On Feb. 28, family, friends and colleagues gathered at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School to honor an old alumnus, someone who had dedicated his life to advancing the work and workers of Stuyvesant and public schools nationwide.

It was a memorial to Albert Shanker, the late AFT president, who over the last two decades was public education’s staunchest defender as well as one of its harshest critics. That Shanker could stand toe to toe with those seeking to dismantle public education while also aiming barbs at status quo defenders of the system may seem a paradox. But it is entirely consistent with his uniquely American story. From the humblest of backgrounds, Shanker rose to become a major force in American unionism and education, thanks in no small measure to the rigorous public education he received as a child. For him, quality public schools meant opportunity. He wanted no less for any other kid.

Born on Manhattan’s Lower East Side on Sept. 14, 1928, Albert Shanker was the son of Russian immigrants and grew up as the only Jew in an Irish and Italian neighborhood. His father delivered newspapers from a pushcart. His mother was a sewing machine operator in a garment sweatshop and an ardent trade unionist. She instilled in her son a deep appreciation of trade unionism (Shanker often said "unions were just below God" in his family) and a love of spirited debate.

Shanker, who didn’t speak a word of English when he entered first grade, was often reduced to hiding in his apartment to escape the anti-Semitic taunts and beatings from neighborhood toughs. "I would just go berserk because I had nothing to do," he told the New York Teacher in a recent interview.

At Stuyvesant, Shanker discovered a major escape route from isolation. "It was not the gang atmosphere. [Stuyvesant] was a bunch of bright kids from all over the city. It was an intensely competitive school." He flourished in math and chemistry, headed the school’s debating team and graduated in the top fifth of his class.

Shanker enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1946, majoring in philosophy, and quickly discovered that racial enmity was not confined to New York. He often was greeted with "No Jews or Negroes Wanted" signs while searching for off-campus housing. The experience helped shape what was a growing political consciousness in the undergraduate. He joined an interracial group that organized sit-ins and demonstrations to protest racial discrimination.

After graduating with honors from the University of Illinois, Shanker pursued a doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University, completing all but his dissertation before money ran out. In 1952, he took a teaching job as a per-diem substitute at PS 179 in East Harlem.

"I had great doubts that I would make it" as a teacher at the school, he later wrote. "The three teachers who had preceded me that year with my sixth-grade class had not."

One of Shanker’s most vivid memories of his early teaching days involved a visit by the school’s vice principal about two weeks into his assignment. "I remember thinking, ‘Thank God! Help has come,’" when the man appeared at his classroom door. "I motioned him in, but he stood there for what seemed like a very long time, pointing at something," Shanker would write 40 years later. "Finally, he said, ‘Mr. Shanker, I see a lot of paper on the floor in the third aisle. It’s very unsightly and very unprofessional.’ Then he pulled the door closed and he left."

His years as an elementary and junior high math instructor taught Shanker that the term "professional," as it was applied to teachers, was "not a standard but a threat: Do this, don’t say that, or else." He responded by joining the Teachers Guild, one of more than 100 teachers unions representing teachers in the city at the time, and soon became part of an aggressive young cadre of organizers.

At the time, the AFT affiliate numbered no more than 2,400 members and was often criticized for offering more talk than action. Shanker and his Guild colleagues had to overcome apathy and the deep-seated belief of many teachers that unions weren’t professional. Under the current system, professionalism "meant basically being not much more than a propped-up dead person" in the classroom, Shanker would remind teachers time and time again.

In 1959, Shanker quit as a Manhattan junior high school math teacher to become a full-time organizer for the Guild, which in March 1960 would merge with break-away elements of a rival high school teacher organization to form the United Federation of Teachers.

But far too few were heeding the call to unionize, and Guild leaders saw that the only way to grow was to act. On Nov. 7, 1960, some 5,600 members hit the bricks to demand collective bargaining rights. It was an audacious move for a tiny local—the strike violated current law, only one in 10 teachers actually participated, and those who did risked immediate dismissal. But thanks in large part to the intervention of a pro-labor mayor, the strike began the arduous struggle that won teachers bargaining rights, and the UFT began to grow.

In 1961, the union mobilized to win recognition as exclusive bargaining agent for more than 45,000 teachers in the city. It was a time that Shanker would later call one of the turning points in his life. Although the UFT had won collective bargaining for teachers, selection of the union to do the job was hardly a done deal. There was considerable foot-dragging by the Board of Education prior to the election, and unions that opposed collective bargaining had been brought together into a well-funded anti-UFT coalition. There was also fallout from the Nov. 7 strike that had to be dealt with, Shanker would later recall. "We had to win over the votes of the majority of those who crossed the picket line" and deal with bitter feelings against non-strikers from the union faithful.

The cash-strapped union geared up for the fight with a small army of dedicated volunteers who treated the campaign with revolutionary zeal. "It was a beautiful thing to see," Shanker would later say of the hundreds of people stuffing envelopes, working phones and cranking out literature. "This was a movement."

Hard work, combined with some timely financial assistance from labor leaders like the UAW’s Walter Reuther and small locals around the country, ultimately carried the day. The UFT buried the opposition, carrying 20,045 of the 32,390 votes cast.

Success built on success in the early sixties. Shanker, who succeeded Charles Cogen to become the UFT’s second president in 1964, would later write: "In April 1962, we had another strike for salary increases, and more teachers joined. In June 1962, we bargained our first contract with a $995 salary increase, and more teachers joined. And as we administered grievances under the contract, still more teachers joined."

In 1967, Shanker led a three-week strike for smaller class size. The action was notable not just for the fact that the UFT leader would spend 15 days behind bars for violating a state law prohibiting strikes by public employees—the first of two instances where Shanker would be jailed in a union fight—but also for the issues at stake. Along with more funding for schools, the union was demanding changes that went well beyond any narrow definition of collective bargaining: items such as smaller classes and tougher discipline policies. "Although educational issues were an important part of our agenda from the beginning, it was difficult to make any headway on them," Shanker recalled. "In addition to the traditional union goals of improvements in wages, hours and working conditions, teachers wanted to use their collective power to improve schools that would make them work better for kids. ... But as soon as the words ‘good for children’ were attached to any union proposal, the board would say, ‘Now you’re trying to dictate public policy to us,’ and that was the end of that proposal."

If strikes that established collective bargaining and expanded its scope are arguably the lasting legacy of Shanker’s UFT era, it was the three successive walkouts in 1968, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strikes, that left its mark on public consciousness.

The Ocean Hill-Brownsville area of Brooklyn was set up as one of three decentralized school districts in 1968 in an effort to give the minority community more say in school affairs. Operating under a separate, community-elected governing board with the power to hire administrators, the experiment had the early support of the UFT, which also expressed interest in keeping experienced teachers in the schools. Problems erupted when the governing board removed 13 teachers and 6 administrators the next year for what the board deemed efforts to sabotage the decentralization experiment. Shanker demanded that due process be followed: The union would not stand by while educators were removed from the district without specific charges and without a chance to defend themselves.

A protracted fight erupted between those who supported the Ocean Hill-Brownsville local board and superintendent on the grounds of local control and those who argued the removals illegally denied the educators their rights. A series of strikes ensued in the fall of 1968, a time when many of the more extreme groups resorted to racial invective. Shanker, who would go to jail for a second 15-day stretch for defying a court order to end the strike, was routinely branded a "racist" in the fight—much to the amazement of those who knew the man and his background.

Following his college activism, Shanker had made union involvement in civil rights a top priority for the UFT during his first four years as president. Along with efforts to support the movement in the South, the UFT brought the struggle back home as well. The union’s executive board voted to place funds in a bank free from dealings in South Africa’s apartheid regime—in 1965. Shanker publicly backed a new civilian complaint board that took on the issue of police brutality in the black community. Indeed, his aggressiveness on the civil rights front prompted one well-respected city teacher to advise Shanker, in a letter to the editor printed in the union’s newspaper, "to be president of the UFT and not try to solve all the problems of the world."

Soon after Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Shanker got some vindication in a campaign to represent paraprofessionals in the city. The union consisted largely of minority employees, and a rival union tried to hang the "racist" label on Shanker and the UFT in the campaign. Not only did Shanker refuse to back off the campaign, he turned it into a referendum on himself by developing literature featuring his picture and the slogan "What he did for teachers he’ll do for you." The UFT won the campaign by a nose—thanks largely to an overwhelming vote for the union from Ocean Hill-Brownsville.

There would be many other landmarks marking Shanker’s tenure as UFT president from 1964-1986. In 1970, his widely read and influential "Where We Stand" column first appeared in the New York Times. In 1972, he worked with Tom Hobart, the Buffalo teacher who led the National Education Association’s statewide affiliate, to engineer a statewide merger. In 1975, he played a key role in saving New York City from bankruptcy by asking teacher trustees of the Teachers’ Retirement System to invest $150 million in city bonds.

Sandra Feldman, who was elected UFT president following Shanker, remembers him as "brilliant, logical, caring and deeply committed to public education as a means of creating a better life for Americans."

To find evidence of that commitment, one need look no farther than Stuyvesant.

Special thanks to New York Teacher staff writer Jack Schierenbeck, whose series on the UFT forms the basis of this report.
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