Race, class, and teachers' unions.

THE STRIKE THAT CHANGED NEW YORK: BLACKS, WHITES, AND THE OCEAN HILL-BROWNSVILLE CRISIS by Jerald E. Podair. Yale University Press, 2003.

THE NEWARK TEACHER STRIKES: HOPES ON THE LINE by Steve Colin. Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Few subjects in labor history are as challenging as the teacher strikes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the strikes discussed in recent studies by Jerald Podair and Steve Colin, a predominantly white group of teachers challenged African American community leaders for control of the schools. As a result, teachers conducted strikes that were largely supported by white racists and opposed by their students and the local communities. The challenges and questions that this situation presents to the labor historian are numerous and serious. Were these strikes acts of racist teachers? Is there a difference between a teachers' strike and a factory workers' strike? Are teachers even "workers" to begin with, or are they--as many teachers would no doubt claim--members of the middle class? Podair and Colin both attempt to address these questions, and in the process they create two very distinct narratives of the teacher strikes of this era.

In the title of his 2002 monograph on the 1968-69 Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike, Jerald Podair says that this strike "changed New York." It is a bold claim, but one that he backs up with a number of substantial insights. Podair is determined to get out of the old debate on the strikes, which sketched either the African American supporters of community schools as anti-Semitic fanatics or the United Federation of Teachers activists as unrelenting racists. Podair presents a more complex picture of racial ideology in and around these strikes. Essentially, Podair argues that the two sides of the strike--where community leaders demanded the right to run the schools and to fire teachers, and teachers went on strike to demand due process before any firing or transfers--were actually about larger cultural issues. It is an important and fascinating--not to mention useful--declaration, one that does move the debate away from the earlier issue of which side was right. In Podair's analysis, these strikes were essentially about different understandings of what it meant to be a teacher. The white teachers generally believed their job was to foster competitive students, well-versed in middle-class standards of behavior. African American community leaders believed that teachers should help African American students recognize the value of African American culture, including those aspects that did not fit comfortably in the teachers' middle-class view of the world. Far from recognizing the value of African American culture, however, Podair demonstrates that white teachers drew on the "culture of poverty" theories of social scientists like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Oscar Lewis to explain how culture held their students back. White teachers viewed it as their job to stamp out the very cultural values that African American community leaders wanted to celebrate. As a result, conflict was nearly inevitable.

This thesis is highly convincing. It works to explain a great deal of the passion and anger around this strike, and Podair does not rest with that, folding into his narrative a discussion of numerous participants in the strike. The book contains detailed (although somewhat loosely linked) discussions of the African American Teachers Association (AATA), which attempted to side with the community leaders, the Board of Education, and Mayor John Lindsay, who tried--unsuccessfully--to find some sort of middle ground between the teachers and the African American community.

Podair also raises issues that we as teachers may need to consider further, particularly in his discussion of the AATA. Most important among them is his discussion of disruptive students. The issue of how a teacher should deal with disruptive students was indeed one of the fundamental factors dividing white and black teachers in 1968, although Podair does not present evidence--or even claim--that this issue is directly linked to the strikes at Ocean Hill-Brownsville. To white teachers working in schools where the students were predominantly African American, "disruptive students" meant those students not following the middle-class standards of behavior: not sitting quietly, not taking notes, not responding to traditional lessons. These disruptive students should, most white teachers felt, be barred from the classroom. To members of the AATA, however, these same disruptive students were students who needed more effort by the teachers, and should not be barred from the classroom so long as there was any opportunity at all to win them over to the value of education.

This discussion of disruptive students, although a small part of Podair's discussion, is an important one in many respects, because it allows Podair to link his story of the negotiations and debates around Ocean Hill-Brownsville to a story of what was going on in the classroom. The same debates that took place in Ocean Hill-Brownsville--about the overall goals of teaching, and whether or not African American students should be taught just as white students should be taught--also played themselves out in the AATA's challenge to teachers dealing with disruptive students. And, as Podair points out in an overly ambitious afterword (where he attempts--in only eight pages--to write a brief history of race relations in New York City since the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike), race has continued to divide the city ever since. More than one mayoral candidate (Podair particularly singles out recent mayors Edward Koch and Rudolph Giuliani for criticism on this point) has made a career on playing to white New Yorkers' determination to control African American people living in the city.

It is a powerful and important study, replete with analysis and the sort of individual portraits of participants on both sides that allows the book to be both readable and enjoyable. This does not mean that Podair's work is flawless. More could have been said about the strike's importance to labor history. In particular, although Podair does address the subject in a few brief paragraphs, a great deal more could have been said about the Teachers' Union, the communist-influenced union that had represented teachers in New York City until 1961. Teachers' Union veterans, we are told, rejected the culture of poverty analysis and were "among the most passionate supporters of the community school movement" (40). It might well have made the book even more fascinating had we gotten a chance to learn more about the relationship between these teachers and the strike.

By far the most important flaw in the study is Podair's limited discussion of the term "middle class," a term he uses without providing enough analysis of what it means. We are repeatedly told in The Strike that Changed New York that the teachers were "middle class," but we also get a picture of the UFT pushing for recognition of the rights of these same people as workers. This suggests that there may be more complexity to the term "middle class" than Podair is willing to analyze in this study. Considering that the teachers' rise to the middle class is one of the deciding factors, Podair argues, in their condescending views towards African American students, this is a serious difficulty. We are told, as Podair draws on the work of David Roediger, that Jewish teachers took advantage of the strike in order to emphasize their own whiteness; but we are not told enough about the role class plays in this process, or, conversely, the role race played in teachers' views of class.

Despite these flaws, Podair's work is insightful and important. He treats the two sides of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike in an even-handed way, and in doing so he largely reframes the debates around these complicated strikes.

Steve Golin's The Newark Teacher Strikes: Hopes On The Line has a far more explicit bias than Podair's study: according to Golin, the teachers were in the right, and those who opposed them were in the wrong. Golin openly acknowledges this bias; as he writes at the beginning of the study, "In writing the book, I've tried to honor the trust [teachers] put in me.... I hope that, when they read the book, they find that I treated them with respect, I honored the spirit that moved them, I showed how much I cared" (2). Golin also acknowledges that several teachers read the study and checked it before it was published.

Golin adopts an informal and conversational style that serves his narrative well; the book is enjoyable and exciting, with a lot of well-written descriptions of individual teachers in their complicated relationships to the union, the students, and the community. We get to know these teachers, and get a very good sense of their interpretation of these events.

Like Podair, Golin has several insights. Most importantly, Golin devotes far more thought to the question of class than did Podair. Golin basically insists that teachers were members of the working class, partially demonstrated by the very ambiguity of their class: "That's what it means to be working class: to be defined by your role as worker; and to struggle to be more than your role" (24). This is unquestionably an interesting claim, but Golin could have provided far more discussion about why the "middle class" has such importance for these teachers. In particular, somewhat like Podair, Golin could have done more to consider the racialized meanings of middle-class identity in America, which might well have enriched the study a great deal.

Also quite impressive is Golin's description of the union's early years: the conflict between the conservative Teachers' Association and the more radical Newark Teachers Union (NTU) in the 1930s and 1940s is presented in a convincing way, as is the role ethnicity played in determining some teachers' beliefs about unionism. Italian American teachers, we are told, generally supported bread-and-butter unionism, while Jewish teachers tended to be more invested in social unionism. Golin does not, unfortunately, explain these differences in any substantive way; nor does he explain what they mean for the study of ethnicity. It is an extremely interesting distinction, but one which Golin could perhaps have explored in greater depth.

Ultimately, Golin's study is at its weakest during the most important chapters of the book, where he examines the highly controversial 1971 Newark teachers' strike. In their 1971 strike, teachers demanded fewer non-professional chores, and wound up in conflict with the African American community in Newark. Golin at first explains the strikes as a conflict over "inadequate resources," but he switches explanations after only a line or two spent discussing these inadequacies, and introduces a rather questionable claim for the cause of the strike. The leader of the Newark Teachers' Union (NTU) was an African American woman, Carole Graves. Golin argues that one reason community leaders like Amiri Baraka and Newark Mayor Kenneth Gibson opposed the union was because they did not like the idea of a woman in power. Unfortunately, Golin presents no evidence for this claim beyond the fact that Baraka in particular often exhibited sexist ideas in his political and artistic work of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is simply not a serious explanation for the Newark teacher strikes, and it would have been better left out of Golin's study.

Equally problematic is Golin's treatment of the incredible violence that accompanied the 1971 strike. Golin provides several powerful examples of violence on both sides, some of which could easily have resulted in people's deaths. But Golin does not spend enough time considering what this violence means. Violence is hardly unique to the teachers' strike; certainly during the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a great deal of violence around American protests and strikes. Was the teachers' strike simply part of this trend? Was it more violent than other strikes taking place at the time? Golin does not address these questions. Nor--surprising given his willingness to introduce gender as an underlying cause of the strike--does he address whether or not this violence had gendered meanings. Certainly much of the violence seems to have been committed by men. Golin mentions, for instance, that the strikers who accosted scabs at their homes were "brigades of guys," and at least the leader of the "wild bus ride," where strikers arrived at open schools and pelted the building with eggs or destroyed others teachers' cars, was a man (165-166). Golin simply does not explain what the meaning of this violence is, beyond anger about the strike itself. Since most strikes involve heightened emotions, and not all strikes are anywhere near as violent as this strike (and certainly relatively few strikes had this much coordinated violence), Golin may well have missed an opportunity to explore these strikes' uniqueness in greater depth.

In some ways, the most serious problem with the study is that Golin is caught in a trap he attributes to the strike participants, and a trap which Podair skillfully avoided. Strikers and strike opponents, Golin claims, were caught in thinking the strike as being either about class or about race. Although he attempts to be neutral, he clearly believes--as do the teachers who are his main subjects--that class issues were the primary reasons behind the strike, that the white teachers who represented the majority of the strikers (many black teachers did not join the picket line, he mentions) struck for concerns related to class rather than race, despite their willingness to ally (far more explicitly than their New York counterparts) with avowed racists like Tony Imperiale in their campaign against black community members.

This bias in favor of the teachers is reflected in the voices Golin includes, which are in turn a reflection of the sources that he used. The basis of The Newark Teacher Strikes is a series of fifty-two oral history interviews with Newark teachers. He does not provide any interviews--and provides virtually no discussion--of parents with children in these schools, parents whom he claims were being misled and misrepresented by Baraka and Gibson. It is possible that he is correct, that parents in Newark had no real interest in whether or not teachers performed "non-professional chores" like leading elementary school students from their classrooms to school buses. But this seems unlikely. One reason non-professional chores became an issue was because one teacher did not lead students to the bus one day, and a student was struck by a car. In any case, to claim that parents were being misled without presenting convincing evidence is highly problematic, and does little service to the book. In fact, an examination and discussion of parents' roles in these strikes would have provided a powerful counter-narrative to the story of the teachers and their unions, especially if Golin, like Podair, attempted to view matters from the parents' perspective.

Also missing from the book is any sort of larger national context: we are told almost nothing of the war in Vietnam, although at least some of the teachers working in the Newark schools were there to avoid the draft; we are told only in passing about the Civil Rights marches, the birth of Black Power, and--perhaps most surprisingly of all--the Newark 1967 riot, the events of which Golin covers in a single sentence despite its importance to both his argument (he claims that more conservative teachers left Newark after the riot, leaving the jobs open for a more radical generation of teachers to enter the schools) and to the subject of race and class relations in Newark. These strikes did not take place in a vacuum; they took place amidst some of the most complex and interesting developments in American history, and Golin could easily have said a great deal more about this context.

In the end, most of the flaws in Golin's work are about what Golin leaves out of this study: more on the national and local context, the voices of parents and community leaders, and more analysis of the meaning of ethnicity all could have been added to Golin's study, but without these passages, Golin's work feels incomplete, a very nicely written work that really doesn't go into enough depth for the historical issues that Golin explores.

Teachers' unionism, explored in both Golin's and Podair's studies, is a fascinating and extremely complicated subject: it allows historians to explore questions like what class means to teachers, whether teachers are indeed members of some rather vaguely defined middle class, as Podair suggests, or whether, as Golin argues, they are working-class people struggling to be more than that. And by exploring the teachers' strikes, Golin and Podair both are able to look at the ways in which racial politics affected the history of teachers in America. While both might look a little more at some of these issues, and Golin's one-sided approach is somewhat frustrating at times, both works represent interesting and highly readable contributions to the field that will provide readers with greater insight into the history of teachers' unions in America. Podair's study especially will likely remain a standard work on this subject for years to come.