The Teacher Wars

by Dana Goldstein

  In 1969 the state legislature split the New York City schools into thirty-three districts. Each new district could elect a school board, but these bodies were a far cry from the community control ideal: They lacked the power to certify, hire, offer tenure to, or fire teachers—all rights that remained centralized under the superintendent and Board of Education. The eight experimental Ocean Hill—Brownsville schools were absorbed into the city’s new District 23. Rhody McCoy left the school system, as did Les Campbell, who opened up a night school that taught Swahili and African martial arts.

  The city canceled the UFT’s treasured—and genuinely effective—More Effective Schools program, amid complaints that it favored some schools over others. Of course, that had been exactly the point: to provide extra resources to the neediest children. Canceling MES, getting rid of the community districts, and decentralizing the school system did little to improve educational outcomes in New York’s poorest neighborhoods and did not change the lack of accountability throughout the system. In the spring of 1971, adults at three schools in Ocean Hill–Brownsville were accused of showing standardized test questions to students before the testing date and coaching them on the correct answers. When confronted by The New York Times with evidence of this illegal behavior, the reading coordinator at one elementary school claimed her cheating was a sort of protest tactic, to call attention to how “unfair” standardized tests were to disadvantaged students. Her principal backed her.

  In 2008, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and his hard-charging schools chancellor, Joel Klein, shut down Ocean Hill—Brownsville’s JHS 271, citing persistently low test scores. Physically, the building remains largely unchanged since the time when it was the UFT strike staging ground. But today it houses the Eagle Academy for Young Men, a school that has proven very popular with Ocean Hill—Brownsville parents: In 2011, sixteen hundred students applied for eighty-six seats. Why do thousands of families finally appear enthusiastic about a school in Ocean Hill–Brownsville? As if in response to parents’ requests during the 1960s, the Eagle Academy, though a unionized school, emphasizes a longer school day and strict discipline, with required uniforms and even military-style routines. As at many other “no excuses” schools, teachers refer to Eagle Academy students as “scholars” to emphasize high academic expectations. The school is supported by a foundation whose board of directors is dominated by executives from companies like News Corp and Credit Suisse. A separate advisory board includes two community members alongside a number of education professionals, from organizations like Teach for America and Scholastic, the publishing house. Though the rhetoric of black separatist politics has all but disappeared, in many ways today’s “no excuses” school reform movement has inherited the mantle of community control by aligning low-income parents with elite school reformers and philanthropists from outside their neighborhoods.

  Yet for all that support, the Eagle Academy at Ocean Hill–Brownsville is not much more successful, in measurable ways, than JHS 271 once was. The tide of gentrification and school improvement that has swept other Brooklyn neighborhoods has not reached Ocean Hill—Brownsville. The Eagle Academy is deeply segregated (less than 2 percent white), a quarter of its students receive special-education services, and 76 percent live in poverty. Only 13 percent of Eagle Academy middle school students are reading at grade level, and 6 percent are proficient in math. Student achievement there remains an unsolved puzzle.

  Across the Hudson River in 1970, Newark, New Jersey, became the site of the longest and most violent teachers’ strike in American history—one that is little known compared to the explosion in New York two years before.

  On the afternoon of November 17, 1970, eight-year-old Matilda Gouacide, a black third grader at Newark’s South 8th Street School, was hit by a car as she left school grounds. A few weeks earlier, a teacher would have met Matilda just outside the school building and shepherded her and dozens of other children safely across a tree-lined road of clapboard attached houses. But the previous spring the Newark Teachers Union had negotiated the furthest-reaching contract in the history of American public education, one that freed all classroom teachers of “nonprofessional chores” such as cafeteria duty, hall duty, and dismissal-time supervision.

  Unlike in New York City, where the teaching force was overwhelmingly white, nearly four out of ten Newark teachers were African American, and the Newark Teachers Union was led by a black woman, Carole Graves. Even so, parent activists in Newark, led by the writer LeRoi Jones, who had become a black nationalist and changed his name to Amiri Baraka, seized upon Matilda’s accident as proof of unionized teachers’ self-interest and disrespect for poor black children. The Newark union, like its New York counterpart, found itself enmeshed in a nasty confrontation with community activists demanding changes to teachers’ work rules. The resulting fourteen-week, 2,500-person strike left one teacher dead and led to the conviction and imprisonment of 185 more. As reported by the historian Steve Golin, dozens of people on both sides of the strike—teachers and their allies, as well as Black Power activists—were the perpetrators and victims of shootings, physical assaults, and vandalism. Carole Graves, the union head, was at home when bullets shattered her windows, injuring her infant niece. Avant Lowther was a young black teacher and union member whose father had also taught in the Newark public schools. Though Lowther had supported previous teacher strikes, in 1971 he crossed the picket line to express solidarity with black community control—and ended up in a knife fight with a white colleague who called him a scab. The union encouraged teachers to arm themselves.

  What ties these two strikes together—the nationally prominent, white-versus-black strike in New York City and the far more violent, racially mixed strike in Newark—is that the unions generally won. In the subsequent decades, teachers across the United States saw unprecedented gains in salaries and benefits. They retained lengthy, strict contracts limiting their working hours and responsibilities outside the classroom and successfully negotiated even more detailed grievance procedures, which allowed teachers to protest poor working conditions—like outdated textbooks or terminations based on political bias—but sharply limited administrators’ ability to rid schools of ineffective teachers. Nationally, teachers unions wielded extraordinary political influence by becoming among the largest donors to both state and federal elections. At Democratic Party national conventions, teachers union activists typically made up about 10 percent of the delegates.

  Additionally, in the years just after the strikes, teachers unions across the country, including in New York and Newark, successfully organized teachers’ aides to join their union. This greatly increased the ranks of nonwhite members. It did not, however, neutralize critiques of the unions as perpetrators of the racial and educational status quo. Shanker’s biographer Kahlenberg notes that the great paradox of teacher unionism is that as the movement increased in power, it declined in popularity.

  Perhaps that is because union-won gains for educators coincided with a steady rightward shift in the nation’s larger political life, with severe shortages of living-wage jobs and affordable child care, housing, and health care—many of the social supports, other than schools, that have the potential to improve poor children’s lives. Urban teachers, who were making strides in income and benefits, appeared to be riding high compared to the families they served, even though teachers remained underpaid compared to their college-educated counterparts in the broader economy.

  In the wake of the 1960s and 1970s teacher strikes, a few visionary educators resolved to bring teachers unions and parent activists back together, for the good of children. In 1974 Shanker became president of the national AFT. Though he never explicitly apologized for any of the union’s actions in 1968, he subsequently introduced a number of innovative ideas aimed at improving instruction and raising student achievement, from charter schools to teacher peer review. Meanwhile, a small movement of teacher-led, community-driven schools gained steam.*7 In 1974 New York City teacher
Deborah Meier founded the Central Park East School in Harlem, which quickly attracted national attention for offering a Deweyite, progressive curriculum to poor students of color—while raising test scores. Meier considered herself a supporter of both teachers unions and parent empowerment. As a teacher during the New York City strikes, she had organized “freedom schools” in her home and at local churches, where striking teachers could continue to work with their students without breaking the picket line. But even community-oriented Central Park East would, in its third year, lose a number of students whose parents wanted “more say about the curriculum than we were prepared to cede,” Meier recalled. “Teachers felt very vulnerable because [in the typical public school] they weren’t free to make decisions. And here were parents coming to say, ‘We want to make decisions!’ So we both got militant at the same moment. We were fighting each other for a piece of the pie.”

  It is striking that in interviews even forty-five years later, union teachers who took to the picket lines to protect due process tend to portray community control as a faux grassroots movement, one led less by parents and civil rights groups than by elite economic conservatives who wished to cleave blacks from the labor movement, thus weakening unions and their claim to the moral high ground. It is true that Mayor Lindsay was no great friend to organized labor. Union activists also point the finger at Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy, who came from a wealthy Republican family. UFT co-founder George Altomare, a lead organizer of the 1968 strike, told me, “There was really no leadership [on community control] in the community itself.”

  That interpretation, however, gives too little weight to strains from within black culture and politics in favor of community control and teacher accountability; even the NAACP, which argued Brown v. Board of Education, turned around to support community control in the most stubbornly segregated schools. It downplays the leadership of parents, like Dolores Torres in Ocean Hill—Brownsville, who demanded a better education for their children. And it ignores long-standing evidence from social science that suggested that white teachers often did have low expectations for their nonwhite students, and that those views negatively impacted academic achievement. Philanthropists like the Ford Foundation were responding to a real groundswell of frustration with white teachers from within communities of color.

  In the 1980s and 1990s, critics of teachers unions became far more politically sophisticated in exploiting the clash between unions’ visions of themselves as fighters for underdog workers and the public’s view of unions as defenders of peculiar privileges, like tenure. The Reagan Revolution brought a new American school reform movement, “standards and accountability,” to national prominence. It adopted and sanitized the radical Left critique of teachers and unions that had developed in the inner-city neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Newark. These new centrist critics rejected Black Power, but, more powerfully than ever before, they promoted a view of career public school teachers as professionally incompetent and insufficiently committed to closing racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps.

  * * *

  *1 In 1961, under pressure from the AFT, the NEA reversed itself and reluctantly embraced collective bargaining for teachers. In 1967 it approved of teacher strikes in special circumstances, and by 1970 administrators were no longer active within the organization.

  *2 The parent trigger movement is portrayed in the 2012 movie Won’t Back Down, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis. The film was funded by philanthropists with a history of conservative, antilabor activism, such as Phil Anschutz, owner of The Weekly Standard.

  *3 In June 1968, Ferguson was convicted of conspiracy to murder and sentenced to up to seven years in prison. He fled the United States for Guyana, but returned in 1989 and served his sentence. In 1996, New York Supreme Court justice Bruce Wright granted Ferguson parole and cast doubt on the charges against him, noting that in the late 1960s, “all Black nationalist activists were targets, not only of local police, but of the FBI as well.”

  *4 The catchphrase “dance of the lemons” was coined by education reformers in the late 1990s to describe how union protections allow ineffective teachers to be moved from school to school, instead of being forced out of the system.

  *5 In his 1973 movie Sleeper, Woody Allen captured the intelligentsia’s fear that Al Shanker would stop at nothing to defend union teachers. The film’s protagonist is cryogenically unfrozen two hundred years in the future and learns civilization had been destroyed because “a man by the name of Al Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”

  *6 Despite his role in this infamous incident, radio host Julius Lester later converted to Judaism and taught Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

  *7 Eventually, many of these union-parent allies would unite under the banner of Ted Sizer, the Brown University education theorist who founded the Coalition of Essential Schools in 1984 to advocate for teacher-led, community-supported schools.

  • Chapter Eight •

  “Very Disillusioned”

  HOW TEACHER ACCOUNTABILITY DISPLACED DESEGREGATION AND LOCAL CONTROL

  Ronald Reagan was an unlikely president to preside over a new era of Washington-driven school reform. The B-list actor-cum-Goldwater-Republican launched his 1980 presidential bid in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town in which three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. Reagan’s message there: “I believe in states’ rights.” He promised to end the federal government’s expensive interventions on behalf of disadvantaged minority groups, including schoolchildren, and to shutter the one-year-old cabinet-level Department of Education, which he referred to as “President Carter’s new bureaucratic boondoggle.” Reagan favored classroom prayer and tax credits for parents who enrolled their children in parochial schools, and named judges who gradually ended the era of school desegregation.

  So it was somewhat of a surprise that Reagan appointed Terrel Bell secretary of education. Ted Bell, as he was called, was an outlier in the cabinet in every way: a Mormon as the Christian Right was gaining influence, a supporter of Medicaid and Head Start among virulent budget cutters, and the shortest cabinet member, too, with a shock of white hair and a smiling, avuncular manner that led critics to underestimate him. He was a former public school chemistry teacher who held a PhD in education and had worked in public university administration. Bell hailed from a world Ronald Reagan loathed, dating back to Reagan’s confrontations, as governor of California in the late 1960s, with a restive teachers union and activist faculty at the University of California.

  But Reagan chose Bell because the Washington establishment trusted him. Bell had served as education commissioner for Presidents Nixon and Ford, and had testified to Congress in support of creating the Department of Education. Reagan’s advisers hoped Bell had earned the credibility to argue that cutting school funding and turning the DOE into a lower-level agency wouldn’t hurt kids. Bell was willing to accept this cynical assignment, which he privately opposed, if it helped him advance his own ideas for school reform within the Republican Party. President Reagan “may be using me,” Bell realized, “but I am doing all I can to use him for my cause and take advantage of his great popularity.”

  Bell did so brilliantly, despite the fact that he was hired to preside over his own demotion, and was ousted in Reagan’s second term in favor of the family-values conservative Bill Bennett. He deployed cagey bureaucratic maneuvering to produce A Nation at Risk, one of the most influential federal documents ever published. The report, a battle cry against the country’s supposed educational mediocrity, harshly critiqued America’s working teachers and secured a Washington toehold for the national standards and accountability education movement, which had begun percolating in state capitols after the Ocean Hill—Brownsville strike. Like the community control radicals before them, the accountability crowd complained bitterly about teachers and their unions. But the new reformers relied on data—not racial ideology—as their weapon.

  This reform wave eventuall
y produced organizations like Teach for America and the “no excuses” charter school movement. Its agenda recalled the school efficiency progressivism of the early twentieth century: standardized testing, numbers-driven evaluation of teachers, and merit pay. And although it was committed to closing the test score gap between white children and black and Latino children, it explicitly rejected many of the other civil rights—oriented goals of the previous two decades of American education reform, from school integration to a culturally relevant curriculum to empowering parents of color to manage their neighborhood schools. Lastly, by promoting the idea that schools and teachers are the primary levers for improving the nation’s—and individual students’—standard of living, many accountability reformers accepted as inevitable the retrenchment of the welfare state in the realms of job creation, vocational training, housing, and child care. A Nation at Risk set the terms of a debate we are still having today.