Albert Shanker, A Passionate Teacher
Nov 9, 2004 3:52 PM
Albert Shanker and Martin Luther King
A fighter for human rights
Born to Russian immigrant working-class parents on Sept. 14, 1928, Al Shanker — who would develop into a stirring orator — spoke not a word of English when he entered first grade. One of the country's best-read and intellectual labor leaders, he was an average student, shying away from competition out of fear of not measuring up to his younger sister, a star student. Shanker was a gawky beanpole of a kid, reduced to hiding in his apartment to escape the anti-Semitic taunts and beatings from neighborhood toughs.
He grew up in Long Island City where Shanker's mother, Mamie, was a garment worker holding union cards in both the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union while his father, Morris, delivered newspapers. Both were staunch Roosevelt Democrats and ardent trade unionists; in the Shanker household "unions were just below God."
From his mother, the young boy inherited a yen and talent for spirited argument, a skill he would put to good use as head of the Stuyvesant HS debating team. Enrolling at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana in 1946 — a time when university housing carried ads stating "Whites and Christians Only" — his mind ranged free. Much to the consternation of his Orthodox Jewish parents, he explored other faiths. And he blossomed politically.
Chair of the campus democratic socialist study group, Shanker brought in speakers, many of whom spoke fervently of their anti-communism. He joined an interracial group that organized sit-ins and demonstrations to protest and end segregation and discrimination; later, as a labor leader, he would stand beside Martin Luther King Jr. and march to Selma, Ala., to demand civil rights for the nation's African-American citizens.
In the late 1960s, he worked to organize thousands of classroom paraprofessionals, many of them minority group members, and began a "career ladder program," through which they could get a college education and one day become teachers. The UFT estimates that over the years more than 8,000 paras have used the program to become teachers and that many more have gotten associate's and bachelor's degrees while remaining paraprofessionals. Today, the UFT's career ladder program is the largest source of minority teachers in New York City.
Upon his own college graduation, Shanker pursued a doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University. After sailing through his coursework, Shanker had second thoughts about the practical worth of a degree in philosophy. Not intending to make it a career, Shanker tried his hand at public school teaching. The year was 1952 and his first assignment was as a substitute at PS 179 in East Harlem. "It was a lousy job," he said.
Especially irksome was the almost absolute power of the principal — and the next year Shanker and a few other teachers banded together at JHS 126 in Queens to do something about it. They organized the school for the UFT's predecessor, the Teacher's Guild.
It was an uphill fight there and at other schools that he would visit in the coming years. He and his hot-blooded JHS 126 colleagues, George Altomare and Dan Sanders, had to overcome apathy and the deep-seated belief of many teachers that unions were for blue-collar workers. The three began holding organizing mixers at Shanker's nearby apartment — with Shanker playing the role of mixologist. The lure worked. "Sure we wanted people to join for the right reasons," Altomare remembered. "But we wouldn't refuse them if they felt left out of the whiskey sour parties."
In 1959, at age 31, Shanker quit as a Manhattan junior high school math teacher to become a full-time organizer for the Guild, which in March 1960 merged with a high school teacher organization to form the UFT. He visited hundreds of schools, often using a new retirement law as the opening he needed to get in. The law had reduced the years for a pension from 35 to 30 causing confusion. "No one could understand the literature, so I studied the pension system and developed a 30-minute talk. I became a hot item on the circuit. I became a pension maven," he said.
But far too few were heeding the call to unionize, and Guild leaders saw that there was only one resolution to the internal union debate over whether to grow before acting or acting in order to grow. Shanker recalled a chance meeting with then-Mayor Robert Wagner that convinced him that teachers would have to take matters into their own hands.
"I asked Wagner why it was that during a previous negotiation he had said that there was not a penny more yet, when a hurricane came, [he] found millions of dollars. He said that was a disaster. I said, 'In other words, if we become a disaster you would find more for us, too.' We both laughed. But from that day we decided to become a disaster."
On Nov. 7, 1960, some 5,600 members hit the bricks in direct violation of a law that could have led to their immediate dismissal. Their goal was to demand collective-bargaining rights. They won and the UFT began to grow. The union struck again in 1962 to win its first contract. Shanker, then the union's secretary, was in the thick of things. In 1964 he succeeded Charles Cogen to become the UFT's second president.
Shanker is survived by his wife of 35 years, the former Edith (Eadie) Gerber, their children, Michael of Tarrytown, Jennie of Philadelphia and Adam of Mt. Vernon; a son, Carl of Gaithersburg, Md, by his first marriage; two grandchildren; and a sister, Pearl Harris, of Cleveland.
