Albert Shanker

American labor leader

Albert Shanker (September 14, 1928 – February 22, 1997) was president of the United Federation of Teachers from 1964 to 1985 and president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) from 1974 to 1997.

Shanker was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side in New York City to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. As a toddler, his family moved to the Long Island City district in Queens. His parents, Mamie and Morris Shanker, were immigrants from Poland. Both were union members; his father was a union newspaper deliveryman, and his mother, who operated a sewing machine in a knitting factory, was a member of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. The Shanker family's deeply held political views were staunchly pro union, following the socialism of Norman Thomas and including ardent support of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. The experience of watching his mother work 70 hour weeks convinced Shanker from an early age that there was a need for societal changes. Shanker read several newspapers daily as a young boy, with an interest in philosophy. His idols were Franklin D. Roosevelt, Clarence Darrow, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin and American philosopher Sidney Hook. In 1946, Shanker graduated from Stuyvesant High School, where he was the head of the debate team. Thereafter, he majored in philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He joined the Congress of Racial Equality. Shanker picketed segregated movie theaters and restaurants and was a member of the Young People's Socialist League and chairman of the Socialist Study Club. For more than a decade, Shanker wrote more than 1,300 columns in The New York Times (which appeared as paid advertisements) and essays in other publications. Accompanied by a small photograph of Shanker, the Times columns, titled "Where We Stand", sought to clarify the union's position on matters of public interest.

Shanker was a key figure in building the United Federation of Teachers and was elected president of the American Federation of Teachers in 1974. He was re elected every two years until his death. Shanker's organizing efforts for educators cannot be separated from the legacy of his actions related to racial equity and anti Blackness. Shanker is remembered for his actions during the Ocean Hill–Brownsville crisis. In 1968, Black and Puerto Rican parents in Brooklyn were piloting a community school program, known as community control, where school districts had the power to hire, fire, and approve budgets at the local level. The pilot program was design to fight school segregation and racial inequity in school policies, teacher hiring, and Black and Puerto Rican student outcomes. When the majority Black and Puerto Rican school board fired 14 white union teachers for underperformance, President of the UFT, Shanker led UFT teachers in a strike to oppose community control. When the UFT proposed Lesson Plans on African American History, “Shanker personally intervened and cut out radical ideas.” His intervention included removal of two chapters on Malcom X and Fredrick Douglass’s words, “power concedes nothing without a demand.”

In 1975, the UFT authorized a five day strike, leading to allegedly saving New York City from bankruptcy after Shanker asked the Teachers' Retirement System to invest $150 million in municipal bonds. On September 21, 1981, Shanker had dinner with Leon B. Applewhaite, a personal friend and one of the three members of the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA). Applewhaite was involved in deciding whether to uphold the decertification of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization for the strike they had called in August of that year. During the dinner, Shanker urged Applewhaite not to decertify the union, an action which plainly violated the prohibition on the ex parte contact contained in the federal Administrative Procedure Act. Although the contact was not ultimately found to have legal consequences, the D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals criticized Shanker's behavior in their review of the FLRA's decision. (See 685 F.2d 547.) In 1988, Shanker was the first to propose charter schools in the U. S. He was inspired by a visit to a public school in Cologne, Germany, in which teams of teachers had considerable control over how the school was run, and about what and how to teach. They stayed with each class of students for six years. The schools were integrated by ethnic and economic origins, and were originally intended to focus on the neediest students, drop outs and those most likely to drop out soon. In 1993, Shanker turned against the charter school idea when he realized that for profit organizations saw it as a business opportunity and were advancing an agenda of school privatization. Although Shanker marched for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr., later in his career, Shanker moved politically to the right. He came out in proud support of the Vietnam War.

Shanker was a visiting professor at Hunter College and Harvard University during the 1980s. He continued to work toward organizing teachers throughout his life and attempted to bridge the AFT with the National Education Association, which he never saw happen. In 1991, U. S. President George H. W. Bush appointed him as a member of the original Competitiveness Policy Council. Shanker died of bladder cancer and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998 by U. S. President Bill Clinton.

The quote, "When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children," is sometimes erroneously attributed to Shanker, as was done by Joel Klein in 2011 and Mitt Romney in 2012, among others in conservative political circles. The Albert Shanker Institute attempted to find the source of this quote, and concluded that "we cannot demonstrate conclusively that Albert Shanker never made this particular statement but, we believe the quote is fiction." The first appearance, which those at the Institute could find, was in the Meridian Star newspaper, in an editorial piece dated August 13, 1985, but no source is included in the article. Similarly, Washington Post fact checkers concluded that "it’s virtually impossible to prove a negative, but the evidence suggests that the quote didn’t come from Shanker and that someone with an agenda probably twisted his words." Shanker's biographer, Richard Kahlenberg, found no record of Shanker's ever saying this and does not believe he ever did.

There is a reference to Albert Shanker in the Woody Allen movie Sleeper (1973). The protagonist is transported to the future, where he is told that the old world was destroyed when "a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead." Film critic James Monaco wrote, "This is not funny at all, unless you know the cranky, whining head of the New York United Federation of Teachers".