Today is the 20th anniversary of this column; it first appeared on December 13, 1970. People have often asked me how the column came to be. Here's the story.
Before teachers were unionized and gained the right to bargain collectively, they were poorly paid and badly treated. But they usually got plenty of sympathy from the press. All that changed with unionization. Teachers who could shut down the schools were no longer a powerless group to be pitied and praised, so they -- and their unions -- now got plenty of criticism from the press.
Like many other labor leaders, I didn't pay much attention to the harsh words. Union members were the ones who elected me, not the newspapers or the public, and as long as what I said and did satisfied my constituency, I figured that's what counted.
In 1967 I led New York City teachers in a 14-day strike, and in 1968 we engaged in the longest teacher strike in U.S. history. We had substantial public support for both these strikes, but it seemed to me that people were more and more seeing the teachers' union primarily as a group that used brute power to get what it wanted. They were losing sight of the fact that the union stood for certain ideas and ideals.
Sure, many teachers joined to improve their salaries and working conditions. But they also joined to change a system that wasn't working for kids or teachers, a system that thousands of idealistic teachers left each year because they were convinced it was hopeless.
During these strikes, I became one of the best-known figures in New York City, but people saw me only as a militant union leader - urging teachers to strike, refusing to settle, going to jail. In late 1968, I became convinced that I had been dead wrong in believing that the public's opinion of me didn't matter. Public schools depend on public support. And the public was not likely to support the schools for long if they thought teachers were led by a powerful madman. The joke in the movie "Sleeper" where the Woody Allen character hears that the world was destroyed when "a man named of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead" was a fair reflection of this view.
I decided to devote some time and energy to letting the public know that the union's president was someone who read books and had ideals and ideas about how to fix the schools. I approached some magazines with ideas for articles but was rebuffed with comments like, "Who's going to write your stuff?" as if a union leader would be unable to write for himself. I tried to get on some TV talk shows that encouraged guest to explore ideas, but these were national shows and I was told that I was a strictly a local figure.
I asked advice from Arnold Beichman, who is now a distinguished writer and fellow at the Hoover Institution -- then, he was teaching political science in Boston. Beichman agreed with my analysis, and after suggesting all the things that I had already tried, he said, "Why don't you become a columnist for the New York Times?" When I objected that the Times would rather give me a punch in the nose than editorial space, Beichman answered, "Then buy it. Buy the space for a weekly column. Put it in the same spot every week. You'll be able to respond to Times editorials and give the readers a different slant on things. You'll be able to criticize the shoddy coverage of education issues there and in other papers. You can review books on education, and before you long, authors will start sending you manuscripts. Last, but not least, you can use the column to endorse good candidates for political office. If you build a following, those endorsements will be worth a lot.
"Just one more thing, Al," Beichman told me, "Don't bother doing this if the column is just going to sound like organization boilerplate. It will be effective only if you are free to explore and advance ideas, even if they are not union policy and are controversial."
The union executive board approved the proposal. So, eventually, did the Times. And that was over 1000 columns ago.
The column has been a great success in many ways. For many people across the country, it is a way of keeping informed about books, research and controversy in education. It is widely read by policymakers and used in college classrooms. Over the years, thousands of people have sent me letters, articles, manuscripts and books -- in fact, they've given me part of my education. And writing the column has provided me with an important discipline -- it forces me to summarize accurately and deal with complex issues in a small space.
Of course writing a weekly column is also a pain in the neck. I travel often, and taking time away from a meeting in Kyoto or Nairobi to write or call in the column is no fun. As time pressures get greater, I often think I should end the column. It has served its purpose, and its cost keeps going up, making a huge financial burden for the union.
But whenever I start thinking this way, someone stops me in the airport in Akron or a restaurant in Budapest and praises or criticizes what I wrote a week or two ago or tells me that he or she drives 20 minutes to pick up the Times to read the column. And I'm hooked again.