Albert Shanker, Crusader for Education Reform, Dies

American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker, whose trailblazing ideas about teachers’ rights and education reform indelibly altered the landscape of public education, died in New York on Saturday after a three-year battle with cancer. He was 68.

Head of the Washington-based union for 22 years, Shanker was often described as a statesman of education reform and was the country’s leading spokesman for teachers, even though he led the smaller of the two national teachers unions.

Sage and feisty to the end, he commanded the attention of policymakers, politicians and educators over a 30-year career as a labor leader, first with his militant unionism as architect of a series of New York City teachers strikes in the late 1960s, and later with his thoughtful and often acerbic critiques of American education.

Not even teachers and the traditional union rules that guarded tenure and other rights were safe from his often withering analysis of what ailed schools--a stand that alienated many of the classroom workers whose status he strove to elevate, particularly those who belonged to the rival union.

Shanker advocated national certification tests for elementary and secondary school teachers--which became a reality a few years ago with the creation of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards. He also called for peer review, changing salary scales to reflect performance and responsibility and revising tenure rules to make it easier to fire incompetent teachers.

“A true leader, Albert Shanker was always ahead of us all,” said Bob Chase, president of the 2.2 million member National Education Assn. In recent years, that union has come to agree with Shanker on many key issues, particularly those involving teacher professionalism, and is actively pursuing the possibility of merging with its longtime rival.

“American public education will miss his articulate, courageous voice,” Chase said.

President Clinton said in a written statement that he was deeply saddened by Shanker’s death and in particular applauded the union leader’s decades-long advocacy of national academic standards.

“Al spent his life in pursuit of one of the noblest of causes--the improvement of our public schools. He challenged teachers to provide every child the very best education possible and made a crusade out of the need for educational standards.”

Possessed of a voracious intellect and political instincts molded by his early years as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants growing up on New York’s East Side, Shanker was a man of diverse talents and interests. His involvements ranged from the executive council of the AFL-CIO--a post he held since 1973--to his election last year as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the only labor leader to sit beside Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners on that august panel.

Diane Ravitch, a noted education historian and former assistant education secretary in the George Bush administration, called the union leader’s death “an enormous loss for American education.”

She noted Shanker’s lifelong commitment to civil rights and his passionate involvement in international affairs.

A staunch anti-Communist, Shanker supported Poland’s Solidarity movement by helping to smuggle in fax machines, copiers and other technology needed by movement leaders. He also was the founding president of Education International, a worldwide teachers union federation.

During his tenure, the American Federation of Teachers broadened its representation beyond teachers to include higher education faculty, classroom aides, nurses and other health professionals, and government employees.

But he was most beloved by the union’s teachers, many of whom credit him with opening their eyes to a new role that unions could play in education--not as a group concerned only with “bread-and-butter” issues of pay and benefits, but as educational reformers.

He encouraged Helen Bernstein when she was president of the Los Angeles teachers union to form a partnership with business and community leaders to improve the quality of education in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The result was LEARN, a citywide alliance that is attempting to give each school more authority to make changes that will raise school performance.

“My whole birth to reform came from listening to Al Shanker speeches,” Bernstein, who now heads a national organization of reform-minded teachers unions, said in an interview last year.

Day Higuchi, the current president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, said Shanker brought teachers “out of the dark ages” and “pushed the whole argument on reform” to the point where even the president of the United States is calling for national academic standards, an idea that still rubs many educators and other officials the wrong way because of this country’s historic commitment to local control over schools.

“In the teacher union movement, Al was a colossus. Now that he’s gone, it’s up to us to make sure the direction he set is not lost,” Higuchi said.

Shanker was born in New York in 1928, the son of a newspaper deliveryman and a garment worker who both were ardent unionists. Shanker entered school speaking only Yiddish, and recounted in an interview with The Times last year how he was beaten and taunted by schoolmates because he was Jewish.

He earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and then entered Columbia University, where he worked on a doctorate in philosophy. But he abandoned his studies when his money ran out. That is when he turned to teaching.

His first teaching assignment was in 1952, as a substitute at Public School 170 in East Harlem. It was, Shanker said, “a lousy job.”

But it was there that he learned about the powerlessness of teachers. One of his favorite stories was about an autocratic assistant principal there who barged into his classroom one day, stretched his arm straight out and pointed accusingly at some balls of paper on the novice teacher’s floor. “That, Mr. Shanker, is very unprofessional,” he said--a line that Shanker, straight-faced, relished repeating before large audiences of teachers and in small groups to friends.

About a year after that incident, Shanker and a few other teachers banded together to form the Teacher’s Guild, which later became the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City teachers union. He became a full-time organizer for the guild in 1959, and in 1960 helped lead the nation’s first teachers strike. He helped New York teachers win collective bargaining rights and their first contract after a second strike in 1962.

But Shanker did not gain national prominence until a few years later, when a conflict erupted over the due process rights of teachers in a Brooklyn district called Ocean Hill-Brownsville.

That dispute, which pitted the largely white and Jewish teachers union against a largely black community school board, led to a series of three violent strikes that divided the city along racial lines.

Though their image as public servants was bloodied in those battles--which city historians and other leaders still consider the most divisive episode in New York history--the teachers emerged victorious, with a stronger contract and their jobs intact. Shanker moved on to lead the New York state teachers union and, in 1974, was elected the head of the national union.

To repair the tattered image of his union and himself, Shanker in 1970 made a novel and strategic decision: He would take his ideas on education directly to the public through a column that would run as a paid advertisement in the New York Times. Called “Where We Stand,” it has run nearly every Sunday since.

In the column, Shanker took on the shibboleths of his profession, deriding reforms such as “smileyface” report cards that place too much importance on preserving the self-esteem of students.

His last campaign, called “Lessons for Life,” urged school districts to adopt tough codes of conduct. Shanker riled many school officials with his portrait of schools as unruly places in need of drastic measures, such as separate schools for those who chronically disrupt learning.

The column that appears in today’s New York Times is quintessential Shanker.

It begins, “Love ya!” and describes a recent study that links “unfounded self-esteem” to bad behavior, from schoolyard bullying to murder and rape.

“When self-esteem is an end in itself and generous praise is considered the way to get kids there,” Shanker wrote, “how likely are teachers to point out mistakes or students to learn from them?”

Shanker is survived by his wife of 35 years, Edith; their children Michael, Jennie and Adam; a son, Carol, by his first marriage; and three grandchildren.