strengthen current attempts to plumb liberalism’s prospects.

Shanker wanted schools to advance the democratic vision of American citizenship exalted in Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” and Mary Antin’s book The Promised Land. Antin’s testament, misremembered now by some as a tract for assimilation and flag-waving nationalism, glanced back sadly at the parochialism and poverty of her early Russian childhood and chronicled her epiphanic encounters with America in its public school system–that mighty and, for her, sacred crucible of civic-republican liberalism that turned refugees from old blood feuds and superstitions into citizens of the United States–and, through it, the world.

Becoming an American in this way meant standing up against bonds of “blood and soil” that narrow other people’s horizons and also sometimes against a narrow individualism that undermines trans-racial, republican justice and comity. Neither capitalism nor socialism alone would free the huddled masses from penury and hatred without guidance from a distinctively American civic liberalism. Trained in its arts and graces, an American citizen would stride on a left foot of social provision and a right foot of irreducibly personal responsibility and initiative.

Shanker was a believer. “Our public schools have played a major part in the building of our nation,” he wrote in 1980 in one of his “Where We Stand” Sunday New York Times columns, underwritten by the AFT. “They brought together countless children from different cultures–to share a common experience, to develop understanding and tolerance of differences. The public schools ‘Americanized’; they taught our language and our history,” disposing young citizens to bond democratically, across lines of class and color. He toughened this vision with admonitions from Dewey, Mann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and George Orwell and made it the AFT’s guiding philosophy. Wielding teacher-union power in 1978 to defeat a conservative push for private-tuition tax credits that would have drained public schools, Shanker also spearheaded reforms in faculty lounges and union halls. Against the bigger, more genteel National Education Association, he made trade-unionism a precondition of teachers’ professionalism, through better pay and protections against arbitrary management. But he also challenged teachers to conduct peer reviews to reward those who truly broadened students’ skills and horizons. As a result of his pugnacity, he won enough tactical gains and internal reforms to help public schools survive the assaults from which his broader civic liberalism hasn’t fully recovered.

Shanker’s liberalism rested on three pillars: confident, intensive citizenship training (like Antin’s) that elevates working people’s aspirations as well as wages, thus deepening their support for schools; colorblind racial integration as a precondition of a common civic faith and its coalitional power; and an aggressive foreign policy to advance democracy and workers’ rights against communism. This three-pillared liberalism might have prevailed, Kahlenberg believes, had not myopic leftists and some self-indulgent liberals abandoned trade unions for chimeras of revolutionary solidarity and self-marketing; sidelined racial integration for identity politics; and flirted with a vapid one-worldism or isolationism. But Kahlenberg downplays the ways even mainstream liberals, including some of Shanker’s close associates, found his tough urban liberalism wanting.

Today’s liberalism is a far cry from Shanker’s, but there is much that liberals can learn from him about what values to hold, what fights to engage, and what mistakes to avoid. Now that another decade of electoral, legislative, and judicial setbacks to labor and public schools have highlighted the importance of unions and a common civic faith, a harder look at why Shanker’s liberalism waned is even more necessary.

Perhaps the most admirable thing about Kahlenberg’s Shanker is that he was both apostle and statesman of his faith. “The marriage of ideas and power, idealism and pragmatism, was perhaps his greatest strength,” Kahlenberg writes. “Not many union leaders are ABD [all but dissertation] in philosophy at Columbia. And not many intellectuals command a union membership of one million.” But Shanker had other, less admirable contradictions. Ungainly in appearance, mercurial and obdurate in private life and in politics, he was immortalized in Woody Allen’s futurist film Sleeper as the man who had ended civilization by getting a hold of a nuclear warhead. But mainly he was blindsided by strong social tides, betrayed by opportunists who feigned accommodation, and let down by associates whose civic visions and interests led elsewhere. By the end of the 1970s, Shanker faced a society far less responsive to liberal hopes than its immigrant Jewish enthusiasts had imagined, and in some respects he was unprepared and perhaps unwilling to keep up.

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