What would Al do?

WWAD?

That’s the name of one-note tune played by Century Foundation’s Richard Kahlenberg, author of the late AFT leader’s influential biography, Tough Liberal. Al Shanker plays Kahlenberg’s Jesus in the American Prospect, “How the Left Can Avoid a New Education War” and in the current issue of the Kappan, “Albert Shanker and the Future of Teacher Unions.” In fact, to Kahlenberg’s credit, it’s hard these days to pick up an ed journal without seeing a spin-off of a Tough Liberal chapter applying Al’s Thought to today’s situation.

Kahlenberg wants candidate Barack Obama to follow the resurrected Shanker’s lead and unite the two main, oppositional education policy groups, in order to avoid a “war” within the liberal camp. Problem is, the two groups represent real and substantial differences that are difficult to reconcile. One, led by the unlikely duo--N.Y Chancellor Joel Klein and Al Sharpton-- has a recipe for union busting and privatization. It attacks teacher unions and calls the other coalition’s focus on debilitating social conditions and fighting poverty, “excuses.” Why in the world would Shanker’s ghost find common ground here?

The other side, organized by the more labor-friendly Economic Policy Institute, recently took out full page ads in the NYT and WaPo calling for "A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education," arguing that schools can’t do it alone and that real school reform requires and improvement in living conditions of children and families. Its leaders include, Helen Ladd, Pedro Noguera, Deborah Meier, Diane Ravitch, Julian Bond, and Tom Payzant.

Shanker was the classic “tough liberal” of his day, a blend of militant unionism and cold-war anti-communism and militarism. One difference between then and now is--in the ‘60s the teaching corps was a bastion of protected jobs for whites as was the entire public school bureaucracy.

On the one hand, Shanker claimed to support racial integration. But when, with the failure of school deseg in N.Y., the black community, angered by white-only teacher hiring practices, organized a “community-control” movement, Shanker used demagogy to rally angry white teachers to oppose affirmative action and smash community control. Kahlenberg, like Shanker, still calls affirmative action “preferences.” How telling.

Shanker, like the AFL-CIO leadership, also supported the Vietnam War and CIA incursions and coups in Latin America, which makes me wonder why, if alive today, he would now be so concerned about an “education war.”

WWAD today? If Al’s channeler Kahlenberg is right, he’d try and water down the differences between the two coalitions and push candidate Obama further to the middle-right for the sake of political expediency. He may be right. But somehow, I still can’t imagine Shanker uniting with the Klein/Sharpton group.