Sandra Feldman, 65, Headed American Federation of Teachers
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Sandra Feldman, who died yesterday at 65, was an up-from-poverty product of New York City schools who became one of their most powerful advocates, as president of the United Federation of Teachers. Then, following in the footsteps of her mentor, Albert Shanker, she took over the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union.
Feldman was a committed activist from her teenage years, when she cut short her honeymoon in Europe to participate in civil rights marches in the South. After organizing a union at P.S. 34, where she taught second grade, she became Shanker’s personal assistant. She replaced him as president of the United Federation of Teachers in 1986, when Shanker resigned the position to concentrate on the AFT, where he was also president.
“She has enormous talents and a spine of steel,” Mayor Koch, who occasionally clashed with Feldman, said. “You couldn’t find anyone who is more stand-up for unionism and her members but at the same time makes decisions on their merits, not by knee-jerk ideology.”
When she took over as president, Feldman said, “I’m not going to try to be Albert Shanker. I’m going to be myself and see what happens.”
As UFT president, Feldman was exceptionally vocal in criticizing the Board of Education, which she labeled “impervious to the education reform movements.” Setting herself up as an advocate for both students and union members, she agitated for smaller class sizes and increased investments in physical plants, as well as higher teacher salaries. During the mid-1990s, she backed a salary freeze for teachers as the city faced financial constraints.
Feldman became president of the AFT in 1997, after Shanker’s death. Under her leadership, the union grew by 40%, to 1.3 million members. Feldman stayed in the limelight as a vocal opponent of school vouchers and privatization. More surprisingly from a school union chief – and not always to the delight of AFT members – she supported standards for teachers, merit pay, and standardized testing.
“There’s this idea out there that teachers unions are a self-serving monopoly,” Feldman said in 2001. “I think there was a realization among teachers that unless we got involved in education reform, we would not get community support.”
Feldman grew up in a poor Coney Island family. Her father was a milkman, and her sickly mother occasionally worked behind the counter at a bakery. “I had an unhappy childhood and have always identified with those who suffer,” she once said.
Throughout her career, Feldman credited city schools with “saving my life.” She retained a scrappy Coney Island accent even while mixing with presidents and foreign leaders.
After graduating from James Madison High School at 16, Feldman studied English at Brooklyn College. While pursuing a master’s degree in English at New York University, she began teaching elementary school at P.S. 34 on the Lower East Side.
She also became a friend of Bayard Rustin and an active member of CORE, the Council on Racial Equality, and helped organize the East River CORE.
Feldman was a UFT field representative during the fateful Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis of 1968, which culminated in a destructive five-week teacher strike. From that time forward, she became a close protege of Shanker and eventually his no. 2 at the UFT.
In 1983, she became the first woman and first teacher to be grand marshal of the city’s Labor Day parade.
When she became president of the AFT in 1997, Feldman initially retained presidency of the UFT, as Shanker had done before her. Like Shanker, she soon found it difficult to coordinate both a local and a national union, and in 1999 she resigned from the UFT and was replaced by Randi Weingarten, her handpicked successor.
“Those who knew Sandy well knew just how hard she worked and how much she personally sacrificed so others would have social justice and economic opportunity,” Ms. Weingarten said in a statement yesterday.
In 2002 and 2003, the AFT was rocked by federal investigations into embezzlement and financial misappropriations at its Washington, D.C., and Miami locals. The AFT cooperated in the probes, and local union officials were sentenced to jail time; there was never any allegation that Feldman or the national union were tainted, although they did have some oversight responsibilities for local union finances.
In the spring of 2004, suffering from a recurrence of breast cancer, Feldman declined to stand for office and was replaced by the AFT’s second in command, Edward McElroy. She spent the remainder of her life in New York at her Gramercy Park apartment, taking in museums and enjoying life but still disturbed by contemporary political developments.
At her retirement, she criticized George W. Bush’s presidency as “an administration that sees no value in public institutions, that doesn’t get the connections between public schools and democracy … that seems to suggest children will pull themselves up by their bootstraps, like cowboys.”
Sandra Feldman
Born October 18, 1939, in Brooklyn; died September 19 at her home in Gramercy Park, of breast cancer; survived by her husband, Arthur Barnes, a brother, Larry Abramowitz, a sister, Helen Berliner, and Mr. Barnes’s two children and two grandchildren.