Word: shanker
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...grateful to TIME and Albert Shanker [Sept. 20] for telling us what is wrong with our public schools: "You walk into a classroom and you see the same teacher and the same blackboard you saw 20 years ago." Does this also apply to the same Professor Kittredge at the same old lectern at Harvard or to the same Professor Baker at the same old drama workshop at Yale in years past? When should a teacher be thrown on the scrap heap? Speaking as a teacher who is standing at the same old blackboard for the ninth year...
Measure of Merit. Shanker concedes that there are bad teachers in the system and insists that his union is as interested in improving standards as anyone else. "You walk into a classroom," he says, "and you see the same teacher and the same blackboard you saw 20 years ago." But this, he says, happens because teachers "have been castrated," and the way to improve them is to give them more power. "Teachers are no longer willing to be supervised by people who have less professional competence than they...
Power Grab. The tragedy of the strike was that it was so easily avoidable. Privately, Shanker and McCoy had arranged a deal with Lindsay under which the ousted teachers would return to their schools for a few days. The community would temporarily tolerate them; eventually, the teachers-who could not have worked effectively in the hostile atmosphere-would be quietly transferred. McCoy, however, was unable to restrain the more militant blacks in the community. And Shanker used the breakdown of the agreement as an excuse to try to make his union the dominant power in the city's increasingly...
Despite their confrontation, both Shanker and McCoy have proved their willingness to deal with the real problem of New York City's schools: the fact that instruction somehow fails to benefit enough students, particularly those from ghetto areas. A 19-year veteran of the city school system, McCoy has experimented with ungraded classes, team teaching, tutorials and other progressive techniques. He complains that an "elite society of professional educators is not truly interested in the education of children but just in security." He also argues that only parentally controlled schools, rather than a central board of education, can achieve...
There was a measure of merit in both men's arguments. Yet, while the quarrel went on, the ones who suffered most were those whom both Shanker and McCoy insist they want to help: the children in the classroom...