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 D uring the early 1920s, few teachers were actively involved in New York City politics. One reason for their political passiveness was practical: The volume and stressfulness of their work discouraged most teachers from expending more energy after their working days were over.1 Beyond that, administrators stigmatized demands for higher wages and other political activities among teachers as being “unprofessional.” The preeminent national education organization, the NEA, issued multiple public statements to the effect that trade unionism was anathema to professionalism. City administrators told teachers, and believed among themselves, that the “individual moral mission of teaching” precluded turning to organizational assistance for the sake of political activism, notwithstanding the dozens of teachers’ associations in the city.2 Furthermore, of the twenty-three thousand teachers in New York City in 1920, only two thousand were men, the majority of whom worked in the high schools. These male high school teachers dominated the teachers’ union movement during this time. Masculine or not, Superintendent William Ettinger frowned on the teachers’ union movement, claiming that “nothing can be more detrimental to our schools than the assumption that the classroom teachers constitute a laboring class, a sort of intellectual proletariat.”3 Finally, in 1920, Local 5 was just becoming the object of the state legislature’s attention to radicalism in public education, as discussed in Chapter 4, and teachers throughout the city were intent on avoiding accusations of disloyalty, or even disobedience, by school administrators. By 1960, however, the patterns of teachers’ politics in the city had changed dramatically. In the time between the mid-1930s and 1950, the TU had become a shell of its former self. The AFT had revoked Local 5’s charter in 1941, in Selective Engagement and Teachers’ Politics in New York City, 1920–1960 6 Selective Engagement and Teachers’ Politics in New York City, 1920–1960 127­ response to pressure from the AFL and from the Teachers’ Guild (TG), a group of teachers who had, in 1935, split from the TU. Over the next two decades, a series of federal and local investigations into Communism in the schools gutted the union, driving hundreds of teachers out of work. By 1960, its membership was fewer than three thousand, even as the number of teachers in the city schools topped forty thousand. During the 1950s, with the Communistdominated TU’s influence dwindling, the other city teachers’ associations battled the city and state governments over wage hikes and working conditions. However, the various associations fought as much with one another as with state and municipal governments. In late 1959, some members of the HSTA, frustrated by the failure of the TG and the HSTA to form a unified front to fight for them, engineered an alliance between the HSTA and the TG. This alliance became the UFT, which staged a one-day strike in November 1960, spurring its board to conduct a referendum “to determine whether teachers wanted collective bargaining.”4 The teachers overwhelmingly approved of collective bargaining, and the UFT won the bargaining election of 1961. The UFT continues today as the sole bargaining agent for New York City teachers and is a key player in school reform projects in the city. Between 1920 and 1960, the acceptability of teachers’ involvement in politics had changed enormously. After World War I, teachers’ aspirations to “professional” status clashed with administrators’ apolitical understanding of professionalism. Both city and state officials (and, during the 1940s and 1950s, federal officials) suppressed radicalism in the teachers’ corps, and even the more mundane politics of most teachers’ associations was frowned on. But by 1960, teachers’ participation in public politics had become routine and was on the verge of becoming institutionalized through the mechanism of collective bargaining. This chapter explains this change. As was the case in France, the dynamics of selective engagement are crucial for understanding the shift in the acceptability of teachers’ involvement in collective claim making. However, there were three important differences between selective engagement in the two cases. First, at the time of centralization , French teachers were not recognized as legitimate political actors. In the United States, however, teachers participated in the politics of centralization. The legacy of their political action in the mid-1890s yielded the Progressives’ emphasis on professionalism, an apolitical ideology that sought to delegitimize teachers’ collective claim making by making it seem an inauthentic and inappropriate expression of teachers’ interests. As discussed in Chapter 4, it also encouraged teachers to form associations according to narrow occupational interests , thereby increasing the...

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