The Teacher Wars (52 page)

(Library of Congress)

In 1940 the American Federation of Teachers expelled the New York City Teachers Union (TU), afraid its communist politics would taint the still-nascent teacher unionism movement. The TU then affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Workers (CIO). In this promotional image from a 1945 issue of the
New York Teacher News
, a white-collar teacher forges a partnership with a blue-collar worker.

(October 13, 1945, issue of the
New York Teacher News,
Collection of the Tamiment Library, New York University)

New York City Teachers Union members lobby for substitutes' rights and multicultural education, 1945. This gadfly band of young teachers, many of them communists, fought aggressively for academic freedom and for schools to embrace a broad antiracist, antipoverty agenda—a platform that anticipated many later-twentieth-century goals of education reform.

(November 3, 1945, issue of the
New York Teacher News,
Collection of the Tamiment Library, New York University)

Alongside his own elementary school teacher, “Miss Kate” Deadrich Loney, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 1965. As a young man Johnson taught in a segregated, Mexican American public school in rural south Texas. He later portrayed teachers as revolutionary foot soldiers in the War on Poverty. Federal funding for poor children's schools would “bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than 5 million educationally deprived children,” he said.

(Francis Miller, the LIFE Picture Collection, Getty)

Al Shanker in 1965, as president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City. The UFT was the nation's first major teachers union to earn collective bargaining rights. With a series of daring strikes, Shanker and his union raised teacher pay and empowered teachers in the education policy debate. Though he advanced many ideas for school improvement, from racial integration to pre-K to tests of teachers' subject-matter knowledge, Shanker was infamous as a defender of teachers even when students got in the way. He once said, “Listen, I don't represent children. I represent the teachers.”

(Library of Congress)

By a show of hands, members of the United Federation of Teachers vote overwhelmingly for a strike on the first day of school, September 9, 1968. Al Shanker is at the podium. “This is a strike that will protect black teachers against white racists and white teachers against black racists,” he said. But some UFT members were motivated more by fear of activists and parents of color making demands on urban teachers and schools.

(Bettmann/Corbis)

Rhody McCoy, administrator of the community control experiment in Ocean Hill–Brownsville, Brooklyn. In 1968, McCoy attempted to remove nineteen tenured teachers and administrators from the neighborhood's public schools, all of them white. The action provoked a sixty-thousand-teacher strike led by Al Shanker. McCoy believed that if black and Hispanic parents got involved in their children's schools, they would be able to show white teachers how to “set a tone so you didn't have any such thing as ‘disruptive children.' ”

(Bettmann/Corbis)

Secretary of Education Terrel Bell and President Ronald Reagan meeting at the White House in 1983, the year
A Nation at Risk
was published to widespread acclaim. The federal report, Bell's brainchild, depicted a “rising tide of mediocrity” in American public education, and blamed dullard teachers drawn from the bottom quarter of high school and college graduating classes. While promoting merit pay and alternative certification for teachers, Bell and Reagan ended the federal government's commitment to school desegregation.

(Corbis)

A Teach for America corps member works in her third-grade classroom in Washington, D.C., 2008. Her white board references the priorities of the standards and accountability school reform movement: high standardized test scores on the DC-CAS exam and other forms of measurable learning growth.

(Brendan Hoffman/AP/Corbis)