American Federation of Teachers

Based on Wikipedia: American Federation of Teachers

Albert Shanker went to jail twice for leading illegal strikes. As president of the American Federation of Teachers for twenty-three years, he became one of the most influential voices in American education—a man who started as a labor radical and ended up championing charter schools, merit pay, and tougher standards for the very teachers he represented. His journey mirrors the strange, contradictory history of the union itself.

The American Federation of Teachers, or AFT, is the second-largest teachers' union in the United States, with roughly 1.6 million members today. That makes it only half the size of its rival, the National Education Association, but the AFT has historically punched above its weight. While the NEA began as a professional association that welcomed school principals and superintendents alongside classroom teachers, the AFT staked out different territory from the start: this was a labor union, pure and simple, aligned with the broader American labor movement and unapologetically adversarial toward management.

Chicago Roots

The union was born in Chicago on April 15, 1916, founded by educators who believed that teachers deserved the same collective bargaining rights as factory workers and tradespeople. Among the founders were two particularly notable figures: Margaret Haley, a fiery organizer who served as the first national organizer, and John Dewey, the philosopher whose ideas about progressive education would reshape American schooling for generations.

Dewey's involvement hints at something important about the early AFT. This wasn't just about wages and working conditions—though those mattered enormously. It was also about who got to decide what happened in classrooms. Teachers, the founders believed, should have a voice in educational policy, not just follow orders from administrators and politicians.

The American Federation of Labor, the dominant national labor federation at the time, granted the AFT its charter just a month after the union's founding. This affiliation with the broader labor movement would define the AFT's identity and distinguish it sharply from the NEA, which cultivated a more genteel, professional image.

Early Struggles

Growth came slowly at first. By 1919, the AFT had about 11,000 members spread across 100 local chapters—impressive for a three-year-old organization, but still representing only about one and a half percent of the nation's teachers. Then the opposition mobilized.

Politicians and school boards viewed teacher unions with suspicion, sometimes outright hostility. Many districts prohibited teachers from joining unions or fired those who did. By 1930, membership had dropped to just 7,000. The organization limped along, unable to significantly influence education policy at the local or national level.

The Great Depression, paradoxically, revived the union. As economic catastrophe swept the country and millions lost their jobs, the labor movement gained new urgency and legitimacy. Workers across industries organized to demand better treatment. Teachers were no exception. By 1939, AFT membership had climbed to 33,000.

Something else changed during the 1930s. The union had begun as an organization of primary school teachers, but now prominent college professors began joining. This broadened the AFT's intellectual credibility and its reach into higher education, where it would eventually become a significant presence.

The Communist Question

The 1930s also brought a more troublesome development. The Communist Party gained substantial influence within several AFT locals, particularly in New York City and Philadelphia. This wasn't unusual for American unions during the Depression era—the Communist Party was actively organizing workers across many industries, and its members were often the most dedicated and effective organizers.

But by 1941, with World War Two raging in Europe and the Soviet Union's reputation tarnished by its pact with Nazi Germany, the AFL pressured the AFT to clean house. The union expelled three local chapters for being communist-dominated, including the New York City Teachers Union, one of the AFT's largest and most influential affiliates. The purge cost the union nearly a third of its national membership.

This episode illustrates a recurring tension in American labor history. Unions depend on passionate, committed activists to do the hard work of organizing. But when those activists hold views that broader society finds threatening, unions face a painful choice between ideological purity and organizational survival. The AFT chose survival.

The Strike Weapon

Teacher strikes were largely taboo through the early twentieth century. Teaching was considered a profession, almost a calling, and striking seemed undignified, even unprofessional. Many states explicitly prohibited public employee strikes.

But desperation has a way of overriding propriety. The 1940s saw a wave of teacher strikes—fifty-seven between 1946 and 1949 alone. Teachers walked out over inadequate pay, overcrowded classrooms, and crumbling facilities. The strikes were often illegal. Teachers who participated risked their jobs and sometimes their freedom.

The movement accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s. Between 1960 and 1974, more than a thousand teacher strikes involved over 823,000 educators. These weren't isolated incidents but a sustained campaign that fundamentally transformed the relationship between teachers and their employers.

The results were dramatic. By the end of the 1970s, collective bargaining agreements covered 72 percent of public school teachers. The AFT had grown from 59,000 members in 1960 to 200,000 in 1970 to 550,000 in 1980. Teaching had become, unmistakably, a unionized profession.

The Shanker Era

No one embodied this transformation more than Albert Shanker, who became AFT president in 1974 and held the position until his death in 1997. Shanker was a brilliant, combative, controversial figure—a man who could quote John Stuart Mill while organizing picket lines.

He came up through the New York City teachers' union, where he built his reputation as a tough negotiator and skilled political operator. He went to jail twice for leading illegal strikes, becoming in some quarters a folk hero for defying the law in pursuit of better conditions for teachers.

But Shanker wasn't just a labor militant. For twenty-seven years, he wrote a weekly column called "Where We Stand" that ran as a paid advertisement in The New York Times. He used this platform to engage with educational policy in ways that often surprised his allies and enemies alike.

Shanker was an early advocate of charter schools—publicly funded schools that operate with more independence from traditional district bureaucracies. He proposed the idea in 1988, envisioning teacher-run schools that could experiment with new approaches to education. Charter schools would later become a flashpoint in education debates, often opposed by teacher unions, which gives Shanker's early enthusiasm a certain irony.

He also called for national competency tests for teachers, merit pay that would reward excellent teachers with higher salaries, and more rigorous requirements for high school graduation. These positions put him at odds with many union members who saw standardized testing and merit pay as threats to job security and professional autonomy.

Civil Rights and the AFT

The AFT's record on racial equality is complicated but, on balance, relatively progressive for a labor organization of its era. The union was one of the first major trade unions to accept African American members on equal terms. In 1918—just two years after its founding—the AFT called for equal pay for African American teachers, the election of African Americans to local school boards, and compulsory school attendance for African American children.

The following year, the union called for equal educational opportunities for African American students. In 1928, it urged that the contributions of African Americans to American society be taught in public schools—a remarkably forward-thinking position for the time, decades before the civil rights movement would make such curricula common.

In 1951, the AFT stopped chartering segregated local chapters. When the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case reached the Supreme Court in 1954, the union filed an amicus brief supporting desegregation. In 1957, it expelled locals that refused to integrate, losing over 7,000 members in the process. And in 1963, the AFT actively supported the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the event where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

This history matters because it shows that unions, despite their reputation for narrow self-interest, can sometimes be vehicles for broader social justice. It also illustrates the costs of doing the right thing—the AFT repeatedly sacrificed membership to uphold principles of equality.

Political Power

Today, teacher unions are major political players, and the AFT is near the top of the list. Since 1980, the AFT and the NEA together have contributed nearly $57.4 million to federal political campaigns—about 30 percent more than any single corporation or other union. Roughly 95 percent of that money has gone to Democrats.

This overwhelming tilt toward one party has consequences. It gives teacher unions enormous influence within the Democratic Party, but it also makes them targets for Republicans and limits their ability to work across the aisle. Education policy has become increasingly polarized along partisan lines, with teacher unions often at the center of the conflict.

The unions' political activities have also generated legal challenges. In 2015, four California teachers sued the AFT and its California affiliate, arguing that forcing them to pay union dues that funded political causes they opposed violated their constitutional right to free speech. The case worked its way up to the Supreme Court.

In 2018, the Court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that public-sector unions cannot require non-members to pay fees, even for non-political union activities. The decision was a major blow to public employee unions, which had relied on these fees for financial stability. Now unions must obtain affirmative consent from workers before collecting any dues—a change that many predicted would dramatically reduce union membership and resources.

Notable Members

The AFT's membership rolls over the years read like a who's who of American intellectual and political life. Albert Einstein joined the union. So did Ralph Bunche, the diplomat who won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1949 and became the first African American to receive that honor. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, was a member.

Hubert Humphrey, who served as vice president under Lyndon Johnson and lost the 1968 presidential election to Richard Nixon, belonged to the AFT. So did Mike Mansfield, the longest-serving Senate majority leader in American history. More recently, Donna Shalala, who served as Secretary of Health and Human Services under Bill Clinton and later as a member of Congress, has been associated with the union.

And then there's Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Angela's Ashes," a memoir of his impoverished childhood in Ireland. McCourt taught in New York City public schools for nearly thirty years before becoming a bestselling writer in his sixties. His membership reminds us that the AFT represents real teachers doing real work in real classrooms—people whose lives and stories matter beyond their union cards.

Controversies and Criticisms

Not everyone views the AFT favorably. In 2010, four American documentary films—most notably "Waiting for Superman"—portrayed the union as an obstacle to educational improvement. The filmmakers argued that the AFT protected incompetent teachers, opposed charter schools and other reforms, and ultimately hurt the children the schools were supposed to serve.

These criticisms tap into a genuine tension at the heart of teacher unionism. Unions exist to protect their members, to fight for better pay and working conditions and job security. But job security for teachers isn't always the same thing as quality education for students. When unions make it difficult to fire ineffective teachers, or resist efforts to evaluate teachers based on student outcomes, they can reasonably be accused of putting adult interests ahead of children's needs.

Defenders of the unions respond that teachers need protection from arbitrary or politically motivated dismissals, that standardized test scores are poor measures of teacher quality, and that the real problems in American education—inadequate funding, child poverty, crumbling infrastructure—have nothing to do with teacher tenure. Both sides have points. The debate continues.

The Modern AFT

Randi Weingarten has led the AFT since 2008, making her one of the longest-serving and most prominent labor leaders in America. Under her leadership, the union has pursued an interesting mix of traditional labor activism and educational innovation.

In 2008, Weingarten announced the AFT Innovation Fund, which provides grants to local unions developing new approaches to education. This represented an acknowledgment that unions couldn't just fight against change—they needed to be part of shaping it. The fund was initially supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, though the AFT ended that partnership in 2014.

The union has also expanded beyond traditional K-12 education. Today, only about 60 percent of AFT members work directly in schools. The rest include paraprofessionals and other school staff, government employees at various levels, higher education faculty and staff, nurses, and other healthcare workers. This diversification reflects broader trends in the labor movement, as traditional industrial unions decline and public-sector and service-worker organizing becomes more important.

Looking Forward

In 2020, the AFT and the NEA jointly issued a report calling for schools to revise or eliminate active shooter drills. The unions argued that such drills, while intended to prepare students and staff for the unthinkable, often traumatized children and created more fear than safety. It was a reminder that teacher unions engage with the full complexity of school life, not just wages and working conditions.

What's next for the AFT? The union faces challenges from multiple directions. The Janus decision has made organizing more difficult. Charter schools and other alternatives to traditional public education continue to expand, often with teachers who aren't unionized. Political polarization makes education policy an increasingly contentious battleground.

But the AFT has survived worse. It survived the anti-union backlash of the 1920s, the communist purges of the 1940s, the legal challenges of the 2010s. For more than a century, it has been a voice for teachers who believe that their work matters, that their expertise deserves respect, and that collective action can achieve what individual effort cannot. Whether you see that as inspiration or obstruction probably depends on where you stand. The AFT, for its part, is still standing.