The Teacher Wars

by Dana Goldstein

  The most notorious trial took place in September and October 1950. Eight Jewish members of the Teachers Union had refused to answer the question about whether they were communists and were charged with “insubordination and conduct unbecoming a teacher.” Teacher News editor Celia Zitron taught Latin and had created a Hebrew curriculum. Teachers Union president Abraham Lederman was a World War II veteran and a junior high school math teacher. Of the group of eight, Alice Citron was especially celebrated. As a nineteen-year veteran of Harlem public schools, she was well known for writing an African American history curriculum, inviting students to her home, and using her own money to buy needy children eyeglasses, books, shoes, and food. Fifteen Harlem parents attended the trial to speak on Citron’s behalf. Pearl Messiah described the peeling paint, broken toilets, and “ugly, nasty books” in her children’s schools, explaining that Citron “inspired us and showed us that we could get these things changed” through advocacy. “Everybody loves Alice,” Messiah said. Another mother, Rose Scott Gallant, said, “She is everything to our neighborhood, to the community as a whole.” Citron’s boss, P.S. 185 principal Abraham Gold, testified that Citron did “splendid work” deserving of “nothing but the highest praise.”

  But the Board of Education had little interest in the classroom records of communist teachers; prosecutor John McGrath freely admitted he had no “proof of any specific classroom act” that had indoctrinated students with communist beliefs. New York’s Feinberg Law, which was later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, concerned itself solely with teachers’ private political ideas, and whether those “anti-American” views were incompatible with educating the state’s children. A second justification for the McCarthy-era witch hunts was the supposedly unprofessional stance of “insubordination” that teachers displayed when they refused to answer the superintendent’s questions about their political affiliations. Such insubordination, the Board argued, would teach children to question, instead of to heed, authority—the same charge the Chicago Tribune had once leveled against the nation’s first teachers union.

  In his ruling terminating the employment of all eight teachers, trial examiner Theodore Kiendl resurrected the rhetoric of the Mary McDowell trial of 1918. He found no distinction between a teacher who actively indoctrinated students and one who simply belonged to an organization with unpopular views. He ruled:

  … a teacher who consciously subscribes to any ideology that advocates the violent overthrow of our government and is prepared to carry it into effect when that seems possible, is utterly unfit to be entrusted with the education of our public school children. The dangers inherent in the continuance of such a teacher far outweigh all other considerations, and even otherwise perfect performance as a teacher cannot be invoked to preserve his tenure.

  In 1952 the U.S. Senate Committee on Internal Security arrived in New York to investigate the TU. Bella Dodd testified that the union’s neighborhood activism was merely a “sinister conspiracy” used to dupe bleeding-heart teachers into joining the Communist Party. “I love Joe McCarthy,” she declared. Irving Adler invoked the Fifth Amendment regarding his Communist Party membership. He lost his job and went on to become a bestselling author of math and science books for children. (In 1956 he and his wife left the party in protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary.) Many purged teachers led illustrious second careers. Alice Citron became the personal secretary to the writer and activist Shirley Graham Du Bois, the second wife of W. E. B. Du Bois. Citron arranged for former TU member Abel Meeropol and his wife, Anne, to adopt the young sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the communists who were executed for treason in 1953. (Abel Meeropol was the lyricist who wrote “Strange Fruit,” the anti-lynching anthem sung by Billie Holiday.)

  Not all teachers caught up in the witch hunts were actually communists. TU secretary Lucille Spence, the union’s highest-ranking African American, never joined the party. But after an informant claimed Spence was a member, the FBI shadowed her for nine years. The Senate committee grilled Spence on her summer 1936 visit to the Soviet Union to observe schools there. When asked if she believed communists—or Nazis—should be able to teach public school, she responded, “I think a school teacher should be judged by the teacher’s performance in the classroom, including a communist, a Negro, or Jew.”

  The last New York City teacher purges took place in 1960. Just a few years later, the fear and jingoism of the McCarthy era lifted. Several purged teachers were rehired and given back pay. In 1967, in a case brought by faculty members at the State University of New York, the Supreme Court reversed its earlier ruling on the Feinberg Law, declaring it unconstitutional. Ten years later the New York City Board of Education restored the pensions of Irving Adler and other teachers who were victims of the witch hunts.

  The Teachers Union, however, never recovered. In 1960 a new union called the United Federation of Teachers burst onto the scene, an alliance between the social democratic Teachers Guild and secondary school teachers, mostly men, who believed they deserved higher pay than their female elementary school counterparts. The UFT brokered a compromise by supporting a new kind of salary schedule, one that rewarded teachers not only for time on the job, but also for advanced degrees. This system would be gender neutral but would guarantee higher pay for many male high school teachers, who were more likely to have college and graduate degrees. The UFT promised to address day-to-day frustrations like teachers’ lack of lunch periods free from school duties. And it promised to jettison communist politics. The UFT’s new leaders, men like David Selden, George Altomare, and Al Shanker, were the sons of blue-collar union members and, compared to the leaders of the Teachers Union, advanced a far less idealized vision of the teaching profession. “High school teachers are assembly line workers, they’re piece workers,” Altomare told historian Daniel Perlstein, recalling the UFT’s early years. Since teachers worked with each individual student for only forty minutes per day, Altomare said, “You don’t know the kids [well enough] to get any job satisfaction.”

  Though its political ideology was more moderate, the UFT embraced militant protest tactics, including strikes, which even the TU had considered off-limits for “professional” teachers. On November 7, 1960, the UFT led a one-day strike demanding higher teacher pay, collective bargaining, smaller class sizes, and lunch periods free from school duties. TU members crossed the picket lines and went to work. State law said the five thousand strikers could lose their jobs, but in reality, it was impossible to fire and replace 10 percent of the city’s teaching force. Though the strike was not immediately effective in winning concessions on pay and working conditions, teachers throughout the city were impressed by the UFT’s show of force, and in 1961 they voted overwhelmingly in favor of collective bargaining, with the UFT as sole bargaining agent. This meant that for the first time in American history, a major teachers union not only was an activist group, but was legally empowered to negotiate employment contracts on behalf of its members, across the table from administrators, the school board, and politicians. The next year, the UFT won a $995 annual raise for every teacher, then the largest in the city’s history, as well as a grievance process for teachers to dispute the decisions of their supervisors. The TU, now irrelevant, disbanded in 1964, and by 1967, 97 percent of New York City teachers belonged to the UFT.

  Had anything been lost? In Harlem, Bed-Stuy, and across the United States, far-left politics often made a teacher more, not less, effective in low-income classrooms. It is difficult to imagine TU activists like Irving Adler, Alice Citron, or Lucille Spence comparing teaching poor children to assembly-line work. In 1978 Harlem minister David Licorish lamented the purges that had pushed communist teachers out of his neighborhood’s schools. Those teachers had been “much more dedicated to teaching black children the way out of the crucible of American life than the teachers we have now,” Licorish told historian Mark Naison. “When they left, Harlem became a worse place. They stayed after school with the children and gave them extra c
urricular attention to bring them up to level.… These people were dedicated to their craft.”

  Though the number of teachers purged across the United States was small, witch hunts sent a powerful message to the teacher corps as a whole. Certain educators—those who lived outside the cultural and political mainstream—were not welcome in the classroom. The irony is that from racial integration to the culturally relevant curriculum to the need for higher academic expectations for poor students of color, many of the radical teachers’ ideals would become mainstream school reform priorities over the coming decades.

  • Chapter Six •

  “The Only Valid Passport from Poverty”

  THE GREAT EXPECTATIONS OF GREAT SOCIETY TEACHERS

  On May 17, 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court declared in its Brown v. Board of Education decision that de jure school segregation was unconstitutional. Though W. E. B. Du Bois was a lifelong defender of black schools led by black teachers, he was moved to elation by the symbolism of the event. “I have seen the impossible happen,” he wrote. The novelist Ralph Ellison declared, “Another battle of the Civil War has been won.”

  It seemed the nine justices—all of them white men born during the nineteenth century—had overturned the very structure of American race relations. Brown v. Board of Education was nominally about the right of Linda Brown, the black daughter of missionaries, to attend a white Topeka elementary school just seven blocks from her family’s home. But attorney Thurgood Marshall and his colleagues at the NAACP had pursued a bold legal strategy. Instead of arguing that segregated black schools were unconstitutional because they were of lower quality than white schools—less well funded, with older textbooks and fewer athletic facilities—they argued that segregation itself should be outlawed, under the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection under the law. In doing so they successfully challenged the fundamental Jim Crow legal principle of “separate but equal,” first established by the Court fifty-eight years earlier in Plessy v. Ferguson. Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Brown decision became one of the most quoted judicial opinions in American history:

  Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group.… We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

  Though segregated schools were the norm all over the country, including in the North, the Brown ruling applied only to the seventeen southern, western, and border states, as well as to the District of Columbia, where explicit laws prevented white and black children from attending the same schools. (In the North, school segregation could be attributed mostly to the neighborhood demographics that resulted from discriminatory housing policy, as well as to school districts’ deliberate decisions to assign black children to predominantly black schools, even when they lived near white schools.) Forty percent of the nation’s public school students, some 10.7 million children, would be affected by the ruling. But what about teachers? Even before Brown there had been concern in the black community that merging black and white schools could decimate the black middle class, which depended on jobs in segregated schools. Writing in The Nation in 1953, the black sociologist Oliver Cox wondered if Negro teachers would become “martyrs to integration … Freedom to work is at least as sacred as the right to non-discrimination in education.” Any school desegregation program, Cox argued, must contain strong protections for black workers.

  The text of the Brown decision mentioned teachers only once, noting that southern states had already taken steps to equalize teacher qualifications and pay across black and white schools. In fact, state legislators had done so with the hope of forestalling demands for integration. Now the court directed states to move with “deliberate speed” to integrate schools. But the justices did not define their terms, and in the absence of specific requirements white southerners turned to nakedly racist political tactics, collectively referred to as “massive resistance,” that fought desegregation in large part by attacking veteran black educators. Half the southern states passed laws revoking the teaching license of anyone who joined an organization that supported school integration, including the NAACP. In 1955 Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia all repealed teacher tenure, with the goal of more easily terminating black teachers in the event that they began to compete with whites for jobs in newly integrated schools. Four southern states even modified their constitutions to abolish the right to a public education. In the wake of Brown, many white southern legislators behaved as if an integrated public school system would be worse than having no public school system at all.

  A few prominent black southerners, themselves proud alumni of segregated schools, sized up white resistance to integration and concluded it wasn’t worth the trouble. When asked about Brown v. Board in 1958, Anna Julia Cooper, the trailblazing feminist teacher in Washington, D.C., told a newspaper reporter, “I’m against it.” She was one hundred years old, old enough to know, she said, that in black schools led by black educators, children were more likely to “take pride in themselves and the achievements” of their race. The sixty-four-year-old writer Zora Neale Hurston, who grew up in segregated central Florida, agreed. In a 1955 letter to the Orlando Sentinel, she worried that committed black teachers and administrators would lose their jobs as all-black schools were shuttered and their students dispersed. “The whole matter revolves around the self-respect of my people,” Hurston wrote. “How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them?”

  In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, desegregation was moving so slowly that no one could say for sure how Brown might ultimately affect the education of black children, or the employment of black teachers. A decade after the ruling, over 90 percent of southern black students still attended all-black schools. Of the 333,000 black children who had been integrated, 80 percent lived in border states, not in Deep South strongholds of massive resistance. In Mississippi, not a single black child had been allowed to enroll in a white school. Why? Except in a few high-profile cases, such as President Eisenhower’s use of federal troops to integrate Little Rock Central High School, neither the courts nor the executive branch stepped in when white schools turned away black students, when local banks denied credit to black parents who petitioned for their children to attend white schools, or when employers fired those black parents in retaliation.

  All that changed in 1964. President Johnson’s enormous popularity in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, as well as his peerless legislative maneuvering, allowed him to establish an unprecedented role for the federal government in local public education. Previous efforts to expand Washington’s influence over local schools had brought limited results. The launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite in 1957 prompted Congress to pass the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which provided several hundred million dollars to prepare high-achieving students for careers in the sciences, math, engineering, and foreign languages. The law did not address educational inequalities driven by race and class. John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960 promising to pass a comprehensive federal education aid package, a liberal dream dating back to Reconstruction. But Kennedy’s efforts were stymied when fights broke out on Capitol Hill between lobbyists representing Catholic bishops, who wanted funding for parochial schools, and those representing teachers unions, who opposed aid to religious schools and prioritized higher pay for teachers. Then, during the frustrated decade after Brown, desegregation was the law, but not the reality.

  When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Department of Justice could finally sue schools that resisted or delayed integration. The following year, the Voting Rights Act allowed many southern black parents to regist
er to vote for the first time. That meant black citizens could threaten to unseat politicians and school board members who opposed integration. By 1972, less than 10 percent of black students in the South attended an all-black school. Though true school integration would prove relatively fleeting in many neighborhoods, it had, at least temporarily, been achieved.

  The most lasting Great Society change for the nation’s schools came through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the precursor to the Bush-era No Child Left Behind. The 1965 law, initially funded at the massive level of $1.2 billion per year, united the Left and center around a new role for Washington as a standard setter for state education agencies and local schools. While the NDEA had targeted funding toward the best and brightest students, ESEA was all about “compensatory education” for the 19 percent of low-income public school students falling behind in poor, largely black and Hispanic schools. Federal aid would now be offered or withheld depending on whether local policy makers followed national directives, such as supplying low-income schools with up-to-date textbooks, establishing school libraries, and pulling at-risk students out of class for supplemental tutoring. States that offered their low-income students more state-level funding would be rewarded with more money from the federal government. Johnson portrayed this expansion of the federal bureaucracy in stirring, soaring rhetoric. He signed ESEA in his hometown of Johnson City, Texas, with his own elementary school teacher at his side. “By passing this bill, we bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than 5 million educationally deprived children,” he said. “And we rekindle the revolution—the revolution of the spirit against the tyranny of ignorance. As a son of a tenant farmer, I know that education is the only valid passport from poverty. As a former teacher—and, I hope, a future one—I have great expectations of what this law will mean for all of our young people.” Those sky-high expectations placed on educators—as revolutionary foot soldiers in the War on Poverty—are still with us today.