Sandra Feldman - Tenure at AFT

Tenure At AFT

Feldman had been elected an AFT vice president in 1974, serving on the national union's executive council and the executive council's executive committee. She was also chair of the AFT's Educational Issues Program and Policy Council, a constitutionally mandated body which advised the AFT executive council on teacher issues.

Shanker died in February 1997 from brain and lung cancer. The AFT executive council appointed Feldman president in May of that year. She ran for and won election as the AFT's president in July 1998, becoming the union's first female president since 1930. At the UFT, Feldman's long-time counsel Randi Weingarten was elected president.

In May 1997, Feldman was elected to the AFL-CIO executive council and appointed to the executive council's executive committee. During her tenure at the head of the AFT, Feldman also served as a vice president of Education International and was a board member of the International Rescue Committee and Freedom House as well as numerous other charities and foundations.

Feldman faced a number of significant challenges in her first two years in office. The first was to oversee a vote concerning a proposed merger with the National Education Association (NEA). Merger had been proposed at various times since the 1960s but had gained ground in 1995. A "no-raid" pact was signed by the two unions in which they pledged to not raid one another's locals in an effort to cool off decades of bad blood. Terms of the merger were agreed to and approved by the AFT executive council in February 1998. But NEA delegates rejected the pact the following July, a majority of delegates voting in favor of the agreement but not by the required two-thirds majority needed to approve merger.

Despite the collapse of the merger, Feldman continued to advocate merger. She oversaw several state and local merger efforts, particularly in Minnesota, Montana and Florida. The AFT and NEA also continued to work together on federal education policy, and renewed their no-raid pact regularly.

A second challenge was organizational. Feldman pushed for and won convention approval for the addition of an executive vice president for the AFT, the first new executive officer to be added to the union's governing structure in its history. Nat LaCour, president of the United Teachers of New Orleans, was elected to the position. But Feldman was unable to overcome all the union's organizational and political problems. In late July 1998, about 3,500 members of the AFT's health care division, almost all of them in Rhode Island, disaffiliated due to a disagreement about the union's willingness to spend money organizing new members. The health care workers subsequently formed an independent union, the United Nurses and Allied Professionals, and later raided several AFT health care locals in Rhode Island and Vermont.

Over the next six years of Feldman's presidency, AFT attempted to expand its organizing capacity, build state-level capacity to service existing units and organize new ones, and work with the John Sweeney administration at the AFL-CIO to reinvigorate the labor movement.

In many ways, Feldman saw her presidency as one in which the legacy of Al Shanker would be implemented despite his death. Hers was a presidency which would reinvigorate rather alter the AFT, and make only incremental changes to AFT programs and policies. Along these lines, Feldman re-emphasized the AFT's commitment to educational issues, which had stumbled after a number of staff retirements and the failure of the union's "Lessons for Life: Reading, Results, Respect" campaign for stronger curriculum standards and better school discipline. But she also renewed the union's focus on organizing, which had languished in the last years of the Shanker presidency. During her tenure, the AFT grew by more than 160,000 new members (about 17 percent).

But even incremental change came slowly. Many on the AFT executive council felt they owed allegiance to Shanker, not Feldman, and they balked at even incremental changes in the union's spending priorities. While the union's educational research and organizing programs remained healthy, the union's servicing capabilities continued to decline during the first few years of her tenure. The union's research and collective bargaining staff remained small and stagnant despite strong membership growth, the union lacked comprehensive membership and collective bargaining databases, and financial oversight of local unions was inconsistent (a situation which led to embezzlement scandals in Miami, Florida and Washington, D.C. in 2002 and 2003).

1998 also saw Feldman undertake a systematic review of the AFT's organization and priorities. In 1992, the union had established a "Futures Committee" to engage in a similar review, and the new "Futures II" committee was charged with building on the report of the "Futures I" report. The committee's work began in mid-1998 and concluded in early 2000. The "Futures II" committee's final report, approved by AFT delegates in July 2000, advocated a four-point plan: 1) building a "culture of organizing" throughout the union, 2) enhancing the union's political advocacy efforts, 3) engaging in a series of publicity, legislative, funding and political campaigns to strengthen the institutions in which AFT members work, and 4) recommitting the AFT to fostering democratic education and human rights at home and abroad. Feldman moved quickly to ensure that the plan was implemented, establishing several new executive council committees (including, for the first time, and Organizing Committee) and task forces and seeking further constitutional and organizational changes to the union's political fund-raising efforts.

Feldman's relationship with the AFL-CIO was difficult to characterize. The AFT had opposed the election of John Sweeney as AFL-CIO president in 1995. While Feldman supported Sweeney's efforts to encourage new organizing and restructure the umbrella group, she was also sharply and publicly critical of the Sweeney administration's interference in the internal politics of the Teamsters union. Feldman's position on the AFL-CIO executive council was strengthened when AFT secretary-treasurer Edward J. McElroy was elected to that body in December 2001.

Feldman was diagnosed with breast cancer in October 2002. After treatment, she returned to full-time work with the union early the next year.

In 2003, Feldman proposed a major educational policy initiative, known as "Kindergarten-Plus." The program would extend kindergarten to children as young as three years of age, expand the kindergarten school day, and reduce kindergarten class sizes. The goal was to better prepare children for entry into the first grade and help overcome some of the debilitating effects poverty had on young children. Although well-received, only one state (New Mexico) had enacted a Kindergarten-Plus program two years later.

In the fall of 2003, Feldman was again diagnosed with cancer. She announced in March 2004 that she would retire as president of the AFT at its regular biennial convention in July. Ed McElroy, secretary-treasurer of the AFT since 1992, was elected the next president of the union.

Sandra Feldman died on September 18, 2005 at the age 65. She was survived by her second husband, Arthur Barnes (an insurance executive), two stepchildren, two grandchildren, and her brother and sister.