Word: shanker
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...implications of the experiment, the Central Board, incredibly enough, never told the three experimental boards precisely what powers they had. Thus, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district in Brooklyn felt that it was well within its rights in transferring 19 professionals last spring for supposed "sabotage." Union President Albert Shanker, 40, angrily called his teachers out of the area in protest, and the district hobbled along with a handful of nonstriking teachers and bewildered volunteer helpers for the rest of the academic year. The Negro community vowed that none of the 350 strikers would ever be readmitted. Equally enraged, the teachers...
...boiling controversy has become an open struggle for power by the U.F.T., which fears that control of the schools is moving from the city's central board to local committees, and that the union is being weakened in the process. As he fights to protect his union, Albert Shanker is demonstrating that he is a shrewd and sophisticated student of the uses of power. A onetime Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Columbia, he is an admirer of Elijah Jordan, an obscure American philosopher who argued that institutions, not individuals, mold a society's values. Shanker says he drifted...
...understanding of how one can be victimized by a lack of power, says Shanker, stems from his days as a Yiddish-speaking boy in a non-Jewish neighborhood of Queens, where other kids called him a "Christ-killer." Once they even tied a rope around his neck and tried to hang him. At the University of Illinois, he bicycled six miles daily to the campus because, he claims, closer quarters were all "listed for WASPS, right there in the official university housing bureau." Looking back, it seems almost inevitable that he became a political activist. As chairman of the Socialist...
...Humiliations. As a substitute teacher in ghetto schools, Shanker was earning only $41 a week as late as 1952. Teachers, he claims, were too terrified of their autocratic supervisors to complain about poor pay and ill-treatment; to help them, he became a full-time U.F.T. organizer. "Part of the early motivation of the U.F.T.," he says, "was to punch the administrators in the nose for all the humiliations teachers had suffered...
When he was teaching, Shanker felt that he had unusually good rapport with Negro pupils. But he discovered that despite his best efforts, their academic progress was often slow. Thus his goal in seeking power for his union, he says, is not only to help the schools do "a hell of a lot more" for all students, but to "shape the educational environment" by building alliances between teachers and the rest of the labor movement. "A lot of things we're trying to do for kids can't be done in the classroom. Kids who come to school...