Word: shanker
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Faced with mounting evidence of the failure of efforts to pour information into students' minds, a number of educators and researchers would like to see more apprenticeship in the classroom. Says Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers: "Schools are not organized according to the way most people learn. We might be more successful if we structured learning in schools more like the way things are done in the real world -- with apprenticeship-type programs connecting abstract symbols to the solution of real problems...
...sunrise every morning in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, the Shanker family gets ready for work. Steven Shanker, 37, and his wife Avima, 35, wake their two sons, Elan, 5, and Dannel, 2, for a hurried breakfast of cereal and orange juice. After the meal Avima heads off by 7:30 to her job as an engineer at Librascope, a computer firm. Then, as other pinstriped parents up and down the San Fernando Valley march out to their cars with groggy children in tow, Steven, a vice president at Union Bank in nearby Monterey Park, drives the boys...
Millions of American working couples must scramble every day to arrange care for their children. But the Shankers have one big advantage over most parents: the day-care center is at Steven's office. Union Bank provides $150,000 a year to subsidize the complex, which includes spacious play areas and five classrooms. While it would cost Shanker up to $700 a month to put his boys in other local day-care facilities of comparable quality, he pays the bank only $520 through convenient payroll deductions. Moreover, the arrangement allows him to avoid paying taxes on the portion...
...bottom line as well. In a report on family benefits, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asserts that responsiveness to workers' needs on the home front "can yield higher employee morale, productivity, recruitment and retention potential, as well as stem excessive absenteeism." From his experience, Union Bank's Shanker agrees: "My commitment has increased and I feel a new level of goodwill toward the bank because my employers have shown concern about my family. There is a direct connection between the existence of the day-care center and my job performance...
More than that, in part because of Bennett's broadsides, teachers were considered the problem, which left them wary of the reformers. "The constant criticism is demoralizing," complains Albert Shanker, head of the American Federation of Teachers. "If the Secretary of Commerce disliked businessmen as much as Bennett dislikes teachers, the President would throw him out of the Cabinet...