Democracy’s Champion: Albert Shanker
Our guest author today is Richard D. Kahlenberg, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is author of Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy (Columbia University Press, 20007).
Freedom House recently released the significant – and sobering — results of its report, “Freedom in the World 2014.” The survey is the latest in an annual assessment of political and civil liberties around the globe. For the eighth year in a row, the overall level of freedom declined, as 54 nations saw erosion of political and civil rights, including Egypt, Turkey and Russia. (A smaller number, 40, saw gains.) Despite the early hopes of the Arab Spring, democracy promotion has proven a long and difficult fight.
None of this would surprise Albert Shanker, who devoted his life to championing democracy, yet always recognized the considerable difficulty of doing so. Around 1989, when the world was celebrating the collapse of fall of the Berlin Wall, Shanker took the long view: “What we’ve seen are the beginnings of democracy. We haven’t really seen democracy yet. We’ve seen the overthrow of dictatorship. Democracy is going to take generations to build and we have to be a part of that building because they won’t be able to do it alone.”
As I wrote in my 2007 biography, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy, Shanker rarely gave a speech in which he did not mention democratic values. A devotion to democracy was Shanker’s lodestar, the principle that guided his support for public schools, and free trade unions. His call for charter schools, for example, was centered around a belief that by giving teachers greater democratic voice in the