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Even as many unions nationwide are struggling to retain their clout, the United Federation of Teachers is still flexing considerable muscle in New York City. But with a teacher evaluation deal still up in the air and Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s last months in office approaching, the teachers union is nonetheless at a crossroads.

Just how much the current moment translates into change for the UFT will not be clear for years. Other turning points in UFT history have been more obvious. Here are a few:

1960: The UFT is born out of rival factions

Teachers Guild President Charles Cogen, addressing a rally in Manhattan, later became the UFT’s first president. (Courtesy of UFT)

The Teachers Guild, a group made up primarily of older teachers, and the more confrontational High School Teachers Association merged in 1960 to create the UFT. Relations between the two groups, which were not the only unions representing city teachers, had thawed after members picketed together the previous year. The UFT’s future hegemony was not at all obvious then, as the union didn’t have collective bargaining power until December 1961 and the Teachers Guild didn’t dissolve until 1964. The UFT would play a crucial role in the education upheaval later that decade, including the 1968 teachers strike precipitated by the firing of teachers in Ocean Hill-Brownsville.

1968: Teachers strike for months (more…)

Did Albert Shanker scoop Joel Klein on ARIS?

The late formidable teachers union leader may not have named that particular New York City platform, meant to make it easier for parents and teachers to share information about student achievement and teachers’ lesson plans. But, in 1995, giving testimony to a Congressional committee on educational technology, Shanker did imagine a future tool that sounds quite modern:

Of course, this vision sounds more like what the web site Better Lesson is building than what embattled ARIS has been able to achieve.

The full text of Shanker’s testimony is inside the PDF linked on this page, on page 266.

Three decades before he became a GothamSchools contributor, education lawyer David Bloomfield was a young teacher trying to organize his colleagues.

While working to unionize teachers at the New Lincoln School, a now-defunct experimental private school in Manhattan, Bloomfield got help from United Federation of Teachers founder and then-president Al Shanker. In the background of the photograph they took together is Paul Bradford, the UFT liaison assigned to New Lincoln who now heads the union’s retiree chapter on the West Coast of Florida.

Bloomfield sent us the picture after coming across it before the New Lincoln reunion held last weekend. “To go back and see my once-third-graders grow into adulthood and to be thanked for work done 30 years ago is a ‘Wonderful Life’ experience that, perhaps, only comes from teaching,” Bloomfield wrote in an email. “I felt like Mr. Chips!”

David Cantor, head of the Department of Education's press juggernaut, is leaving. (Courtesy of Cantor.)

After five years of taking our phone calls and returning most of them, Department of Education Press Secretary David Cantor is moving on.

He had the job longer than any of his predecessors, overseeing both periods of high-frequency press outreach and long droughts of stay-the-course defense.

His departure will make it even harder for reporters to extract information out of an opaque organization, especially considering he’s leaving behind an office full of recent hires. It will also finally allow him to escape from complaints — sure to return given the dismal budget climate — that the school system spends too much money staffing its press office.

Cantor is going over to Widmeyer Communications, where he’ll remain on the education beat as the senior vice president in charge of PreK-12 education, arts, and philanthropy. Widmeyer was founded by Scott Widmeyer, an operator in the education world who cut his teeth working for teachers union president Al Shanker. But it does work for the non-union side of things, too, including the Gates Foundation and Pearson.

Cantor sent over this statement: (more…)