2007 August 28 Archive at The Core Knowledge Blog

By Richard D. Kahlenberg

… Though Shanker held no public office, he became supremely influential, his name constantly invoked in education circles. “In the course of the past two decades,” educator and author E. D. Hirsch Jr. wrote in 1997, “Albert Shanker made himself the most important figure in American education.” While secretaries of education came and went, as did presidents of the much larger NEA, Shanker endured, and he outdid and out-thought all of them. If Horace Mann was the key educational figure in the nineteenth century and John Dewey in the first half of the twentieth century, Albert Shanker has stood as the most influential figure since then. As a central thinker, writer, and player in all the great education debates of the last quarter century — whether school vouchers, charter schools, or education standards — he was, journalist Sara Mosle argues, “our Dewey.”