The Teacher Wars (21 page)

UNION TEACHERS VERSUS BLACK POWER DURING THE ERA OF COMMUNITY CONTROL

Al Shanker is the bridge who links today's teacher union politics, driven by promises of reform and accountability, to the democratic socialism of the early twentieth century, from which the modern teachers unions emerged. Shanker spoke no English on his first day of kindergarten in 1927. At home in Queens with his father, who sold newspapers from a pushcart, and his mother, a sweatshop seamstress, Yiddish was the tongue and labor politics—just as much as Judaism—the religion. His mother's pay improved when she joined the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America; the union, Shanker later remembered, was practically a god to his family. He was hardly a passionate student, but he loved to read. As a teenager, he walked from Queens over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge to buy copies of
Commentary
and
Partisan Review
from the newsstands outside the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. He excelled on the debate team at Stuyvesant High School, and his father expected him to become a lawyer. Later, in college at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Shanker joined CORE—the Congress for Racial Equality—and chaired the Socialist Study Club. When socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas visited campus in 1948, Shanker organized a huge rally, bigger than the ones for Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey.

Shanker graduated and returned to New York to enroll in Columbia's PhD program in philosophy. There he studied with John
Dewey and took copious notes for a dissertation. But he seemed to lack the discipline to simply sit down and write. Dejected and short on cash, he dropped out in 1952 at the age of twenty-four. It was the peak of the baby boom, and there was
a shortage of public school teachers. A college graduate could quickly earn a New York City teaching credential by passing a written exam and speech test. After initially failing because of his working-class Jewish accent, Shanker practiced his diction—rehearsing the phrase “Look at the lovely yellow lilies”—and earned a certification. He began teaching, first in a Harlem elementary school and then at a junior high in Queens.

In Shanker's mind, it turned out to be demeaning, infantilizing work—nothing like the career he had imagined for himself in academia. During his lunch break, Shanker had to patrol the schoolyard to break up snowball fights and trail students into a local A&P to prevent shoplifting. To take a sick day, a teacher needed a note from his doctor. Even worse, Shanker realized he didn't know how to teach, and he hoped for some guidance. But when an administrator finally visited Shanker's classroom, his only feedback was to complain that there were three pieces of paper on the floor. Faculty meetings could last more than three hours, during which principals would complain about broken clocks, noisy classrooms, and other matters that had little to do with instruction. The average teacher earned $66 per week, less than an experienced car washer.

So Shanker became an organizer with the Teachers Guild, the small anticommunist alternative to the old Teachers Union. He was a key player in the Guild's transformation into the United Federation of Teachers, America's largest teachers union, which claimed 28,000 members in its early years. The UFT was the standard-bearer of a new national movement organized around the rallying cry of “teacher power,” calling for collective bargaining, higher pay, and an end to “non-professional chores” like the ones Shanker had resented. By the mid-1970s, public school teaching became
the most unionized profession in America, with 90 percent of teachers joining either the American Federation of Teachers or the National Education Association, and more than 70 percent working in districts whose unions gained collective bargaining rights, meaning union leaders could represent teachers' interests and demands at the negotiating
table with districts.
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Between 1960 and 1980 there were over a thousand teacher strikes across the United States. Despite laws in many states that made strikes by public employees illegal, union leaders were increasingly willing to face jail time in the hopes of improving conditions similar to the ones Shanker had experienced. The aggressive organizing worked.
Teachers with collective bargaining rights earned, on average, 10 percent more than their colleagues without collective bargaining. Teacher power could mean significant advantages for students, too. In New York City in 1962,
UFT co-founder George Altomare's high school economics classes had as many as fifty-two students each. The following year, after a disruptive 20,000-teacher strike, contract negotiations between the union and school board reduced the maximum high school class size to forty-nine, and soon the union pushed the number lower, to thirty-four.

Militant teacher unionists were inspired to protest and strike by the civil rights movement. In 1963 Shanker marched alongside Dr. King in Washington and from Selma to Montgomery. When Shanker was elected UFT president the following year, he committed the union to
Freedom Summer. UFT members volunteered to teach in southern Freedom Schools to train civil rights activists, and the union provided buses to transport black voters to the polls. Sandra Feldman, a young UFT administrator and later on Shanker's successor as president, was arrested for attempting to dine with an interracial group of CORE activists at a segregated Howard Johnson's restaurant in Maryland. The UFT was considered a trusted ally within the civil rights movement.

Within several years, however, CORE and a litany of other civil rights groups would turn against the UFT and teacher unionism more broadly. Al Shanker, a leftist intellectual with working-class activist roots, was cast as a villain in the debate over educational
equality, seen as a defender of teachers' interests at the expense of poor children of color and their parents. That characterization of teachers unions remains politically potent today—although, as we shall see, it is not a wholly fair assessment. How did union teachers and inner-city parent activists, who agreed on issues like smaller class sizes, school integration, and more school funding, end up on different sides of the school reform debate in the late 1960s? And why did the rise of teacher power coincide with the decline of the public's confidence in teachers and their unions?

In the late 1960s, unions gained unprecedented political influence over education just as the public—and especially black parents and activists—was growing increasingly cynical about schools. It was becoming clear that desegregation, which the national unions supported, would not be the cure-all for educational inequality that so many liberals had hoped for. The Coleman Report had demonstrated that racial achievement gaps remained stubbornly persistent even where desegregation was enforced most aggressively, in the former states of the Confederacy. In the North, meanwhile, most black and Hispanic communities were still waiting for integration to take root. White parent activists in cities like Boston and New York were organizing, sometimes violently and often successfully, to oppose school busing programs. And the courts were doing little to intervene in places where school segregation had been caused by housing patterns or even the discriminatory drawing of school district lines (as opposed to the legally mandated “dual systems” for white and black children that existed in the South). These northern forms of segregation, though deliberately created by white policy makers, were considered de facto, not de jure.

School segregation actually deepened in the North. In 1960, 40 percent of black and Puerto Rican children in New York City attended schools with no white children; by 1967 more than half did. Students in majority-white middle-class public schools scored two years ahead of grade level on achievement tests, while students in inner-city schools tended to be at least two years behind.

Worsening segregation led activists and researchers to shift
their focus to teacher quality. Were teachers in segregated schools doing a good enough job at educating poor nonwhite children? Surveys had already shown that white teachers often held low opinions of their black students' intellects, but the effect of those views on children's learning had been unclear. Then in 1968 an academic paper appeared that became one of those touchstone studies, cited ad nauseam by the media, politicians, and activists for years to come. The paper was called “
Pygmalion in the Classroom,” by Harvard professor Robert Rosenthal and elementary school principal Lenore Jacobson. Rosenthal and Jacobson told San Francisco public school teachers the names of several of their students who had performed well on the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition and thus were expected to “bloom” academically. In fact, the Harvard test did not exist. Twenty percent of students, of varying IQ scores and races, were selected at random to belong to this “high expectations” group. At the end of the school year, those students demonstrated bigger gains on both IQ and achievement tests than did their peers in the same classrooms. The researchers concluded that teachers' lower expectations had damned the control group students—a finding that had disturbing implications for children from groups that had been historically discriminated against, who teachers might assume could not learn at a high level. Now it seemed clear that when teachers held low expectations, student achievement was actually hindered.

In New York City in 1967, the UFT went on strike again, in part for the right to evict unruly students from the classroom. Newly unionized Chicago teachers had demanded that same right back in 1902, arguing that the majority of children could not learn when a few disrupted class. Sixty-five years later, critics saw a racially explosive subtext: White teachers—90 percent of the New York City workforce—seemed to be claiming the right to determine exactly which children of color were capable of learning. Rhody McCoy, a crusading black principal who emerged as a union nemesis, believed that if parents of color got involved in their children's schools, they would be able to show teachers how to “set a tone so you didn't have any such thing as ‘
disruptive children.' ” Luther Seabrook, another prominent black educator, had a more scarring critique of supposedly
racist white teachers: “
Even liberal educators view the Black child as a freak of nurture, if not of nature.… They speak of the Black child as ‘culturally deprived'; or, as their racism becomes more subtle, ‘culturally different.' Despite these euphemisms, the child knows that he is being called ‘nigger.' ”

These arguments penetrated the white mainstream. Bestselling books and hit movies about heroic educators, like
Up the Down Staircase
,
To Sir with Love
, and
Death at an Early Age
advanced the idea that most inner-city children were being denied energetic teaching and a challenging curriculum. African American culture, too, reflected a jaundiced view of urban schools and the teachers who worked within them. The black writer LeRoi Jones, a member of the Beat movement, grew up in Newark, New Jersey, the son of a social worker and postal worker. At the integrated Barringer High, Jones worked on the school newspaper, eventually earning a scholarship to Howard University. In his fiction, however, he focused not on the opportunities integration provided, but on the ways in which majority-white schools could alienate black children, both academically and psychologically. His autobiographical short story “
Uncle Tom's Cabin: Alternative Ending” features Mrs. Orbach, a bigoted spinster white teacher who resents and discourages the efforts of her brightest student, a black boy named Eddie McGhee. Finally the child's loving college-educated mother visits the principal to complain. That sort of parent activism would become the hallmark of the community control movement, in which urban activist parents, some with ties to the Black Power movement, demanded greater say over who taught in their children's schools, and how. Community control never coalesced around a single set of demands, but a few features defined the national movement. Activists wanted teachers who embraced a sort of Teacher Corps ideology—who would visit children at home, stay after school to offer extra help, and even live in the ghetto communities in which they worked. They believed parents and neighborhood school boards, not citywide boards or superintendents, should have control over budgeting and the hiring and firing of teachers at local schools. Many community control advocates, though not all, thought an Afrocentric curriculum would reengage black children in school and learning.

The
two major organizational backers of community control, CORE and the Ford Foundation, made strange bedfellows. CORE was increasingly leftist, flirting with black separatism. The president of the Ford Foundation was McGeorge Bundy, the former White House national security advisor under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and a key architect of the Vietnam War. Bundy was deeply influenced by Mario Fantini, the Ford Foundation's program officer for education. Fantini's scholarly work argued on behalf of multiculturalism in schools, such as lessons in African music and history. He convinced Bundy that if black parents and teachers worked together to set a more engaging Afrocentric curriculum for their children's schools, the liberal integrationist dream of
Brown v. Board of Education
would become a reality; inner-city schools would improve so drastically that white parents would be eager to enroll their own children in them. In retrospect, this theory of change seems willfully naïve. There was no evidence at all that significant numbers of white parents were willing to send their children to Afrocentric schools. Yet in 1967 community control appealed to activists and politicians who were eager to move away from wars over whether to bus black children to white schools. New York City mayor John Lindsay, a progressive Republican, appointed Bundy to lead a city commission on improving schools. The resulting Bundy report argued for abolishing the city school board and turning over teacher hiring, tenure, firing, and matters of curriculum to between thirty and sixty neighborhood community boards partly elected by parents and partly appointed by the mayor.