The lone changer: how Albert Shanker became a champion of education reform--but couldn't bring his union with him.

• Author: Noah, Tim
• Position: Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy

Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy

by Richard D. Kahlenberg

Columbia University Press, 552 pp.

Albert Shanker, who died in 1997, was the last labor leader to command the nation's attention. Can you name the president of the United Auto Workers? I bet not. How about the president of the United Mine Workers? When I was introduced to a man named John Sweeney at a party a few years back I fell into a whirlpool of anxiety trying to place the name. We'd talked a full five minutes before I remembered he was president of the AFL-CIO. There's no chance I would have committed the same social blunder in the presence of George Meany, who ran the AFL-CIO from 1955 to 1979. Nor would I have fumbled over the names Walter Reuther (president of the United Auto Workers from 1946 to 1970) or John L. Lewis (president of the United Mine Workers from 1920 to 1960). Reuther and Lewis are major figures in American, not just labor, history. That likely won't be true for their latter-day successors, Ron Gettelfinger and Cecil Roberts.

Shanker made his presence known, first in New York City and later in the whole country. Now Richard D. Kahlenberg, an education scholar, has favored Shanker with a deservedly admiring biography, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy. The book explains thoroughly, though somewhat bloodlessly, why Shanker was an important figure both as a labor leader and as a leader in education policy. It also identifies Shanker as a significant (if controversial) figure in the tumultuous history of race relations during the 1960s.

Shanker initially came to the public's attention as the hard-charging president of New York's United Federation of Teachers, which he helped found in 1960. A mere seven years later, the UFT was the largest union local in the entire AFL-CIO. Under Shanker, UFT members acquired one of the first collectively bargained teacher contracts in the nation. That was in 1961. By 1973, both starting and maximum salaries had nearly doubled. In that year, a New York City teacher could earn a salary equivalent to $90,000 in 2007 dollars. Largely because of the UFT's success, national membership in teachers unions took off like a rocket through the 1960s.

Shanker's hometown fame reached its plateau in 1968 when he led three citywide teacher strikes against a semiautonomous school district straddling two adjacent ghetto neighborhoods in Brooklyn: Ocean Hill (a largely abandoned area within Bedford-Stuyvesant) and Brownsville (a more populous but similarly low-income neighborhood). The Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict turned on the extent to which local neighborhoods could exercise control over schools. "Community control" was a bland-sounding but divisive liberal idea promoted by McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation. Previously Bundy had been national security adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon...