Teachers’ Rights Versus Students’ Rights

Race Politics and Teachers’ Professional Identity

Since the early decades of the 20th century, New York City’s public school teachers—as a whole, a Leftward-leaning group—recognized racial injustice as a pressing social issue, albeit one that most often unfolded far south of the city limits. In the interwar years, lessons extracted from the cultural gifts movement filled the city’s classrooms in efforts to weave together the various ethnic groups populating the city (Selig, 2011). With the close of the Second World War, unprecedented numbers of Black and Puerto Rican migrants made their way to New York, creating a “visible change in the racial composition of the city’s poor” (Walkowitz, 1999, p. 188). Reconceived as intercultural education, city teachers continued to employ the so-called colorblind discourse of gifts and differences and encouraged cooperation and respect (Perrillo, 2012). Rather than disrupting the existing social order, these brands of liberal progressivism complemented later calls for integration.

Teachers’ social activism magnified in scale and scope during the early 1960s, and the myth of the “retrograde South” sustained teachers’ liberal credentials as race relations in the North eroded (Lassiter & Crespino, 2010, p. 5). Ardent supporters of desegregation, in a letter mailed to all UFT members in June of 1960, the union’s leadership explained, “every UFT member should participate in the nation-wide effort to bring down the barriers of segregation” (UFT, 1960). UFT members participated in the March on Washington in the summer of 1963, and after that event, union leader Abe Levine wrote to all members proclaiming the Federation’s “proud record in civil rights” (Levine, 1963). In the summer of 1965, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) printed an advertisement in national newspapers: “Help Teach Democracy in the Deep South.” A fundraising drive, the advertisement explained that every $10 could bring “6 to 8 weeks of equal education” to a “Negro child,” every $100 buys “a bus ticket for a Northern teacher, and pays her entire summer expenses,” and $1,000 “opens and sustains a Freedom School” (“Display Ad 3,” 1965). In unionized teachers’ estimation, they were intervening in an exceptional Southern problem.

When the school board in Prince Edward County, Virginia, closed all of its schools as a way to dodge mandates to integrate (Bonastia, 2012), the UFT blasted those efforts as a transparent attempt to deprive African American children of their fundamental right to an education. “The UFT should do something in Prince Edward County this summer,” executive board member Richard Parrish explained in a flyer titled “No Greater Need” (UFT, 1963a). The UFT prompted members to volunteer or, at a minimum, donate funds and supplies (UFT Committee for Supplies, 1963). Attesting to the selflessness of these members, Parrish explained to a local reporter that “virtually all of the participating teachers will be giving up ‘about a quarter of their annual pay’ by forsaking summer jobs” (UFT, 1963b). In all, about 30 UFT teachers went to Virginia that summer in two separate one-month stints (“14 Teachers,” 1963; “N.Y. Teachers,” 1963). Approximately equal numbers of Black and White teachers and all members of the UFT, the group traveled south with a group of students from Queens College of the city’s municipal system to live with local families. According to one reporter, the teachers “came to accomplish something that White Virginians could not or would not do” (Franklin, 1963). This brand of liberal activism was central to how union teachers and leaders understood themselves. In a question and answer session in 1974, Shanker regaled the audience with stories of CORE sits-ins from his college days at the University of Illinois and aligned himself with Dr. Martin Luther King. “When I was in jail in 1968,” he explained, affirming his Leftist credibility, “King sent me a check to pay part of my fine . . . he knew of my relationship to the movement” (“Questions With Albert Shanker,” 1974). Shanker’s biographer noted that he kept that check in his wallet as both a souvenir and a reminder of his work (Kahlenberg, 2007).

But there were cracks in this commitment. First, not all of the city’s teachers supported this project. Writing to the editor of the union’s periodical, United Teacher, members argued that the Federation ought not ask members for additional money. Even more poignantly, one teacher argued “I do not want anyone to speak for me on matters of social conscience” (Geisser, 1966). Such reservations were not exclusive to the rank-and-file membership. A car accident in 1964 tested the devotion of the entire UFT leadership. One UFT volunteer lent a rented car to another volunteer; following a series of exchanges, the vehicle eventually came into the hands of an underage and unlicensed driver, who crashed the car, killing one and injuring another. In turn, the New York City teacher-volunteer received an indictment. In one of his first acts as UFT president, Shanker contacted the Council of Federated Organizations demanding that a portion of the funds the UFT raised for the Mississippi schools be diverted toward legal defense. Liz Fusco, the Council’s chief coordinator and later a strike-buster in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville dispute, refused the request. Questioning Shanker’s commitment to the larger goals of the Freedom Schools and civil rights more generally, she closed her note by stating, “people with only a summer’s, only an educator’s, commitment tend to hinder” more than help (Fusco, 1965; Perrillo, 2012, p. 132).

The UFT’s liberal stance on race politics splintered even further with the rise of Black Nationalism and shifts of power within the Civil Rights Movement. Standing firm on his Old Left integrationist platform, Shanker explained, “there was a change in the direction of the civil rights movement.” Pointing directly to the rise of Black Power in 1966, he argued that the movement,

became anti-integrationist, it became separatist . . . black leaders were saying we want to control our own schools, our own neighborhoods, we want our own share of the jobs through that control. . . . I am one of those people who is still trying to integrate people. . . . It means putting blacks into places with whites and blacks will not necessarily be the majority and where they won’t necessarily control that piece of the turf. (“Questions With Albert Shanker,” 1974)

Many unionized teachers in the city emerged as racial liberals in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement, adhering to principles of assimilation and integration. However, rising calls for structural change and the disruption of the existing social order by the late 1960s left many of these teachers displaced in the liberal landscape. As the racial politics of the Left evolved, figures like Shanker grew increasingly disillusioned and adopted a neoconservative stance (Scott, 1997). Under this new rubric, as attention shifted to the North and the vast racial inequalities within the city’s walls, activism and social justice seemed to collide with the ways the union defined teachers’ professional rights and privileges.

Unlike the activist impulses that drew them to the South, when combating the race problem at home, the UFT employed different strategies. Tackling inequality from the vantage point of expert rather than activist, the UFT used the educational problems of the city’s minority children as a foil to affirm their vision of teacher professionalism. Whereas teachers traveled to the South during the summer to combat unequal schooling, at home the union identified working in disadvantaged areas as deprofessionalizing. In 1967, emboldened by collective bargaining and the organization’s growth, union leaders sought to negotiate a new contract with the city. In a long list of demands, three items are particularly significant. First, teachers vehemently opposed the practice of forced rotation and transfer. City officials maintained that such a policy would help equalize the schools, bringing more experienced teachers to the most underperforming areas, but teachers saw this as castigation. Forcing teachers to switch schools not only undercut the rewards of tenure, Shanker explained, but it represented little more than a series of unfair “punishments and rewards at the disposal of the principal” (Shanker, 1971). The second point of contention in the 1967 contract negotiations revolved around the “disruptive child.” A euphemism for Black and Puerto Rican students, the “disruptive child” clause created an avenue for teachers to deal with students they believed to be dangerous. One of the UFT’s non-budgetary demands, the Federation proposed that teachers be allowed “to remove a child from the regular classroom situation when it becomes apparent to the teacher . . . that the child is unable to benefit from the regular classroom” (UFT, 1967). Teachers argued that the schools were quickly becoming wild and dangerous places, fit neither for true professionals nor any sort of real learning. Poking fun at the situation at a dinner in Shanker’s honor in 1975, Joe Glazer sang Teacher’s Lament set to the tune of Sixteen Tons:

You teach six full hours and what do you get?

Cuts and bruises and dirt and sweat.

You breathe that chalk dust, holler for quiet;

When you turn your back, you’ve got a full-fledged riot.

You teach six full hours to 84 brats

And all of them yelling like dogs and cats.

They’re cutting on the seats, writing on the walls

Huggin’ and a-kissin’ in the upstairs halls . . . . (Glazer, 1975)

In the third request, the UFT demanded that “the board shall provide parking facilities for teachers . . . [and] the Board shall include parking facilities for teachers in all plans for new construction” (Blum, 1967). With suburban development and urban sprawl, increasing numbers of city teachers no longer lived in the neighborhoods in which they taught.

The 1967 contract negotiations represent a pivotal moment in this history for two reasons. First, unionized teachers’ professional concerns illustrated the growing chasm between teachers and certain groups of students. This divide proved fertile terrain for calls for community control. Second, these negotiations demonstrated the increasing power of the union. Members of the Board of Education failed to negotiate to union leaders’ satisfaction, and in response, UFT teachers struck, closing down the first day of school. Shanker was photographed on the picket lines wearing a placard that read “Teachers Want What Children Need.” The image was printed by the New York Times and widely circulated by the UFT (Buder, 1968; UFT, 1969). Appearing beside Bayard Rustin, the well-known civil rights leader and integration advocate, the image supported teachers’ political and professional persona but also revealed the competing ways children’s needs were both understood and used as a point of leverage. Promptly invited back to the table by city officials, union leaders called off the strike by the end of the day and negotiated a new contract. Some rank-and-file members felt that union leaders had not pushed hard enough, with one teacher admonishing “you asked us to have courage and then you sold us out” (“To Shanker,” 1967). But for Shanker, the brief strike was a victory, and he broadcast that to teachers later in the month with a letter titled “WE HAVE WON!” (Shanker, 1967).

By the late 1960s, staffing the city’s “disadvantaged” schools had become especially difficult due to suburban flight, the lure of teaching in suburban schools, and the rising sentiment that working in urban circumstances was deprofessionalizing. Cities around the nation grappled with similar problems, and local leaders envisioned the National Teacher Corps, a federal teacher recruitment initiative, as a salve (Rogers, 2009). Reflecting the rising sentiment that too many teachers were disengaged from the real work of teaching, Frederick Rodgers, the Corps Program Director at New York University (NYU), argued that “we do not want” the future teacher to be “just an outsider who interacts with the community, but an integral member of the community” (Rodgers, 1968). Required to become a part of the communities in which they taught, some interns chose to live in the neighborhoods in which they worked while others volunteered their services to auxiliary programs.

Initially, UFT leaders lent their support to the Teacher Corps initiative. By the mid-1970s, however, the union had changed course as teachers faced the economic downturn and fears of mass layoffs. Offering two interrelated points of objection, Shanker wrote to William Smith, National Director of the Teacher Corps. “We are now in a situation,” he noted, “of a teacher surplus.” Expanding, he maintained, “the continuing effort of the Teacher Corps to place preservice student teachers in the schools seems unwise to us—particularly when these people may well be used to replace employed personnel.” Further, Shanker expressed growing concern about how Corps members “relate[d] to fully licensed people” (Shanker, 1975). In his 1973 study of the interns, Ronald Corwin identified similar rifts. Characterizing the Corps cohort by “their hippie clothes, long hair and reputations,” he observed tensions between teachers who wanted to maintain authority in their classrooms and interns who “came to the program viewing themselves as agents of change” (Corwin, 1973, pp. 130–134).

The divide between longstanding teachers and newer entrants, particularly those who came through the Corps, was both generational and political (Murphy, 1992; Perlstein, 2004). For Shanker, Corps members were not of a professional caliber. When asked “what percentage of the nation’s teachers do you believe are now competent?,” Shanker offered a mixed response:

I think that a very high percentage are competent [because] . . . we are still living with a handful of Depression-era people. There were a large number of people who came into teaching at the end of the 50s, many men and women who today would go into other professions. . . . I think we got a lot of outstanding people. . . . And we still have them, though they’re leaving. (Shanker, 1985a)

Turning his attention to the most recent generation of teachers, Shanker shifted his position: “If the high school seniors who say they’re going to become teachers, indeed, do become teachers, then the percentage of competents in the future will not be very high. They will be very, very low” (Shanker, 1985a). Corps members entered the profession through different pathways, for different reasons, and armed with different political sensibilities. For leaders and rank-and-file members of the UFT, these elements not only marked these new teachers as unprofessional, but their presence in the schools undermined all teachers’ professional identity, at least as envisioned by the union.

Teacher Educators, School Administrators, and Racialized Messages

Though the union stood as the organization that most forcefully and visibly advocated for teachers’ shared professional persona, it did not create this identity alone. Instead, the image of the professional teacher and the ways it intertwined with racialized assumptions stemmed from teachers’ professional preparation programs in schools of education and was further bolstered by administrative policies and practices. Long characterized as proponents of progressive ideology and liberalism, schools of education and social justice have long gone hand-in-hand. But an analysis of some of the professional preparation programs in the city during these years reveals that the same racialized assumptions that union leaders articulated before, during, and after the 1968 strikes suffused these institutions as well. These lessons contributed to the expertise upon which teachers defined their professional authority (Abbott, 1988; Freidson, 2001) and perhaps more importantly, informed how they engaged with and envisioned their students (Burkholder, 2011; Payne, 2008; Selig, 2011). The 1968 strikes may have been a highly visible flashpoint, but as this section demonstrates, the underlying issues bubbled beneath the surface both before and after the strike in the milieu surrounding teachers in education programs and at work.

Teacher educators were well aware of the growing divisiveness within the city’s walls and evidence of race-based achievement gaps. Arising from concerns over the demographic and geographic divides between teachers and students, programs like Hunter College’s Training of Tomorrow’s Teachers (TTT) initiative took preservice teachers into the schools so they could learn about “real life situations.” Describing one such situation, program director Elaine Block wrote, the student-teachers

were in a classroom when a group of angry parents stormed in, grabbed the teacher and led her out . . . when these freshman met for their seminar later that morning, they had . . . a highly relevant focus for their discussion of community action and involvement in schools. (Block, 1977)

Rather than an exceptional episode, Block and others cast such moments as typical, offering future teachers guidance on the inevitable angry and forceful urban parents. Similarly, faculty at the School of Education at New York University (NYU) called on prospective teachers to become more “sensitive and understanding” to the problems of minority students’ home lives ( School of Education, 1965), suggesting that the conditions in the schools traced back to the children, their families, and communities and not the institution of public education or society, more broadly.

During these years, the professional knowledge faculty members in schools of education instilled in prospective teachers stemmed from widely accepted ideologies of deprivation that pathologized Blackness. Fundamental to the race politics of the day, the same racialized sensibilities undergirded the Moynihan and Coleman Reports as well as the ways in which their findings were used (Patterson, 2012; Spencer, 2012). According to the “Statement of Policy” from the 1972–1973 academic year from City College,

though living in an urban area, not all of our students have grown up in deprived areas of New York nor have all a profound awareness of the problem of urban living. Yet a significant portion of them will teach in schools in economically and culturally deprived neighborhoods. Through required courses, counseling and experience in . . . schools in similar neighborhoods, students can be prepared to fill their role as teachers. (“Statement of Policy,” 1973)

Teachers responded to these lessons differently. Some, like UFT teacher Jules Kolodny, appreciated the curriculum because it prepared the “average middle class white teacher” for the students of color he would encounter. But others, like many Black teachers, found such lessons to be entirely pejorative. In a satirical play, one Black teacher warned another that she “better stop taking those culturally biased psychology courses about black families” (Collins, 2006, pp. 47–48). This brand of teacher preparation armed future teachers with a perception of children of color as troubled and their parents as violent, reifying and escalating the very cleavage they sought to repair.

The School of Education at NYU extended this approach even further through the Teachers Corps program. An intervention targeted at poverty-stricken children, the Corps claimed that “their lives are aimless, their home and family patterns unstable” (The National Teacher Corps [NTC], 1966). Only once students’ “cultural handicaps . . . [are] overcome,” the NTC office asserted, can “they can begin to learn” (NTC, 1966). The theory underpinning the entire project rested on the premise that “poverty schools require specially-trained teachers and aides” (NTC, 1966). At the base of the curriculum at NYU were the same assumptions that bolstered mainstream teacher education at the municipal colleges. Fundamentally teacher-centered, the Corps program at NYU focused on “educating teachers regarding the lifestyles of low income students” (Griffiths, 1978). Reflecting on the program’s early success, Superintendent Donovan proudly noted,

our experience this year already indicates that the interns constitute a valuable resource for the enrichment of education and that the training received by the Teacher Corps interns is extremely valuable in enabling them to better cope with the problems of teaching disadvantaged children. Also, our school system is being provided with a reservoir of additional teachers. (Committee on the Teacher Corps, 1968)

According to faculty, Corps members’ most important training occurred during “Cycle III” when they completed their preservice education. Intended to put all of prospective teachers’ knowledge to work, NYU selected an extraordinarily telling location to expose their interns to the realities of urban life and poverty. Conflating violence and criminality with people of color, NYU interns spent their final semester teaching in Rikers Island, the city jail (Rodgers, 1968).

The racialized assumptions that buttressed teachers’ professional persona were formed first in their preparation programs and endorsed in the schools by administrators. Responding to the demographic and geographic divides between teachers and students, the Board of Education’s Office of Public Relations released a series of pamphlets to guide teachers’ interactions with “environmentally handicapped pupils” ( Staff Bulletin, 1966). “They’re Strangers in School,” one pamphlet alerted teachers.

Because of the drastic difference between these two worlds [the teacher’s and the student’s], disadvantaged youngsters and their parents often are “strangers” in school. The people they see there, the surroundings, the whole atmosphere of the schools may have little relation to the realities of their lives, and they feel ill at ease, alone, unaccepted. (Office of Education Information Services, 1964)

Encouraging teachers to learn about their students, the pamphlet prompted them “to move out of your world and into theirs” (Office of Education Information Services, 1964). Another pamphlet warned of the “Public Relations Boons and Booby Traps” of the home visit. “Parents sometimes feel that a visit from the teacher is an invasion of their privacy,” the booklet alerted. One suggestion: “a fresh batch of brownies and a pot of coffee are good for getting acquainted” (Office of Education Information Services, 1967). Another pamphlet encouraged teachers to build “Negro self-respect,” suggesting that “such activities will not only help the Negro child enjoy a new feeling of self-esteem but they also help his white classmates appreciate the Negro as a valuable member of society” (“The Teacher and School Integration,” 1966).

These policies represent the most overt attempts by school administrators to shape teachers’ understanding of the race problem in the city’s schools. But other less visible and perhaps more powerful school policies supported the deprivationist ideas that grounded teachers’ professional identity. According to numbers released by the Negro Teachers Association (later named the African American Teachers Association) in 1967, over 50% of the students enrolled in the city’s public schools were Black or Puerto Rican, but their distribution was uneven. For instance, 55% of elementary school students were Black and Puerto Rican, as were a striking 71% of students in special schools. In contrast, Black and Puerto Rican students comprised only 34% of academic high schools. Meanwhile, only 8% of regularly licensed teachers were Black (Negro Teachers Association, 1967; “A New York in Black and White,” 1968; Reconnection for Learning, 1967). As an article in the New York Times indicated, the situation “look[ed] quite hopeless.” “By the age of twelve,” the author argued,

the average Negro or Puerto Rican white child in the New York schools is more than two full years behind the average mainland white child in academic accomplishment. . . . The road most Negro and Puerto Rican children are traveling in the New York schools leads only to unskilled manual labor or to the gutter. (Mayer, 1965)

The public schools, as other institutions, reflected the dominant group that controlled and shaped them. Racialized ideas of Blackness and Whiteness, impossible to disentangle, formed the institutional logic of these social organizations, influencing everything from access to outcomes. Inextricable from the schools, racialized assumptions of power informed how individuals related to one another and understood their place in the institution. These subtle yet ever-present dynamics motivated the social activism of the generation as well as teachers’ responses.

The 1968 Teacher Strikes

At approximately 2:00 p.m. on April 25, 1968, a small fire broke out in a school in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district. Teachers led their students out of the building to a nearby corner, according to protocol. But as 3:00 p.m. and the end of the day approached, a group of teachers packed up and headed home, leaving their classes on the corner (Podair, 2004, p. 97). The episode enraged local community members who viewed the event as evidence of the weak commitment White teachers had to minority students. Project Method, a parent group, sent a telegram to Superintendent Donovan and Albert Shanker, offering a slightly different account of the day’s events. “We openly declare war,” the message began.

Recognize or not this community will begin to act. We have assistant principals and teachers who are openly trying to ruin our Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district. Today during a seven alarm fire in front of p.s. 178 the teachers were ordered to take their children directly home at 11:45 am because the building was filled with smoke. Almost all the teachers took their children including first and second graders to the corner and sent them home because it was lunch hour. . . . We declare our independence and will act as we desire. . . . Our Puerto Rican and Black children will be educated and the white power structure will be broken. (Project Method, 1968)

From May to November of 1968, tensions flared as Black parents and teachers wrestled with the UFT for control over the city’s schools.

By the late 1960s, fortified by the growing Black Power movement, the city’s minority communities argued that they needed to control their own schools. Pointing to the UFT’s latest contract negotiations, parent-led grassroots groups maintained that White teachers simply did not have the best interests of minority students in mind. As one parent noted, “in the past a large number of teachers were constantly putting in requests for transfers. They didn’t want to teach in neighborhoods such as ours. We don’t want those kind of teachers” (“School Muddle Thickens,” 1968). Albert Vann, President of the African American Teachers Association, agreed. In a widely circulated press release, he blasted the UFT’s “disruptive child” clause as a way for out-of-touch White teachers to “perpetuate the miseducation and persecution of [Black and Puerto Rican] children” (Vann, 1967). According to Vann, many minority parents viewed the city’s public school teachers as outsiders who “tell us how to educate our children” (“Negro Teachers Give School Plan,” 1967).

To community activists, teachers were the critical barrier to change, directly inhibiting quality education for Black and Hispanic children. An inextricable part of a “racist Power Structure” (“Ocean Hill-Brownsville School District,” 1969), community members argued that these teachers “have trapped the black lower class in the tributaries leading to the slums” (Preston, 1967, p. 372). For them, the only way to disrupt this cycle was to recruit minority teachers to teach minority students. Through the community control movement and calls for decentralization, Black activists maintained that “teachers who are being imposed on this Brooklyn community are incapable of relating to the needs of the area’s children” (McKissick, 1968). So focused on their own “professional fortunes,” one Black social worker observed that for teachers, “the non-achievement of [minority] students . . . is seen as a mere fulfillment of the self-fulfillment prophecy” (Preston, 1967, p. 374). The only viable solution visible to these parents was complete control over the schools. Viewing the UFT and the Board as self-interested and fundamentally racist, Vann argued that “parents should have the controlling voice in their schools” (“Negro Teachers Give School Plan,” 1967).

The UFT and the Board of Education agreed to a series of experimental community-controlled districts to be funded by the Ford Foundation (Lewis, 2013; Perlstein, 2004; Podair, 2004). In each experimental district, a board of parents and community members would replace the centralized Board of Education. UFT leadership never expected the transfer of real authority and instead understood the experiment as a gesture, but the transfer of power was central to the proposed program. According to an article in the New York Times, community boards would have power to hire and fire teachers, set curriculum and methods of instruction, and allocate funds (“Boycott of Experimental Schools,” 1968). On May 8, 1968, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community board tested the limits of its authority as it voted to end the employment of 19 White administrators and teachers, many of whom were active in the UFT.

Stunned, the Federation’s leadership responded by calling for an immediate strike in the district that would last into the next school year. In response, local parents took to the schools. A New York Times article reified racial stereotypes by characterizing parents as “defiant” and reporting that they held “crayon” signs that read “Black people control your schools” (“Parents Occupy Brooklyn School,” 1968). For the second year in a row, New York City children missed the first day of school when “810 of the 900 public schools did not open as 53,000 of the 57,000 teachers failed to report to work” (“Union Stresses Rights,” 1968). The Board resolved the first strike on September 10, 1968, calling for the transferred teachers to be reinstated. In response, local parents once again attempted to bar returning teachers from entering the schools, and UFT leaders called a second strike on the grounds of harassment and intimidation; that strike ended on September 30, 1968. The final strike began on October 14, 1968, when teachers claimed they had received death threats from community members and ended on November 17, 1968, as a result of a closed meeting between UFT leadership and the Board of Education; the community board was not included in the talks and was abolished by the State Legislature the following year (Berube & Gittell, 1969).

For unionized teachers, encapsulated in the disregard of their contract was the debasement of their professional stature. The recent takeover of the schools, Shanker argued, “ignores the new power and integrity of the professional teacher” (UFT, 1969). This individual, he maintained, “will not continue to teach in any school or district where professional decisions are made by laymen” (UFT, 1969). Shanker was not alone in his reasoning, either. In the face of police brutality, police departments around the nation faced similar calls for community control and civilian review boards in the 1960s. In response, Daniel Liu, president of the International Association of Police Chiefs, told a local reporter, “if our profession is to function with dignity we must continue to speak out against meddlers” (“Police Chiefs’ Head Urging Resistance,” 1964). John Cassese, the president of New York City’s Police Benevolent Association, shared a similar point of view: “I am sick and tired of giving in to minority groups with their whims and their gripes and shouting. . . . Any review board with civilians on it is detrimental to the operations of the Police Department” (Brooks, 1966). No point was more important for these figures to make. As one teacher noted, “Of course we’ll go with Shanker . . . the real issue is decentralization and what’s going to happen to the professionals” (“Supporters of Shanker,” 1968).

The problem here was that parents and teachers wanted exactly the same thing: control in the education establishment. For parents, this was a civil rights issue; for teachers, it was about professional authority. Arguing that the schools were bastions of White privilege and dominance, local groups called for complete separation, asserting that the community ought to decide who should teach what subjects and how. In their model of expertise, the UFT called for the very same recognition. The Bundy Report, named after the Ford Foundation’s president, was the embodiment of the community control movement. In response, the Federation’s leadership reasoned,

as teachers we must warn of the dangers involved. Communities do have the right to decide whether they want their children to learn Swahili or Hebrew. But once the community has decided what it wants, the teachers must be free to construct a curriculum, set the methods and determine the texts and other materials most suited. This is the very meaning of professionalism . . . the professional has the power to make decisions in those fields in which he is an expert. The public may decide that it wants good health, but the doctor controls the medicine and operations. (UFT, 1969)

Allowing that the community had a right to make certain demands, the UFT also maintained that such authority ought to be rigorously circumscribed.

Quick to characterize members of the community as uneducated and in poverty, Shanker and the UFT turned the tables, casting community activists as unprofessional, violent, and racist. Recounting the weeks out on strike during an interview, Shanker remembered that teachers were “terrorized” by the community (Cowan, 1985). Echoing similar sentiments, the Times observed that many teachers were “really frightened stiff” during the school boycotts when confronted by parents (“Abuse and Threats,” 1967). Telling teachers to brace for a fight, Shanker implored them to draw upon their “own personal heroism” to get through this trying time (“400 Teachers Vote,” 1967). As one teacher explained to a local reporter, “we don’t deny [parents’] equality, but they shouldn’t get it by pulling down others who have just come up. It’s wrong and reactionary for them to pit their strength against a group that struggled for years to make teaching a profession” (“Supporters of Shanker,” 1968). Facing accusations of racist behavior, Shanker turned to the language of civil rights to both justify teachers’ actions and affirm their liberal credibility (Kahlenberg, 2007; Perrillo, 2012). Before a crowd of teachers, Shanker implored, “we must emulate the kids in Little Rock, who kept going to school despite harassment” (“400 Teachers Vote,” 1967). Likening Black parents to Southern racists, Shanker offered,

But what is this community control? In my mind it’s the same thing white southern governors used to call state’s rights. . . . Now, it’s no more pleasant if it’s done by blacks in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, than if it’s done by Governor Wallace in his thing. It’s exactly the same thing. (“Questions With Albert Shanker,” 1974)

The racialized vision of teacher professionalism was not accepted by all teachers. Recalling her experiences in school, one Black teacher explained, “you just began to think you were white” (“Negro Teachers Defend Their Stand,” 1967). The African American Teachers Association argued that “the Black person has become inferior. If he wants to succeed, he has to ‘become white,’ and the degree to which he becomes successful is directly related to the degree to which he becomes white—mentally” (Seabrook, 1967). Not surprisingly, this formulation alienated the small but growing population of Black teachers. Offering a fundamentally different view of the professional educator, these teachers maintained that their work in the classroom ought to bolster the community.

The African American Teachers Association affirmed that teachers’ commitment must be “to children, rather than to personal ambition.” And teachers, the Association implored, must “develop the ‘ghetto’ community” (Seabrook, 1967). Formed in 1964, by the time of the strike, approximately half of the city’s Black teachers held dual memberships in the African American Teachers Association and in the UFT. During the 1968 strikes, the majority of these teachers crossed the UFT’s lines, joining with the Association and local communities. Their responsibility, according to the Association and outlined in “Guidelines for Black Teachers During and After the UFT Strike,” was to “report to school . . . [and] prevent striking teachers from returning” (African American Teachers Association, 1968). According to a joint statement of Black teachers released to local papers, “We go on record as supporting school decentralization and effective community participation in the operation of our public schools. . . . We are working and identify with the Black community” (“Black UFT Members,” 1968). Irrespective of the Federation’s claims to defend due process and educational integrity, as Black teacher Gwen King surmised, “what’s really at stake is that the union does not really want community control” (“Supporters of Shanker,” 1968).

Shanker paid little attention to the African American Teachers Association, dismissing it as incendiary, and to the Black members who joined, finding their numbers largely irrelevant. But he could neither ignore nor forgive the actions of executive board member Richard Parrish, a Black teacher from the Bronx and founding member of the UFT who separated from the union during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strikes. A vocal leader in and organizer of the Federation’s trips south, Parrish had long blended labor unionism with civil rights activism. Focused on integration, in 1954, Parrish called on the AFT to suspend any locals that remained segregated (Currivan, 1954), and in 1959, Parrish worked in conjunction with other Black labor leaders and the NAACP to bar discriminatory unions from the AFL (Jones, 2010). In spite of the backlash, Parrish continued with this work and in the capacity of executive secretary of the Negro Labor Committee, explained, “our aim has always been to organize and guide Negro workers into bonafide trade unions and to establish solidarity of Negro and white workers” (Parrish, 1960). Parrish’s work during the early years of the Civil Rights Movement meshed well with Shanker’s point of view. According to David Selden’s oral history, Shanker asked Parrish to join the Association’s newly formed Black Caucus as a way to “keep an eye on it.” A trusted member of the UFT’s inner circle, when Parrish decided to side with the Caucus over the UFT, he found himself quickly alienated. According to Selden, Shanker bellowed to Parrish, “I did not expect for you to go there and sell out.” Despite his 40 years of service to the union, first in the Teachers Guild and later in the Federation, at his memorial service, “no UFT representative appeared” (“Interview With David Selden,” 1985).

The strikes centered on conflicting ways of understanding the race problem and its solutions. For teachers—drawing on their professional preparation in schools of education and administrative policies—the problem stemmed from deficit families and deprived neighborhoods. Community control would only exacerbate the situation. Instead, what was needed, union leaders argued, was what was already in place: a commitment to integration and colorblind sensitivity. For Black parents and community activists, the schools were the problem. Anti-Black racism and White privilege together yielded intractable structural inequality. In the estimation of many community members, there was no path forward within these institutions; they had to be dismantled.

Race, Meritocracy, and Professionalism Beyond the 1968 Strikes

Following the Ocean Hill-Brownsville fracas, racial tensions across the city remained especially acute. In spite of Shanker’s recollections of popularity (Cowan, 1985), both he and the UFT were in dire need of a makeover. Retreating further into the image of educational expert, Shanker and the UFT spoke increasingly about educational quality, but the issues that predominated the 1970s and early 1980s were no less racially charged. As overt tensions quelled, the same racialized assumptions that informed teachers’ professional persona during the strikes shaped discussions about teacher examinations, affirmative action, and paraprofessionals.

By the late 1960s, critics across the city condemned the preliminary teacher exam—long defended by the union as a bastion of meritocracy—as racist (Collins, 2011; D’Amico, 2015a). Individuals from the Board of Education to schools of education called for the elimination of the exam on the grounds that it detracted qualified applicants and unfairly screened others. Most poignantly, they argued that the exam, more than any other barrier to entrance, prevented minorities from joining the field. In 1977, the Office of Civil Rights charged that the licensing exam was racially discriminatory. In response, the Board of Examiners denied all charges of discrimination, shifting blame to schools of education. “Patterns of employment,” the Board of Examiner chief maintained, “result from long-standing practices in higher education in this region” (Board of Examiners, 1977). In a more extensive report, the Board of Examiners observed, “only 5 percent of CUNY’s graduates were minorities” (Board of Examiners Response, 1977).

Among the Board of Examiners’ few supporters was the UFT. In a Congressional hearing, Shanker dismissed concerns of discrimination, calling into question the abilities of unsuccessful applicants. “Those who fail the examination today,” he told the committee with great certainty, “cannot read or write or spell . . . no one would want such a person to be a teacher” (Shanker, 1972). Though Shanker said nothing explicit about race, his statement overflowed with race-based suppositions. The UFT allowed that the type of examination might have to change, but they refused to see it disappear altogether, including statements about examinations in nearly all contract negations and other dealings with the Board. For instance, though it pertained little, the Federation’s statement on decentralization included a section on the teacher exam. Consenting that increased efforts for teacher recruitment should be made, the UFT proposed “a national teacher examination should be used with a minimum mark established. Appointments should be made to districts from a ranked list by the central board on the basis of vacancies” (UFT, 1969). Atop unionized teachers’ list of concerns was making the examination process objective. In the post–Ocean Hill-Brownsville milieu, the Federation’s members expressed concerns about their job security. As one teacher noted, “the end of the merit system will enable those who can’t make it on ability to reach the top on the basis of their skin color” (Trop, 1968). Union leaders’ demands for quantifiable objectivity stood in sharp contrast to their staunch opposition to measured teacher accountability. Whereas the first brand of measurement would ensure a qualified field, the second, they argued, would unfairly punish the teacher of the disadvantaged child (Shanker, ca. 1969). In both cases, the union stance was hitched to larger questions of race.

By the early 1980s, Shanker presented himself as an education reformer far more than a labor rabble-rouser. In a speech before the National Press Club, Shanker called for the development of a national exam for teachers. “Current exams for new teachers,” he began his talk, “would be considered a joke by any other profession” (Shanker, 1985a). Regarding the weak barriers to entrance as deprofessionalizing, Shanker called for higher hurdles. Controlled by the profession itself, the three-part exam Shanker envisioned would raise standards. Importantly, he added to the delight of his audience, if established, the AFT “would not accept into membership any person hired who had not met this standard” (Shanker, 1985a). Notably, at the very same time that the profession began to diversify, Shanker bemoaned the fact that the teaching profession had become one that “reputedly anybody can get into” (Shanker, 1985a). “Raising the standards of entry,” he argued, “will attract many of the higher-caliber young people who are gravitating toward other careers” (Shanker, 1985b, p. 11).

At the same time that criticisms of the examination swelled, so too did calls for affirmative action, the two projects fundamentally connected. From the very start, Shanker and the UFT leadership remained firmly opposed to affirmative action or quota programs of any sort, favoring instead a “best man” approach. Turning to the supposedly colorblind rhetoric of merit, union leaders maintained that such diversity policies would deprofessionalize teachers. In a debate with National Education Association (NEA) president James Harris, Shanker argued that affirmative action simply replaced “one form of racism with another” (“Teacher Power,” 1975). Though in the early 1970s, the AFT and NEA spoke of a potential merger, talks ultimately fell apart in large degree because of Shanker’s refusal to negotiate a quota policy (Murphy, 1992). Shanker asserted that “it’s absolutely disgusting to say that you have to have a fixed percentage, x number of Chicanos, x number of Puerto Ricans, x number of Blacks, x number of Indians” (“Teacher Power,” 1975).

In his debate with Harris, Shanker retreated to a moral high ground, arguing,

what was wrong about racism in this country is that it treated certain groups not as equals, and now what you’re trying to do is set up a new system, and not where we’re color-blind, but where people get their positions, or are denied positions on the basis of their color, their race, religion. That’s dead wrong. It’s un-American, it’s un-democratic, and it’s unconstitutional. (“Teacher Power,” 1975)

But Shanker proudly pointed to another program. “We have an affirmative action program with paraprofessionals this year. Over 2000” (“Teacher Power,” 1975). Following the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strikes, the UFT vigorously turned to paraprofessionals as a way to reform its racist image (Kahlenberg, 2007). “Just a few years ago,” Shanker explained, “there were 10,000 people in the city of New York on welfare feeling that nothing would ever happen to them, and now they have jobs” (“Questions With Albert Shanker,” 1974). Claiming responsibility for “sending welfare mothers to college,” Shanker proclaimed that the Federation’s work on behalf of paraprofessionals combined with their career ladder program marked “the most successful affirmative action program in the United States” (Cowan, 1985). Through this program, Shanker maintained that the Federation could foster “the next generation of black teachers in the future” (Cowan, 1985).

Leaders of the community control movement like Rhody McCoy envisioned paraprofessionals as far more than mere supports for regularly licensed teachers: Paraprofessionals would bring the community into the schools and do what teachers could not. “You will have the skills they don’t have,” McCoy explained to a group of Black mothers training to become paraprofessionals in the spring of 1968. Continuing, he offered,

A teacher has a youngster who says “street” without the final “t.” Well, the teacher just thinks, “That’s the way they talk in this culture.” You’ll know he has a problem with final sounds, and when the teacher sends the kids to you, you’ll work on final sounds. (Mayer, 1968)

For this reason, Shanker viewed paraprofessionals as a highly dangerous group: Just as they had during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike, they could cross UFT lines and perhaps even take “regularly” licensed teachers’ jobs. The UFT spent much of the late 1960s aggressively courting this class of education workers. Through the career ladder program, the Federation promised that paraprofessionals—many of them minority women without a high school degree and on welfare—could eventually earn a college degree and become a “regular” teacher. Bayard Rustin, a key figure in the early Civil Rights Movement, praised the program and Shanker for bringing self-determination through work to the nation’s poor (Rustin, 1970). Local communities praised the program, too, as a way to allow schools to “handle [their] own” (“PS 83,” 1967). The program certainly helped to diversify the city’s teaching population. But it was far less successful in bringing these individuals up through the ranks of the school hierarchy. As one local observer noted, “it would take 10 years before [paraprofessionals] get the BS degree,” and few could spare that amount of time (Tanner, 1969). Moreover, with the 1975 layoffs, paraprofessionals were the first to be let go, disproportionately losing their jobs. In the end, the result was an increasingly diverse but highly stratified population of schoolroom workers.

Extending this project further, in his last act as UFT president before he turned all of his attention to the AFT in 1986, Shanker joined the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy’s Task Force on Teaching as a Profession. An answer to A Nation at Risk, the task force titled its final report A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century. Echoing many of the ideas Shanker conveyed since the 1968 strikes, the report demanded “the standards for entering teachers must be raised” (Carnegie Forum on Education, 1986, p. 35). The commission called for “highly skilled teachers” and a fundamental restructuring of the teaching hierarchy. Proposing a tiered system, the task force maintained that “professionals are typically supported by many other people who do the work they would otherwise have to do. [And] the services of these other people come at a lower cost” (Carnegie Forum on Education, 1986, p. 40).

Introducing a new category of “lead teacher,” the most highly skilled of all, this person would sit atop of the teaching hierarchy. Beneath this individual would be different levels of teachers, determined by expertise and education, continuing all the way down to the paraprofessional. With only a select few at the top earning the highest pay and receiving the greatest support, the commission suggested that such a framework might attract “people who qualify for jobs in the upper tiers of the American workforce” but who currently find “the conditions under which teachers work . . . intolerable” (Carnegie Forum on Education, 1986, p. 36). While the NEA supported the recommendations with reservation, taking issue especially with the “lead teacher category,” Shanker concluded that the report “deserves full support” (Carnegie Forum on Education, 1986, pp. 117–118). Recalling his work on this project, Shanker (1991) presciently rephrased: “Why not reserve the title of teacher for those that are highly qualified [italics added] and pay them accordingly? This arrangement needn’t mean having fewer adults working with kids.” Instead, he noted with hope, “we could have more than we do now” through “the extensive use of paraprofessionals” (Shanker, 1991).

Conclusion: Bringing the Past to Bear on the Present

At the base of the 1968 school crises was a notion of teacher professionalism animated by race. Far from an isolated flash point, temporal and unique to public education, the sparks that ignited the strikes were evident both before and after the walk-outs, in the schools and beyond them. Professional credibility stems from the distance between the expert and the client. The distance that bolstered unionized teachers’ claims was a result of racialized assumptions. The union, however, did not craft this race-based professional identity alone. In schools of education, prospective teachers learned powerful lessons that would come to inform how they understood themselves as professionals, the students they taught, and the communities they served. Administrators endorsed and repeated those same racialized messages through formal and informal policies and practices.

Politically and pedagogically, teachers’ unions and schools of education situated themselves within the landscape of the Left, a positioning often implicitly, if superficially, synonymous with social justice and anti-racism. This historical inquiry problematizes that representation by uncovering the ways in which liberalism and derogatory racial views coexisted. The historical evidence presented in this article should not be interpreted as a condemnation of the teachers, administrators, union leaders, and teacher educators of these years. Instead, this history should stand as powerful evidence of the complex and nuanced ways racialized assumptions gained credibility and infused all corners of the schools.

Teachers understood calls for community control as an affront to their professional stature and privilege. But why? The answer lies in the institutional structure of public schooling. Situated firmly on the lowest rungs of a rigid bureaucratic hierarchy, historically teachers have had little power and even less voice in the organizations in which they worked. To gain professional authority, teachers looked to their students and employed the same racialized lens that informed their professional preparation and the administrative policies and practices that shaped their work lives. But anti-Black racism alone does not explain this history; Whiteness and racialized notions of power and privilege shaped the very institutions in which teachers hoped to gain status. These tensions were not unique to the schools, and teachers’ reactions to them were largely unexceptional. Instead, this study animates the attempts to unseat and conserve power that unfolded across the nation during these years and provides a framework to understand the persistent strains between social institutions and the communities they serve.

Tensions between teachers and students predated and extended far beyond the 1968 strikes, emerging again in the Vergara v. California (2014) teacher tenure case. There and elsewhere, teachers and their supporters argued that tenure was a fundamental professional right as parental groups and their supporters identified tenure as a privilege that impedes the education of children of color. This history suggests that both groups may be right—and wrong. Teachers deserve protection; at the same time, those arrangements can penalize certain classes of students. But more importantly, are teachers and tenure really the core problems? Teachers and their unions are components of a larger institutional organization, replicating rather than refuting the messages produced by administrators and in schools of education in an endeavor to gain credibility and authority (D’Amico, 2014). Without tenure, would the underlying root causes disintegrate?

Rigorous historical methodology can help us understand the complex dynamics that shaped the past. But what is its value to the present? Historians are firm in their rejection of presentism, that is, using current questions and concerns to make sense of bygone eras (Hunt, 2002). There is no straight line leading from the then to now, and the oft cited adage that knowing the past prevents repeating its mistakes is overly simplistic and misleading (Horsford & D’Amico, 2015). History is relevant to the present and future (Guldi & Armitage, 2014) not for the answers it yields—for there are none that are definitive—but for the questions it raises and, as historian Jonathan Zimmerman has suggested, its ability to “make our current circumstances less certain, less stable and less taken-for-granted” (Lederer et al., 2005, p. 560). In our present context, we continue to wrestle with racial achievement gaps in the schools; the majority of teachers remain White, and certain schools remain predictably difficult to staff; African Americans have been murdered at the hands of police and disproportionately populate prisons, detention rosters, and unemployment lists. All of this in spite of the Civil Rights Movement, in spite of well-documented grassroots efforts to make change. How can we account for this? This history lays bare the powerful and subtle countervailing forces that have thwarted change. It is not just anti-Black racism that must be disrupted, as generations of activists have sought to do, but its ever present dyad, White privilege, for both shape the nation’s most fundamental social institutions and the roles of those who inhabit them.