Word: shanker
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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...
...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...