Parenting & Family Quote by Albert Shanker

Shanker’s line is a dare disguised as a shrug: you want teachers’ unions to “put kids first”? Fine - show him the mechanism that would make that rational. The sentence turns on a deliberately cold piece of civic arithmetic. In a union, the people who pay dues and can vote you out are the people you’re structurally obliged to serve. Schoolchildren can’t bargain, can’t strike, can’t bankroll campaigns, can’t show up at delegate assemblies. So Shanker frames “representing children” as a category error, not a moral failure.

The intent is defensive but also clarifying. In the 1970s and 1980s, Shanker became the public face of a newly muscular teachers’ labor movement, attacked for protecting mediocre teachers, resisting evaluations, and treating public schools like an employment system first and a learning system second. His retort refuses the sentimental premise that unions should function like child advocacy nonprofits. He’s insisting that collective bargaining is about power, not purity.

The subtext is sharper: if the public wants children’s interests represented inside the machinery of education politics, it needs institutions with comparable leverage - parents organized at scale, student voices with formal standing, governance structures that don’t rely on labor peace as the primary metric of success. Until then, Shanker implies, expect unions to behave like unions.

What makes the line work is its blunt cynicism. It doesn’t pretend the system is noble; it admits the incentives out loud, forcing critics to argue with the architecture, not the attitude.