Shanker, Albert 1928-

UNION OFFICIAL

Militancy Gone Straight.

Albert Shanker was president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) from 1974 through the 1980s. During the 1980s the dues-paying membership of the AFT hovered at slightly more than six hundred thousand, only one-third that of the National Education Association (NEA). However, the organization represented a powerful force of mostly urban, mostly northeastern teachers. Shanker earned a reputation in the late 1960s and 1970s as something of a loose cannon, a radical whose involvement in a dramatic black-white confrontation in the Brownsville-Ocean Hill section of New York City helped to stamp him as a major force for militant teacher unionism. By 1987, though, he decided not to run for reelection to the presidency of the AFT's pugnacious New York affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers. In the late 1980s Shanker, his rhetoric toned down, became much more statesmanlike.

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