Leo Casey responds to my WWAD post

Thanks to UFT's Leo Casey for this response to yesterday's post, What Would Al Do?, my reflections on Richard Kahlenberg's own reflection on Al Shanker. Here's Leo:

What Al would do is never ask what Al would do – the part of him that I find admirable was his ability to be a fresh and innovative thinker, to avoid the ossification of his view of the world. I find this fetishization of him very un-Shanker like. It is like embalming Lenin -- except that Lenin had few of the redeeming virtues Shanker had, from where I sit. So I have a problem with taking a generally very dynamic thinker, and making him into someone frozen in time. I find it interesting for example that right before he died, he told the New York Teacher reporter doing a series on the history of the UFT that he thought he had been mistaken in the past in taking the Sidney Hook line that Communists should not be allowed to teach because they would propagandize. He said that they were no different that many others who held to rigid dogmas, and yet were not precluded from teaching: the true test was that they did in the classroom, not what they believed. I would never have predicted that change of mind.

In particular, Shanker would have been appalled at people like Checker Finn and Joel Klein attempting to use the moral authority of his name to attack teacher unions and teacher union leaders. Shanker was, first and foremost, a teacher unionist, and understood all that he did through that lens.

Shanker was a man of principle, and it is hard to imagine Shanker having anything to do with the Sharpton-Klein coalition on a whole host of principled grounds. Kahlenberg may be right that Shanker would also have problems with the Bolder, Broader coalition, but Shanker died over ten years ago and it is too easy to get into what is speculation on how he would have evolved – I don’t see the same sort of principled objections he would have had to Sharpton-Klein. But bottom line: if Shanker could change his position on Communists in the classroom, he could change it on a whole number of issues.

There is much in Randi which follows in Shanker’s path, but she is also her own woman, and has accomplished things here in NYC, such as the coalition with community groups, that was not possible under his leadership. How would have thought, ten years ago, that with the help of ACORN, the UFT would have together organized 28,000 home day care workers, overwhelmingly poor women of color? Who would have thought that the UFT would be partners with groups like the Coalition for Educational Justice and the Immigration Coalition?

For what it is worth, I think you misread Ocean Hill-Brownsville. I do believe that the UFT made mistakes in that conflict, but the community control side had a position far more mistaken and flawed – and while the union’s mistakes were ones of strategy and tactics that allowed the conflict to take on a racial and ethnic cast, the community control side were mistaken and flawed on principle, dismissing democratic procedures and due process procedures as meaningless. It is simply not true that the strike was about opening up positions in education for people of color – that had been already done. If anything, and from the union point of view, it was about protecting due process for teachers, and ensuring that teachers could only be dismissed upon a finding that they had not performed their duties as they should. That is a core value for a union. Significant mistakes were made in fighting for that goal, but the goal was one worth fighting for.

Leo Casey

Vice-President from Academic High Schools

United Federation of Teacher