The Teacher Wars

by Dana Goldstein

  Teachers have been physically threatened.… School buildings have been taken over by extremist groups using public property and tax money to teach children to hate.… Teachers and children have been kept out of school by outsiders—not parents and community groups. With over 15,000 parents in the district, less than a dozen participated in the action. The Legislature’s Decentralization Plan Will Mean More of the Same. Don’t let our school system be taken over by local extremists.

  In reality, the Ocean Hill–Brownsville dismissals were as much about competence as about ideology. Art teacher Richard Douglass, for example, had been transferred to JHS 271 from another middle school, whose principal had also complained he lacked classroom management skills. Like most teachers in Ocean Hill—Brownsville and low-income schools across the country, Douglass had received no special training in how to work with poor children, children with behavioral problems, or non-native English speakers. In fact, Douglass was an adherent of A. S. Neill, the British education theorist whose 1960 bestseller, Summerhill, described the radical “free” pedagogy of the boarding school he had founded in England, which served children from mostly affluent families. Summerhill students lived “free from adult authority,” allowed to play or learn in whatever proportion they saw fit. Children voted on rules and punishments, and parents were encouraged to take a hands-off approach, only getting involved at school with their children’s permission. The art room at Summerhill was an unstructured place where students could pursue whatever projects they liked. These practices, though attractive to many liberal educators during the 1960s, were a bad fit in Ocean Hill—Brownsville, a neighborhood where parents had been organizing in favor of a more traditional approach: structured lessons, stricter discipline, and a longer school day. Douglass knew he was in over his head, but he seemed to blame his students more than his own poor training or ill-suited philosophy. Maybe, he told a New York Post reporter, the problem was that a liberal arts curriculum was irrelevant to these particular kids. “The children are not motivated to learn,” he complained. Instead of art, the school should “stress reading in the mornings and electives in the afternoon, like inviting an electrician or maybe a plumber, because realistically all the kids wouldn’t be going to college.”

  Douglass was plainly an ineffective teacher. So were some (though not all) of the other teachers dismissed alongside him, who admitted later that they had trouble managing student behavior. The summer following the dismissals, the city Board of Education conducted hearings to determine the fates of ten of the original thirteen dismissed teachers who wished to return to their jobs in Ocean Hill–Brownsville. (The others had resigned or accepted positions at other schools.) A widely respected African American judge, Francis Rivers, served as trial examiner. He threw out the cases of four of the dismissed teachers, saying they had been targeted not because of problems in the classroom, but simply because they had voiced skepticism of community control. Of this group, Daniel Goldberg, a UFT rep, was considered an especially gifted social studies teacher. His supposed offense had been sniping about the district’s administrative practices to a colleague at a Christmas party. In the cases of Douglass and five other teachers, Rivers concluded that the district’s accusations of classroom management problems, lateness, and even corporal punishment were nearly impossible to substantiate, since McCoy’s administration kept no records of observations or other personnel matters. Rivers did not deny adults were remiss in the classrooms of Ocean Hill–Brownsville. But the dismissals seemed arbitrary to him, since testimony indicated that more than a quarter of the teachers in the district were similarly weak. What’s more, some of the dismissed teachers had repeatedly asked for instructional help from their supervisors but were ignored.

  On August 26, 1968, Rivers ordered McCoy to reinstate all ten teachers, along with the 350 who had struck in solidarity the previous May. When UFT teachers arrived at JHS 271 on the first day of school that fall, however, it was clear many would not be allowed to work. Administrators “paired” returning union loyalists with teachers considered friendly to community control, and several union-affiliated teachers reported that when they began to teach, their partner teacher either led students out of the classroom or directed children to disrupt the lesson. It was chaos, an all-out factional war. Shanker had to determine how to respond. He believed McCoy and the community control movement were bullying union teachers who were skeptical of Afrocentrism, and that if this behavior was allowed to stand, black teachers could be bullied because of their race, too. At a UFT meeting he advocated a citywide walkout, arguing, “This is a strike that will protect black teachers against white racists and white teachers against black racists.” The union’s delegate assembly voted in favor of the strike, and 93 percent of New York City teachers chose to honor the picket line, compared to just 77 percent during the 1967 strike and 12 percent during the UFT’s first walkout in 1960.

  The 1968 strikes of sixty thousand teachers, the largest ever, were particularly disruptive because they were staggered in intervals of several days and weeks between September and November. In total, a fifth of the school year’s instructional time was lost, and nearly one million children were affected. Shanker presided over giant City Hall rallies of up to forty thousand union teachers chanting in favor of due process. “You’re a racist, Mr. Shanker!” shouted community control supporters in response. Anti-union demonstrators trailed the UFT leader everywhere he went, even to his family’s split-level home in suburban Putnam County, where they issued Shanker a “report card” with a grade of F for “works and plays well with others” and A for “racism.”

  In Ocean Hill–Brownsville, 60 percent of students continued to show up at school during the strikes. The district attempted to function with replacement teachers, who were culled from several groups that were critical of union leadership: the African-American Teachers Association, a black separatist group; white liberal supporters of community control, some of them the sons and daughters of communist Teachers Union members; and young New Left activist teachers who judged that the staunchly anticommunist Shanker was insufficiently opposed to the Vietnam War. Teacher interviews were held in a gymnasium, where McCoy, community board members, and parents all questioned the applicants. Dolores Torres remembered that she and other parents sought teachers who were enthusiastic about working with nonwhite children and who were pedagogically flexible. “What did they feel about coming to work in a neighborhood that was predominantly black and Hispanic? Did they feel that our children could learn as well as anybody else’s children, in, say, a white neighborhood, an affluent neighborhood?… A lot of the teachers were agreeable. They felt that if you couldn’t teach a child one way, then try something else—but that all children could be taught.”

  In an essay for The New York Times Magazine, replacement teacher Charles Isaacs, a white, freshly minted graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, described instruction during the strike in idealized terms. Students at JHS 271 were reading Langston Hughes, studying African history, and calling teachers by their first names, Isaacs wrote. They took a weekend field trip to hike at Bear Mountain, chaperoned by “younger, better educated” teachers like himself, who were “having too good a time” to ask for overtime pay. But students realized their education was being compromised by the upheaval. They had to enter school through police barricades erected to separate picketing teachers from community control activists, some of them armed Black Panthers. More police were stationed on the school’s rooftop, wearing helmets and riot gear and carrying nightsticks. Helicopters buzzed overhead, and there were so many reporters and cameras that “it was like someone was filming a movie or something,” remembered Karima Jordan, who was in ninth grade. “You couldn’t believe this was happening.”

  Television news footage of the picket line showed a solemn circle of middle-aged white men and women trudging along with UFT-produced signs hung around their necks: “CIVIL RIGHTS FOR TEACHERS.” “CONTRACTS MUST BE HONORED.” “STOP TEAC
HING RACE HATRED.” The scene was punctuated by moments of ugliness. Children witnessed blatant racism, from name-calling to physical confrontations. Peter Goodman, a strike leader, was married to a black teacher who supported the strikes. He considered himself a civil rights activist who opposed community control on pedagogical grounds. But he admits that some of his white colleagues had baser motivations. “Lots of teachers were pretty racist,” he told me. “They saw the strike as white versus black, there’s no question in my mind about that.” Those fears were fanned by the violent rhetoric swirling around the community control movement. During the strikes, an anonymous anti-Semitic flyer was placed in the mailboxes of some Ocean Hill–Brownsville teachers. It read:

  If African-American History and Culture is to be taught to our Black Children it Must be Done by African-Americans Who Identify With And Who Understand The Problem. It is Impossible For the Middle East Murderers of Colored People to Possibly Bring to This Important Task The Insight, The Concern, The Exposing of the Truth that is a Must If The Years of Brainwashing and Self-Hatred That Has Been Taught to Our Black Children By These Blood-sucking Exploiters and Murderers Is To Be Overcome.

  Rhody McCoy and the community board denounced the leaflet’s message. There was no reason to believe anti-Semitism was a core value of the community control movement, which included many prominent Jews. Seventy percent of the replacement teachers McCoy hired were white, and half of them were Jewish—almost identical demographics to the teachers he fired or who went on strike in response to his policies. But McCoy’s embrace of radicals like Ferguson and Campbell left him vulnerable. Al Shanker was eager to portray community control as bigoted, in order to build public support for his union and its disruptive strike.*5 He circulated five thousand copies of the anti-Semitic flyer with the statement, “Is that what you want for your children? The UFT says NO!”

  The labor impasse finally ended in late November, when the New York State Board of Regents placed Ocean Hill–Brownsville and the city’s two other demonstration districts under state management, essentially ending the experiment in community control. The strike had exhausted the public and politicians, whose support for school decentralization had been predicated mostly on the hope of ending battles over school desegregation, and less on what community control advocates were really demanding: the empowerment of low-income, minority, sometimes radical parents and activists to control the budgets and agendas of local schools. Yet the racial inflammation continued unabated, making national news. On the day after Christmas, Black Studies teacher Les Campbell was a guest on the WBAI radio show of Julius Lester, a black musician and activist. At Lester’s suggestion, Campbell recited a poem written by one of his students, a fifteen-year-old girl named Sia Berhan. It was titled “To Albert Shanker: Anti-Semitism”:

  Hey Jew boy with that yarmulke on your head

  You pale faced Jew boy I wish you were dead …

  Jew boy you took my religion and adopted it for you

  But you know that black people were the original Hebrews

  When the UN made Israel a free, independent state

  Little four and five-year-old boys threw hand grenades

  They hated the black Arabs with all their might

  And you, Jew boy, said it was alright

  And then you came to America the land of the free

  Took over the school system to perpetuate white supremacy

  Cause you know, Jew boy, there’s only one reason you made it

  You had a clean white face colorless and faded.*6

  The disturbing piece of writing distilled, from a teenager’s immature perspective—one obviously heavily influenced by her teacher—some of the real racial resentments underlying demands for community control. It did seem, to many people of color, that the white, two-thirds Jewish UFT had taken over the city’s school system. The old communist Teachers Union had essentially been a civil rights organization, working alongside parents. But the old union never had collective bargaining rights; its ability to shape teachers’ working conditions was sharply limited, so it focused on other issues. The UFT was a different animal. One of the key insights of historian Marjorie Murphy’s groundbreaking study of teacher unionism, Blackboard Unions, is that collective bargaining actually allied teachers to the central administration of urban school districts—the exact constituency Margaret Haley had founded teacher unionism to counteract. Under collective bargaining, it was easier for unions to negotiate with one strong administrative body, such as a city superintendent, board of education, or mayor, than with a plethora of neighborhood school boards or principals, each with their own set of demands. In New York, this meant that the UFT, though a supporter of school integration, worked closely and cooperatively with the Board of Education, which (as black communities knew all too well) had repeatedly stymied desegregation efforts. With their increased influence, teachers unions like the UFT were able to quickly raise teacher salaries, which could generate resentment among black and Puerto Rican public school parents, who tended to earn much less than college-educated teachers, and who had not benefited from the rise of largely white organized labor.

  Yet union leaders were in utter disbelief that they had been accused of racism. After all, hadn’t the UFT protested Jim Crow in the South and supported desegregation in the North? Hadn’t Martin Luther King in 1964 proudly accepted the UFT’s highest honor, the John Dewey Award? Al Shanker saw black separatism as a radical, illiberal ideology. “To me, the Civil Rights Movement was a movement for integration,” he said. “In a sense, [community control] represented a kind of backward step.”

  Union members boasted of the fact that after King’s death in 1968—right in the midst of the community control debate—several labor-oriented members of King’s inner circle, like Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, continued to side with the UFT. Randolph led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the most prominent majority-black union. Rustin was the brilliant Quaker who played a key role in introducing King to notions of nonviolence. He had participated, alongside Shanker, in the socialist, anti-Soviet workshops organized by Max Shachtman, a former confidant of Leon Trotsky himself. During the strike, Rustin enthralled majority-white crowds at teachers union rallies in New York City, sometimes leading them in singing black spirituals. He urged unionists to pay more attention to improving children’s educational outcomes but believed community control provided few answers. “The proposal seems concerned more with political self-determination in education than with quality,” he said.

  Fundamentally, however, Rustin and Randolph saw a lack of good jobs—not bad schools or teachers union work rules—as the primary barrier to enlarging the black middle class. Unionists eagerly subscribed to this interpretation of events. Early UFT leaders, like Shanker, George Altomare, and Peter Goodman, had a lifelong respect and affection for unions because their parents had belonged to them. Altomare’s mother, like Shanker’s, was a member of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, while Goodman’s father was a union furrier. Yet labor politics had changed since the 1930s. Those older unions represented private, not public, employees. When seamstresses won higher wages, it was ownership who saw reduced profits. Teachers, on the other hand, were paid with tax dollars. By the late 1960s both community control activists and the mainstream media portrayed union-won raises for teachers as a drain on school budgets, sucking up money that could go toward much-needed new school buildings, textbooks, and other educational resources. A 1967 profile of Shanker in The New York Times Magazine summarized both elite and activist opinion that the union chief “gets the most he can for his teachers, even if it means sacrificing the needs of the school system.” Shanker boosted this perception when, in the midst of the Ocean Hill—Brownsville controversy, he gave a lecture at Oberlin College. When an audience member asked him if he worried about how strikes affect children educationally, Shanker replied, “Listen, I don’t represent children. I represent the teachers.” It remains among his most-quoted statements, often used
to denigrate the teachers union movement as a whole. Yet the needs of teachers and children were not always so diametrically opposed. That was one of the lessons of the More Effective Schools program, which improved academic outcomes in part by hiring more teachers for poor children. Judge Rivers had concluded that teachers in Ocean Hill—Brownsville had sought professional help in order to better serve their students, and that they had been ignored by administrators. Union positions were not always to blame for disappointing student outcomes.

  Had the short experiment in community control worked as an educational program? After the strike ended in November 1968, Rhody McCoy told the media, “I’m going to produce! Come back a year from now and I promise you I will have done it.” He even claimed to have already raised student achievement by 30 percent, though he refused to release the district’s standardized test scores to prove it—rather ironic, considering that low test scores had been a prime motivator in the movement toward community control. When the media unearthed the data, it showed that the years from 1967 to 1969 had been educationally disastrous for the district’s students. Third graders fell from four months behind before community control to twelve months behind after. Students’ reading skills barely budged from the end of eighth grade to the end of ninth grade, even though they had gained the equivalent of fifteen months in reading skills over the course of their eighth-grade year under the previous administration. Though McCoy had instituted some promising programs, like bilingual education, Montessori-style elementary classrooms, and improved school libraries, critics believed his reforms had been long on political verve but short on instructional details. In attempting to explain these disappointing results, McCoy stated, poignantly, “Everyone else has failed. We want the right to fail for ourselves.”