The Union Man

This is the way Albert Shanker used to teach: "If it takes four ounces of poison to kill a person, how many ounces would it take to kill your mother, your father, your sister and your brother?"

Adds Shanker, recalling his days as a junior high school math teacher: "It was the only way I could get them to learn. They loved it."

Today, affection and poison still figure strongly in Shanker's life. One critic calls him an "evil genius," while his supporters want him to run for mayor. As he toured New York State last week, enthusiastically explaining the June merger that will create a statewide, 200,000-member teachers' union, it was clear that Shanker has become one of the most complicated, controversial and powerful men in education.

Twelve years ago, when Shanker's United Federation of Teachers emerged from a gaggle of 106 teacher groups in New York City, the mere idea of a teachers' union made school administrators squeak like chalk on blackboard. Many teachers themselves had doubts about belonging to such an organization. But the financial record of the UFT, which Shanker expanded from 2,400 to 90,000 members, has erased many of those doubts.

Benefits. Since 1960 the top salary for regular teachers has climbed from $9,100 to $ 16,950, plus such fringe benefits as dental treatment, college scholarships and day-care centers (Shanker's own salary has risen, too, from $7,500 to $50,000). So very few pedagogues oppose the merger between the UFT-dominated United Teachers of New York State and the New York State Teachers Association. This is just as well, since Shanker, in settling a union squabble once snapped: "I haven't got time for democracy."

Shanker, 43, was born to the harsh controversies of union life. His mother was a staunch member of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, and Shanker even met his wife Edie at a 1959 teachers' meeting, where she was skeptical of his union. "I organized her," he recalls. "A few weeks later she was our strike captain in Queens."

During the sixties, Shanker gained a steadily broadening political power for himself and his UFT, partly because of his readiness to strike the city's schools. Says Shanker, summing up those tumultuous days: "One strike was worth a thousand settlements."

Looking Ahead. It was the Ocean Hill-Brownsville eruption in 1968, however, that firmly established Shanker as the Don Rickles of the educational establishment. Long annoyed by the city's experiments in school decentralization, which threatened to Balkanize both the schools and his union, Shanker got tough when the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school board tried to oust 13 of "his" teachers. He called a citywide teachers strike that closed the schools to their 1,000,000 pupils for 35 days. Since Ocean Hill-Brownsville is heavily black and many of Shanker's teachers are Jewish, hotheads on both sides made ugly charges of racism. Those charges still poison both the schools and the imminent negotiations for a new contract, in which Shanker is emphasizing demands for more guards to protect classes in turbulent neighborhoods.

In fighting for his union members, Shanker is inspired partly by the still growing surplus of teachers--an estimated 10,000 in New York State alone. Job security has become a basic issue. But some educators argue that Shanker's civil-service approach does no service to the children. Rules of seniority protect incompetents and make it hard for administrators to replace them with teachers who favor classroom innovations. "Shanker's an educational embarrassment," says one young white teacher in Harlem. "He wants what was--a school system that's as bureaucratic as the local post office, except that everyone in it has a Ph.D."

But even Shanker's foes concede, as does Director David Seeley of a citizens group called the Public Education Association, that Shanker is "a very smart man who sees a lot further than other people." Since the power over bankrupt city schools is shifting increasingly to the state government, Shanker is moving to create a statewide union --and it is likely that his ambitions do not stop there. With similar merger talks now under way in Michigan and Rhode Island, Shanker speaks openly of hoping to organize the bulk of the nation's 3,000,000 school and college teachers into the largest union in the U.S. How long would that task require? Shanker himself predicts that five years might be needed, but that estimate may be conservative. Only last November, he estimated that the New York State merger might take two years. It is taking seven months.

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