As New Yorkers approach this week the 40th anniversary of the start of the teachers strike that erupted in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville sections of Brooklyn, we found ourselves thinking about what Albert Shanker might have said, were he alive today, about the current crisis in the city. He was the president of the United Federation of Teachers at the time of the strike, which was triggered by a move to oust 13 white, mostly Jewish teachers from the Ocean Hill-Brownsville School district as part of a decentralization plan.

The resulting strike became a seminal event in the history of American liberalism and catapulted its hero, Mr. Shanker, to the labor pantheon. Ocean Hill-Brownsville followed a number of abortive efforts to integrate New York City schools in the late 1950s and 1960s. There was then a wide gap between the academic performance of minority students and their white counterparts. As the community control idea gained popularity, Mayor Lindsay recruited the increased participation of the Ford Foundation and its president, McGeorge Bundy, who had been proponents of this concept.

Their proposals helped lead to the establishment of three decentralized “demonstration” districts, one in Harlem, one on the Lower East Side, and one in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn. The leadership of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district began to insist that the only way to increase the performance of black and Puerto Rican children was to hire black and Puerto Rican teachers and principals. This culminated in the removal of 13 teachers, five assistant principals, and one principal for reasons that appeared to be unrelated to anything but their race.

The series of strikes, which started May 8, 1968, lasted well into the fall of the following school year and closed most schools citywide for weeks. Shanker saw that the choice was between a “school system in which justice, due process and dignity for teachers is possible” or a system “in which any group of vigilantes can enter a school and take it over with intimidation and threats of violence.” The resolution was a compromise in which a limited program of community control was put in place, as well as increased job protection for teachers. It is that decentralized system which was replaced by mayoral control in 2002.

All of the disputes over the governance of our schools that has taken place since that time have their roots in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. Many of the job protections in the teachers’ contract that cause so much controversy today resulted from this dispute. Much of the racial tension that has bedeviled our city since then can be traced back to these events. The racial friction that resulted was particularly painful to the UFT, because, at the time, New York’s teaching staff was largely Jewish, and the union was among the strongest supporters of the civil rights movement.

Yet what stands out from a remove of 40 years is that the educational gap in academic performance between minority students and their white and Asian counterparts bedevils our educational policy debate more than ever. And here is where we’d love to be able to have a long conversation with Shanker, who, sadly, died of cancer in 1997. For Shanker believed that respect for the teaching profession (and the financial rewards for his members) would result from better outcomes for students and that the best protection for his members lay in promoting effective teaching methods and a rigorous curriculum.

In this, the labor leader went against the grain of much of the theory that has come to dominate in our schools of education. He was a frequent critic of so-called “progressive education,” supported high academic standards, and embraced traditional instructional ideas. We wouldn’t suggest that 40 years later Shanker should be deciding educational policy from the grave. But as we enter into the debate over whether mayoral control is to be extended, Ocean Hill-Brownsville counsels putting a premium on an atmosphere of mutual respect and tolerance of opposing views. Shanker’s fondness for high standards seems to us like a good place to find common ground between advocates of the status quo and those who seek change.