{"id":1650,"date":"2009-06-06T10:23:11","date_gmt":"2009-06-06T14:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1650"},"modified":"2009-06-06T10:23:11","modified_gmt":"2009-06-06T14:23:11","slug":"sifting-priorities-micro-and-macro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1650","title":{"rendered":"Sifting priorities, micro and macro"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had such good intentions this morning. After dropping off my daughter at the High School o’ SATs, I figured I’d sit in the local Starbucks and read student work while she was wearing down No. 2 pencils. So there I was at about 7:45 in the morning, listening to slightly-too-loud Sinatra and reading drafts of one section of the major paper for the class I’m teaching this summer. After about a third of the batch, I bailed on both student reading and the environment of too-loud soft music and too-loud jovial fellow customers. I listened to Scott Simon’s interview of Naturally 7<\/a> while driving a few blocks to the library branch that just opened up, and I’ll sit here for the meantime, trying to figure out what to do for the rest of the weekend. As usual, I have Too Much to do, and I have to do some of it and not the rest. May I make the choices wisely, but more importantly, may I make the choices consciously.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

In many ways, education policy and policy debates are about the same
\ntypes of choices: you can’t do everything at once, you can’t fix
\neverything at once, and being ambitious requires being selective about
\nwhere you spend energy. It also requires a big-picture perspective.
\nThat’s part of why I shook my head at Norm Scott’s confectionary history of UFT<\/a>.
\nThere’s an important role for internal debates inside unions, and I
\nhave respect for UFT activists who are willing to go toe-to-toe with
\nthe most powerful teachers union leader in the country, but there are
\nhuge leaps of logic in Scott’s thumbnail history and a failure to see a
\ncrucial big-picture issue. <\/p>\n

Scott assumed that there was an
\noverarching “sellout strategy” that Al Shanker consistently used after
\nspring 1968, and that the sellout strategy was based on a circumscribed
\nrealpolitik vision of unions:<\/p>\n

After the brutal ’68
\nstrike Albert Shanker knew the UFT could never again win much more than
\nsalary increases for teachers, and at some point only those at the
\nexpense of selling out. Thus over the next 15 years was born the “new
\nunionism” where the union no longer is an antagonist but a cooperative
\npartner with management.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The problem with this argument is not that it has no <\/i>basis
\nin fact but that it gives far too much credit to a single individual
\nfor the direction of the UFT (and AFT). Shanker was certainly a
\nforceful unionist, and both the UFT and AFT were shaped by his
\nleadership, but the general dilemmas facing UFT in 1968 were not new or
\nunique, Shanker would never have been able to take the UFT on strike
\nwithout the agreement of hundreds of UFT leaders, and there is
\nsomething odd about the obsession of union dissenters with a single
\nleader. <\/p>\n

It’s the last that’s the most surprising to me on
\nboth intellectual and political grounds. If I were a member of ICE (a
\ndissenting caucus within UFT), I would not be obsessing about Randi
\nWeingarten. While focusing on individual targets can be useful for
\nenergizing one’s base, it’s useless for public discussion and the nuts
\nand bolts of organizing and campaigning. To put it bluntly, it’s
\nfollowing the reasoning template offered by the New York Post<\/a>,
\nwhose editorial board loves to focus on personalities and the imagined
\nvirtues and vices of key figures. Imagine for a second that Shanker had
\ndied fifteen years earlier than he did, in 1982 rather than 1997. How
\nwould the history of the AFT have been different? <\/p>\n

Oh, wait.
\nWe don’t have to speculate. We can look at what’s happened to the AFT
\nin the past 12 years, since his death. There have certainly been
\nstylistic differences, and the AFT has a far less closed culture (and
\nis thus healthier) than it was at Shanker’s death. But many of the
\nstrategic decisions taken in the late 1990s and early part of this
\ndecade would probably have been taken if Shanker had been alive, and it
\nwasn’t because anyone at AFT held seances to figure out “what Al would
\nthink” (despite the jokes made about Richard Kahlenberg’s attempt to
\nchannel Shanker and probably some debates framed in that way). <\/p>\n

Consider
\nthe debates about mayoral control in New York City. I don’t pretend to
\nknow the inside politics, but anyone looking at the picture three
\nmonths ago could have predicted a few things:<\/p>\n