Download Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy AudioBook Free
In Woody Allen's 1973 film, Sleeper, a figure wakes up in the future to learn that civilization was destroyed when "a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead." Shanker was condemned by many when he turn off the New York City institution system in the bitter hits of 1967 and 1968, and he was denounced for stirring up animosity between dark-colored parents and Jewish instructors. Later, however, he built alliances with blacks, and at the time of his loss of life in 1997, such characters as Costs Clinton celebrated Shanker to be an educational reformer, a champ of equality, and a promoter of democracy in foreign countries.
Shanker lived the lives of several men destined into one. In his early on years, he was the "George Washington of the teaching profession," helping to found modern tutor unionism. Through the 1980s, as mind of the American Federation of Educators, he became the nation's leading education reformer. Shanker recognized initiatives for high education standards and accountability, teacher-led charter institutions, and a system of "peer review" to weed out insufficient instructors. Throughout his life, Shanker also fought for "tough liberalism," an ideology favoring general population education and trade unions but also colorblind guidelines and a robust anticommunism—which, Shanker assumed, were vital to a committed action to democracy.
Although he previously a coherent worldview, Shanker was a complex individual. He started his job as a pacifist but improved into a respected defense and foreign insurance policy hawk. He was an intellectual and a populist; a gifted loudspeaker who failed at small converse; a liberal whose biggest enemies were often on the still left; a talented article writer who experienced to pay to acquire his ideas printed; and a gruff unionist who savored shopping and detested sports activities. Richard D. Kahlenberg's biography is the first ever to give a complete narrative of one of the most important voices in public education and American politics in the last half century. At a time when liberals are accused of not knowing what they are a symbol of, Tough Liberal illuminates an interesting figure who suggested an alternative solution liberal path.
