The Teacher Wars (24 page)

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 TEACHING 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:

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”:

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.”

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.