Like everything else in the cities, education seems to defy both management and comprehension The struggle over urban schools has in recent years grown progressively more ferocious, with the casualties mounting accordingly Discussions of underachievement and psychological damage have given way to cries of genocide No longer are anger and criticism confined to the malfeasance of an occasional superintendent, the arena of contention now includes entire educational programs—integration, school improvement, community control—each designed in its own way to remedy conditions in slum schools Meanwhile, the schools remain segregated, student achievement shows no sign of change, and the distribution of power is no different from what it used to be Yet while we appear to have been on a treadmill with respect to basic educational reform, the ideological scenery has been going by at a furious rate, at present, the main issue no longer appears to be whether segregation should be eliminated, or more money allocated to schools, but who shall control what exists

How has this change come about? Until about a year ago, most people would have agreed that the main purpose of school reform was to eliminate racial disparities in educational achievement, this, in turn, was regarded as the best way to reduce racial disparities in jobs and income The debate, by and large, centered on the question of how the schools should go about accomplishing that task Many Negroes and white liberals supported an emphasis on integration, arguing that segregated schools impaired motivation and achievement, and thereby damaged Negroes’ chances for occupational success and full citizenship Educators, on the other hand, typically located the problem not in the racial organization of public education burin the intellectual and cultural “deprivation” of Negro children, hence, they advocated educational programs aimed at compensating for those deficiencies

Recently, two new educational proposals have been advanced—decentralization and community control In the form in which they were initially made, these proposals did little to disturb the assumptions underlying earlier efforts at reform Thus, increased accountability to the local community was presented as another way of unlocking a school’s potential for raising the educational attainment of its pupils Although other issues have since arisen, the original claims for decentralization rested on the belief that the traditional “liberal” approaches to school reform—integration and/or compensatory education—had been tried and had failed

Behind this notion lay three major assumptions One was that government had in fact redistributed resources—in the form of students, teachers, dollars, or whatever—in order to eliminate the racially unequal distribution of results in schooling A second was that the programs of integration and compensatory education had been evaluated, and it had been demonstrated that they did not work i e, test scores had not changed Finally, the reason for this failure was perceived to be administrative or political in nature the school bureaucracy was opposed to reform, the teachers were racist, or the entire structure was hopelessly unresponsive From these assumptions flowed the conclusion that any new policy proposal—be it bloc grants, administrative decentralization, or community control—must center on transforming fundamental political relationships

Before taking up the merits of these new proposals, I should like to discuss the assumptions on which they rest For it is by no means self-evident a) that liberal programs of educational reform were in fact tried on a significant scale; b) that where they were tried, they failed, or c) that political and administrative change is necessarily a precondition for change in the distribution of educational achievement

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II

Hard evidence on the effectiveness of educational strategies has never been easy to come by Until 1966, for example, when the Coleman Report was published,¹ virtually no direct evidence existed on the relationship between a school’s racial composition and how well its students performed What the Coleman Report revealed turned out to be at some variance with integrationist ideology Negro students in mostly white schools were indeed higher achievers than those in mostly Negro schools, but this apparently bore no intrinsic relation to a particular school’s racial composition Rather, in those mostly white schools where Negroes performed well, the white students were typically from more advantaged homes, Negro students in a middle-class white school would do no better than Negro students in an equally middle-class Negro school As a practical matter, integrationists could reassure themselves that the relative lack of a Negro middle class meant that social-class integration would inevitably entail racial integration as well, but in view of this finding they could no longer embrace the notion that a school’s racial composition per se affected achievement

Of course, the absence of unequivocal evidence on achievement was never the main obstacle to school integration, and in many communities where integration was tried, achievement gains seem indeed to have followed In most communities, however, the attempt was never even made The blame for this may be placed primarily on the indifference, inertia, and opposition of school officials, and on the general political sentiment which they reflected Although committed educational leadership in places like Berkeley, Evanston, and Syracuse showed that organized white resistance could be overcome, most school systems—in the hundreds of communities whose size and demography put integration within easy reach—never reached that stage Even fewer efforts were made in the large cities, where national attention was riveted

Integrationists responded to this situation by devising a strategy which promised to reduce white opposition by coupling integration with a variety of beguiling educational attractions educational parks, magnet schools, special education centers, and the like If most white parents, the reasoning went, were forced to choose between inferior all-white schools and educationally superior integrated facilities, they would not hesitate to choose the latter The problem was that educational innovations are as expensive as school budgets are tight, the strategy required new legislation which would allocate much more money to city schools

In any event, the strategy was never really tried, since most professional educators chose a different response altogether They saw that Negro parents wanted better schools and higher achievement, and therefore offered programs of remedial and compensatory education in the existing segregated schools When this counter-strategy was embodied in local programs, and in Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, it put a premium on the perpetuation of segregated schools It paid educators to maintain schools in the slums rather than create the integrated, educationally superior facilities envisioned in integrationist rhetoric

Thus it is incorrect to say that school integration failed, what failed was the politics required to bring it about Like most liberal strategies for social change, integration is politically viable only on the assumption that it is in the interest of whites to reduce the status disparity between themselves and Negroes Inducing whites to choose integration by creating educationally irresistible schools was a clever effort to create such an identity of interest The only flaw was that before white parents could be presented with the choice, vast new funds would have had to be appropriated, with the explicit proviso that they would be used to create these schools And naturally the money itself could not be obtained without substantial white support In political terms this meant that in order to make the strategy work one had to presume the prior existence of that very identity of educational interests which the strategy was designed to bring into being In this case, circular reasoning proved to be as deadly in politics as it usually is in logic only a few of the integrationists’ schools have ever been created

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The concept of compensatory education favored by most educators represented an effort to avoid this fatal circularity Since compensatory programs operated only in slum schools, they seemed indeed to offer a happy political alternative Whites could assume a progressive stance by supporting improved ghetto education—and better schools for poor whites, too—while opposing or remaining neutral on demands for busing, Princeton plans, and other politically volatile integration tactics For these reasons—to say nothing of the substantial Negro support the remedial programs enjoyed—a powerful coalition of moderate and liberal reformers and schoolmen came together behind such legislation as Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

How did these programs fare? Over the past two years a succession of evaluations has been unable to find much evidence of improved achievement To be sure, their sponsors have proclaimed the programs a success the litanies of praise that have been issued cite improved school conditions, brighter attitudes, better attendance, reduced vandalism, happier teachers, etc Nonetheless, to judge by the main criterion the programs were designed to satisfy, the general absence of gains in achievement makes all these claims seem trivial or disingenuous

What accounts for this unhappy record? In a strict sense the question cannot be answered, for as long as we don’t know what works, it is impossible to make the comparisons which might suggest the reasons for failure Comparisons aside, however, one can assess in a general way the actual impact on slum schools of the millions of federal dollars that have been appropriated for their improvement Title I increased instructional expenditures for each participating child by about $60 a year in 1966-67, and last year by about $65. Since the nation annually spends an average of about $450 per pupil for instruction, the increment (10 to 15 per cent) from Title I can only be described as modest The simplest way to figure the amount of educational improvement that an increase like that can buy is in terms of the time a teacher devotes to her children If a teacher has thirty students and works a five-hour day (and if we imagine that she divides the day into a series of tutorials), then each student recieves a ten-minute daily tutorial An increase of 10 per cent in the teaching staff would add one minute to the daily individual attention a student receives That does not exactly constitute an educational revolution

There is more For one thing, the compensatory moneys have often been used to make up for existing differences between black and white schools, rather than for creating better-than-equal black schools For another, the funds made available under Title I frequently have been so dispersed that their budgetary impact—which is clear enough on a balance sheet—is undetectable in the target schools themselves As a result, in many cases the infusion of money has had the opposite effect from the one intended If, on the one hand, the funds are concentrated only on the neediest children, a noticeable change does occur in these children’s school program, but only for an hour or so a day, or a day a week. Teachers who work in the school but not in the program often become hostile or jealous, and those who do work in the program, since their colleagues are unfriendly and their students unsuccessful, grow frustrated and discouraged They explode and leave, or somehow adjust cynically to the situation, neither reaction is particularly productive If, on the other hand, the funds are diffused widely over a variety of children and schools, intense frustration on the part of a few teachers is traded off for a more generalized low level of despondency or indifference Then there is the added problem of turnover in both teaching staff and in the programs themselves, which occurs partly as a result of the conditions I have just outlined, partly for political or administrative reasons Continuity is rare and knowledge non-cumulative the same basic lessons are often learned over and over again, either by new teachers in the same program, or by the same teachers in new programs No one benefits perceptibly

There have been a few experiments which involved rather larger sums than those provided by Title I, but here too one would be hard put to say unequivocally that they resulted in improved achievement Some interpretations of evidence from the More Effective Schools program in New York City, for example, suggest that there may have been achievement gains for children who were exposed to the program over long periods of time, but other interpretations suggest the opposite; similarly with the tutoring program conducted by New York’s Mobilization for Youth and a few other programs. In all cases, reports of improvement are open to serious question

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Finally there are pre-school programs, which vary in content and direction from traditional classroom situations, to parent-training programs, to programs giving individual attention to two-year-olds A number of these programs have reported substantial gains Two things, however, should be noted about them. The first is that the gains appear to dissipate quickly if things are allowed to return to normal; the second is that those programs which are school-centered are very expensive, costing between $1,000 and $1,500 per child per annum. Now, research on pre-school education seems to indicate that it is indeed possible, although it is by no means easy, to affect patterns of intellectual development if pervasive changes in a child’s environment are instituted a good deal earlier than the age at which schooling now begins, and if they are continued on into the elementary school years. But the prospect of undertaking such a course of action raises many problems in its turn One of these relates to the political and cultural implications of further extending the schools’ dominion over children, I will take this up later Another is suggested by the price that is likely to be exacted for such reform: if the cost of improving achievement will be an additional one or two thousand dollars per pupil per year, and if our main goal is to eliminate racial disparities in adult income and occupation, then why not spend the money directly on family income maintenance, or on creating socially useful and important jobs? Perhaps the best way to change existing inequalities in income and occupation is to change them, not to use schooling as a means of deferring reform.

The costliness of programs of intensive education in early childhood is politically crucial in another way, too, for a ghettoized approach to school improvement assumes that whites will trade off the programs’ cost for the maintenance of segregation Although to some extent that is doubtless true, there is no guarantee that the commitment of whites to existing patterns of segregation will stretch to the point where they would be willing to spend on black children two or three times what is typically spent on whites. It is precisely here that the “failure” of compensatory education resides As a recent publication of the U S. Office of Education dolefully pointed out, a really serious effort in compensatory education would “require a mobilization effort more far-reaching than any now envisioned by any community.” It would, in other words, imply a level of white support for ghetto development which—in light of the past eight years’ experience—is as difficult to conceive as the amount of white support that would be required for integration.

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III

What has failed, then, is not the traditional “liberal” educational technologies—whether of the integrationist or compensatory variety; these technologies have been tried too sporadically and haphazardly to permit of careful assessment. Rather, the deficiency lies in the absence of operational political strategies which would bind up the interests of blacks and whites in such a way as to elicit white support for programs that would improve the relative status of black children. That is a primitive political defect, an inability to apply what might be called the politics of common interest to basic social reform.

But if it is incorrect to say that integration and compensatory education have been tried and found wanting, politically it all seems to amount to the same thing: the relative educational status of Negro and white children in metropolitan areas is little different now from what it was in 1954. The persistence of this dreary contrast has in recent years provided a major impetus to movements for decentralization and community control.

Decentralization and community control refer to a variety of notions about schooling and school reform, not all of them related to the problem of disparities in achievement. One of these is that the potentially effective components of city school systems—parents, teachers, and inquisitive children—are walled off from each other by a Byzantine bureaucratic maze; before the elements can function to the children’s best advantage, the argument runs, the walls must be broken down and the bureaucracy brought under control. Another view is that the entire educational system is racist, from the way it allocates resources, to the attitudes of its teachers and the character of its textbooks; according to this view the remedy is not to make the system more accessible but to transfer control of the enterprise altogether: until the schools are operated by the parents of their young black clients (or those who legitimately stand in loco parentis), they will not be responsive to the needs of Negro children. A third view is that the problem resides in the psychological consequences Of powerlessness. As things now stand, it is argued, the central fact of life for black Americans is that they do not control their personal and collective destinies. All the significant ghetto institutions—schools, government, welfare, etc.—are controlled by whites. Unless these whites are replaced by Negroes, black children will lack a sense that the world will respond to their efforts, and their achievement will languish as a consequence. The last two ideas roughly comprise the meaning of community control, the first, decentralization.

Of the three, the notion that the root problem is bureaucracy probably has the broadest appeal. For one thing, the complexity and unresponsiveness of many big-city school systems is legendary; no client of any class or color happily accepts the reign of the clerk, and increasing numbers reject the inflexible style and pedagogy of the schools. For another, we have long been accustomed to the idea that the very size of institutions inevitably produces a kind of social arteriosclerosis, and assume that the remedy lies not in reaming out the conduits, but in reducing the distance between the vital organs and the extremities. Finally, the anti-bureaucratic critique is almost always couched in irresistible contrasts between extreme situations—Scarsdale as opposed to Bedford-Stuyvesant, or Winnetka as opposed to the West Side of Chicago.

Unfortunately, however, there is no evidence that the level of parent participation in schools is related to students’ achievement. It is true that parents in suburban communities are somewhat more likely to participate in school affairs than those in central cities, but this seems to have more to do with the consequences of affluence than with anything else; analysis of the data in the Coleman Report fails to reveal any association between the level of parental participation and achievement. Nor is there any evidence that smaller school districts—which we all presume to be less bureaucratized and more responsive to parents and children—produce higher levels of achievement than larger ones. With a few outstanding exceptions, public education in the U.S. runs on the assumption that administrative decentralization, small and homey school districts, and local control are educational essentials; literally thousands of school jurisdictions stand as testimony to this creed, against only a handful of urban monoliths. Yet here again there appears to be no relation whatsoever between the size of a school district (or whether its board is elected or appointed) and the achievement of the students in its schools.

On the other hand, there is abundant evidence that parents who are involved in a direct way in their children’s education tend to have children who achieve at higher levels. Involvement of this sort includes reading to children, taking them to libraries, talking to them, explaining things, and otherwise providing lots of cognitive stimulation and support for intellectual accomplishment. Thus, when poor parents are trained to behave toward their children in the way middle-class parents do, the children’s level of achievement rises. This should not come as a surprise, except perhaps to those hardy souls who believe that the intellectual deprivation associated with poverty can be traced exclusively to genetic makeup It does, however, argue for the establishment of parent-training efforts, like the one that has been operating in Ypsilanti, Michigan, rather than programs aimed at eliminating bureacuracy in schools

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Advocates of community control (as opposed to administrative decentralization) might raise the objection here that the source of underachievement is not bureaucratic inertia in the first place, but institutional racism There is, in fact, no dearth of evidence that city school systems discriminate against the poor in general and Negroes in particular Studies of resource allocation almost always reveal that predominantly black schools suffer by comparison with white schools, in terms of such things as teacher experience, tenure, and certification In addition, the attitudes of many teachers are influenced by class and racial antagonisms, in the Coleman sample of Northern urban elementary schools, between 10 and 20 per cent of teachers in ghetto schools overtly expressed a preference for schools with all or nearly all white student bodies. It should be noted, however, that Negro children whose teachers are as good as or better than the average for whites and have better than average racial attitudes, do not show higher achievement than their less fortunate counterparts in ghetto schools

Here it may be countered that it is not a teacher’s racial attitudes which affect performance, but his expectations of his students’ academic success And indeed, this idea appears to make intuitive good sense It seems reasonable to believe that bigoted white teachers—or Negroes who accept white stereotypes—will somehow communicate to their students the sense that black children are academically less capable If that is so, then it might well follow that the most efficient way to deal with such teachers, short of large-scale psychotherapy, would be to sharpen dramatically their responsibility to the parents of Negro children, on the theory that they would then have to shape up or ship out

Let us assume for the moment that this hypothesis is correct² Let us also grant that community control would transform academic expectations that have been distorted over the years by bigotry or brainwashing Would it also eliminate underachievement in ghetto schools? The latter is unlikely, for most achievement differences appear to be related not to a student’s race or to his school’s racial composition, but to factors having to do with social class Correcting the consequences of racist distortions in teachers’ expectancies is not the same thing as correcting the vast class differentials which produce differences in achievement in the first place The notion that bigoted teachers depress the academic performance of black children is based on the premise that these teachers fail accurately to perceive and/or to act upon the children’s real potential, because the children are black. Yet it has been shown that differences in achievement are of roughly the same magnitude at grade six or nine as they are at the time children enter school, and are relatively insensitive to variations in anything about schools All the research of the last four decades points to the conclusion that differences in nutrition, general health, and access to intellectual and cognitive stimulation—which, of course, vary widely by social and economic status, and therefore by race—are the chief environmental determinants of children’s intellectual performance Eliminating racial distortions in teacher expectations would improve ghetto education, but it would probably not eliminate disparities in achievement that are ultimately due to differences in social class

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Both of the theories that I have discussed so far suffer from the obvious defect of presuming that schools have an impact upon students’ achievement, when most evidence on this point tends in the opposite direction The third—the fate-control theory—does not so presume Its premise is the notion that the central educational problem for black children is not poor pedagogy, but powerlessness, a political condition in the ghetto which is not at all unique to the schools Now, it takes only a modicum of political insight to notice that Negroes do not control most of the institutions which directly affect their lives, and little ideological originality to argue that hence they are a subject people, dominated in colonial fashion by a foreign white ruling class This argument has been advanced with increasing strength since World War II, but until publication of the Coleman Report there was no way to link the political fact of powerlessness with students’ performance in school One of that report’s major findings, however, was that the extent to which black students felt they could master their destiny was a powerful determinant of their achievement, more important than all the measures of family, social, and economic status combined

That provided the necessary link If a student’s sense of environment control strongly influenced his achievement, black control of ghetto schools, it seemed to follow, would produce a sense of personal efficacy which would in turn lead to improved performance The idea now enjoys enormous popularity, primarily because it seems entirely consistent with reality First of all, political and cultural emasculation has been a dominant element of the black experience in America Secondly, all the precedents of American ethnic history are supposed to demonstrate that group political and economic solidarity is the touchstone of personal status and mobility. Finally, it seems to make eminent sense that people who feel in control of their destiny will be high achievers, the sense of mastery leads to mastery

But try it the other way mastery leads to the sense of mastery; high achievers are more likely to have a stronger sense of environment control than low achievers It sounds just as persuasive one way as the other, a perplexity which is amply reflected in research. Some studies suggest that the sense of efficacy causes achievement, some suggest that it works the other way around, and others find no association whatsoever We have no studies of the relationship between parents’ political efficacy (or their sense thereof) and their children’s test scores, the few studies that relate parents’ general sense of environment control to their children’s achievement are inconclusive and contradictory. Here as elsewhere, the results of scientific research provide a firm basis for nothing but further research

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In summary a good deal has been made of the various ways in which decentralization and community control will improve achievement, but a review of what we know turns up confused, contradictory, or discouraging evidence This does not mean that greater participation, less bureaucracy, greater openness, and more accountability are not worthwhile goals, I happen to think they are crucial In my view, however, these are essentially political and administrative issues,, and one’s assessment of their significance or desirability should be determined by theory and evidence particular to those realms of experience The one thing my brief review of the educational evidence does mean is this. If one were guided solely by research on achievement and attitudes, one would not employ community control or decentralization as the devices most likely to reduce racial disparities in achievement.

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IV

But the gathering momentum for community control and decentralization is unlikely to be diminished by this news. On the contrary, advocates of these policies argue that evidence derived from the existing situation is not simply inadequate but altogether inapplicable More important, the major pressures for decentralization and community control now have less to do with the failure of educational strategies than with the failure of what I referred to earlier as the politics of common interest

As a historical matter, it is of course true that one of the underlying causes of the movement for community control has been the persistence of racial disparities in achievement Yet the nature of the current situation is best illustrated by the fact that within the last year, the persistence of these disparities has not simply produced more militant demands for higher achievement but has created a profound crisis of authority in ghetto schools, a sense that these schools lack legitimacy as educational institutions. This feeling is strongest among Negroes—especially the young, the activists, and the professionals—but it is reinforced by the many middle- and upper-middle-class whites who reject the public schools’ regimentation and authoritarianism for other reasons For some blacks and whites, the notion that only parents and community residents are legitimately empowered to operate schools rests on what is taken to be the objective inadequacy of those in authority, scarcely anyone with access to print denies that the schools have failed to correct ghetto educational problems Repeated for years, this assertion has led effortlessly to the idea that the established agencies lack the special competence upon which most educational authority is assumed to rest

There is, however, more to the crisis of authority than that The illegitimacy of ghetto education is more and more often proclaimed to reside not in the failure of that education to produce achievement equal to that of white schools—had it done so, according to the earlier logic, the criterion of legitimacy need never have been challenged—but in the defective nature of the social contract between black and white America. One manifestation of this position is the attack that has been launched on the instruments—achievement test results, rates of college acceptance, etc—typically used to determine if the older, “rational” criterion of authority was being satisfied, not only that, but the intellectual and cultural content of those instruments has been dismissed as irrelevant or antithetical to the black community’s political and cultural aspirations A second, and politically more explosive, manifestation of this view is the assertion that school officials and teachers whose ideas or activities suggest the absence of political and cultural identification with the black community therefore also lack the qualifications requisite to educate black children. This is entirely consistent with the new criterion of authority, which assumes that the task of educators in the ghettos is to establish the basis for a valid social contract between Negroes and the institutions in their communities Hence it becomes not at all strange to substitute for the old, “rational” tests of educational competence a subjective test of political consensus, for in a sense the situation is presumed to have reverted to the precontract state of nature, wherein the main issue is one of defining the body politic that is about to come into being, and deciding who shall be its citizens.

This “anti-colonial” position is, in the technically correct sense of the term, revolutionary; it asserts that the established authorities and the principles upon which their dominion rests are fundamentally and irreparably illegitimate, and that the only way they can continue to command is by the use of naked power. In such a situation the minimum task of the revolutionary is to bring that fact into the open, to “expose” the illegitimacy by provoking the authorities to violence

Although only a relatively few Negroes consciously hold this position, their political strength is multiplied enormously by the fact that there are very few who explicitly hold the opposite view. Most blacks have an acute sense of the injustice which white society has visited upon them, so that if white authorities should attempt to suppress an openly revolutionary cadre, the best response they could hope for from the general community would be one of sullen hostility In the case of the struggle over the schools, this makes it functionally impossible to distinguish those who want community control as a means of fulfilling the achievement criterion from those who want it as the basis for a new social contract. The two groups will remain pretty much identical so long as the achievement criterion remains unsatisfied

It is easy to see why the anti-colonial position is anathema to the established authorities Among other things, in selecting school personnel advocates of this position seek to substitute what amounts to a test of political loyalty for a series of universalistic “professional” standards. In last year’s school dispute in New York, for example, the Ocean Hill Board was accused of racism and of violating due-process guarantees for teachers, but whether or not this was true, the real issue was the Board’s effort to apply a test of political consensus to educators. Since—as in Africa—there are always whites who can pass such a test, the Ocean Hill Board could maintain that it was not guilty of racism at the same time that it sought to expel teachers for what it called racism—i e, non-consensus.

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But whatever the local variations, the crucial fact is that the crisis in urban education is passing into a phase in which only a change in the locus of authority will bring peace How long the present transition period will last is hard to say, but the main elements of the domestic political situation appear to favor an increase rather than a diminishing of the anti-colonial impulse Those elements include the inability of the liberal/labor/civil-rights coalition to secure legislation that would mount a broad and basic attack upon black-white disparities in income and occupation, an unprecedented (but hardly unheralded) upsurge of black nationalism; the emergence of a black professional class in Northern cities as a political force.

Since the collapse of the Johnsonian consensus on domestic affairs, which can be roughly dated to the 1966 White House Conference “To Fulfill These Rights,” these three elements have come into high relief, reinforcing one another. After the White House Conference, it became increasingly clear that Congressional liberals were light-years away from the political strength required to legislate fundamental change in the economic and social status of Negroes. The resources lost to the war effort in Vietnam were of course partly to blame, but there was more to it than that: as the White House Conference report suggested, fundamental change would require social spending on an absolutely unprecedented scale Even without a war in Vietnam the Congressional struggle would have been titanic in its proportions; it was clearly impossible under conditions of large-scale defense spending.

In the cities, therefore, where no real effort has been made to deal with the underlying problems of jobs and income, attention remains where it has been since 1954 The schools are visible and accessible, in the sense that the political nexus of employment and housing is not; their performance has been obviously out of harmony with the ideology of education expounded by all moderates and liberals since Brown vs. Board of Education; and the inability in the last decade to effect widespread educational reforms has insured that existing frustrations would grow as performance fell farther and farther behind expectations.

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As a result, the primary urban activity since late 1967 has been a struggle for the division and control of what already exists. Although one may argue that this is a rational response if one believes there is no hope for new social legislation, it has the notable drawback of creating political divisions which even further diminish the likelihood of such legislation. The greatest division of this kind has occurred between Negroes and white liberals. (To be sure, the peace between them had never been easy. Aside from the inevitable element of paternalism—whites in the movement were cooperating to solve what was typically seen as “the Negro problem”—there was the problem generated by rivalry for jobs and leadership once the movement began to score some successes) In the recent disasters in New York City, many of the same white liberals who had championed the cause of civil rights suddenly found themselves under attack because they happened to inhabit those institutions toward which urban Negroes were now turning with hungry eyes. In a sense, the social-welfare bureaucracies—schools, welfare, anti-poverty programs—were the least strategic places to attack. They have, after all, been among the most liberal institutions, they have a common interest with blacks in the expansion of social-welfare legislation, and they are typically populated by whites who are noticeably more liberal than the average. But they were close at hand, they were the institutions Negroes knew about, they were (or seemed) easier to approach than others more remote and conservative, they were located in the ghettos rather than downtown, and they were even sympathetic to the situation which produced the movement for black control.

Add to this the politicization of the cultural and psychological upsurge known as black nationalism, which began in the mid-1960’s and was well underway long before black power became a political and ideological reality. Renewed interest on the part of blacks in Afro-American culture and “Negritude” produced basic and legitimate demands upon white America, in the schools and elsewhere. The written materials of education are typically bigoted, and there is virtually no important aspect of public education in the cities, from the distribution of money to the attitudes of teachers, which is untouched by discrimination or racial antagonism. These problems, however, are as amenable to remedy by integration as by black separatism.

But in the absence of genuine integration, or of much evidence of fundamental economic and social change, nationalism became wedded to the demand for a piece of the action, and was forged into a program for change. This is not the place to argue the merits of the position as a general matter; what is important is that black nationalism offered a system of ideas which seemed to correspond with the interests of the emerging class of black professionals, and to explain the need for black community control. Even in itself integration is a difficult path: it promises strain, tension, and unfamiliarity to black and white administrators and teachers equally, and hence it has never inspired real enthusiasm except among a few. Community control, on the other hand, avoids these pitfalls. It offers concrete gains long overdue—jobs and promotion to administrative and supervisory positions, without the accompanying discomfort of venturing into foreign schools and neighborhoods—under the ideological aegis of assisting in the development of one’s own community. A more perfect coincidence of ideology and self-interest can hardly be imagined.

The coming-of-age of the black professional class, a potent aspect of the struggle for community control, may turn out in the end to be the most important element in the battle over the schools, more significant than the substitution of parent for citywide boards, or community for bureaucratic control. The enfranchisement of a black elite, long overdue, should indeed help to improve education. In the short run, however, it has poured fuel on an already raging fire. Frustration, hostility, ambition, and concern for children long neglected is a potent combination, especially when applied generously to the complicated gear-works of big-city civil-service labor relations. The results have been spread depressingly over more editions of the New York Times than one cares to contemplate. As the struggle continues—and it surely will—the Lindsays of the world will seek to maintain civil peace—and their positions—by accommodating as many black demands for a slice of the action as they find possible, while the Albert Shankers will seek to maintain life by holding on to what they have. In so doing, the Lindsays will find themselves alienating lower-class and sometimes liberal white constituents, and the Shankers will find themselves making alliances with and concessions to conservative elements. The liberals will find themselves in the position of having to defend those portions of the social-welfare bureaucracies they control against black demands; all they can do, aside from hanging on for dear life, is to assume a principled position against segregation and for the application of vastly greater resources. However one may sympathize with that position, it is no more likely to be useful in the next day’s struggle to keep afloat politically than it is either to reduce segregation or to increase the available resources.

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V

Is there a way out of our present morass? The difficulty here is twofold. One might still imagine that a massive assault on status disparities would shift attention away from the question of legitimacy, but it is hard to conceive of such an assault being mounted. Producing the needed legislation would require sustained political mobilization of blacks and whites, a prospect which seems remote so long as: a) they are so fatally preoccupied with each other; b) new money cannot be found to reduce the competition and allow recruitment of a broader constituency; and c) many powerful whites and ambitious blacks, for their separate reasons, prefer a political settlement to economic and social justice.

I do not mean to imply, however—and this is the second difficulty—that the way out would be clear if only more resources were available. That, unfortunately, is only the converse of the argument for decentralization: it makes no more sense to pretend that removing social and economic disparities will solve all the problems of city schools than to argue that political rearrangement will eliminate achievement disparities. The point can be conveniently illustrated: the liberal ideology of educational improvement tells us that since schooling is the least divisive and best way to insure equal chances for jobs and income, we should provide more of it for Negroes. School reforms based on this notion typically include heavy doses of those disciplined activities which are thought to yield high scores on achievement tests But the same middle-class liberals who advocate this medicine for the poor often cannot stomach administering it to their children; they enroll them instead in more open, permissive, and pedagogically diversified private schools. This paradox suggests in practice what many advocates of school reform cannot admit as a matter of principle that there exists presently a fundamental tension between the sorts of educational changes which are thought to improve achievement, and those designed to diversify pedagogy, reduce routine, and allow for individual and cultural creativity

As an ideological matter, school reformers have dealt with this tension by placing exclusive stress on either diversity or achievement, the practical political consequence has been to behave as though solving one problem would solve the other. Many liberals have therefore supported programs designed to extend the dominion of the schools over children’s lives, and have advocated such things as twelve-month school years, pre-schools and kindergarten for all, afternoon school centers, and the like Under any circumstances serious questions could be raised about the desirability of a further intrusion of state institutions into a child’s cultural and intellectual development; given the current circumstances—in which the institutions in question suffer from an advanced form of political, cultural, and pedagogical atrophy—the problems are terrific Although one can easily imagine a program of extended schooling being executed well, with concern for diversity and individuality, there is a big difference between what one can imagine and what one can actually do with the materials at hand. The extension of schooling means the extension of the schooling that happens to exist, as the history of Headstart and Title I—to say nothing of the compulsory education movement—makes abundantly clear Thus, liberals who advocate such measures run the risk of overtly or covertly subverting other educational values they hold dear

In the case of decentralization—as the recent events in New York reveal—the same insistence on unitary solutions to separate problems has led to the widespread idea that political and administrative change will remedy racial achievement differences, an idea which, as I have tried to show, flies in the face of all past experience and knowledge concerning the determinants of achievement As for the aim of creating diversity in the schools, decentralization and community control can be described only as half-hearted and incomplete attempts in that direction.

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Consider the various proposals for decentralizing the New York City schools All, from the Bundy plan to the most radical proposals for community control, assume that the necessary and sufficient condition for producing diversity is the imposition of new control on existing institutions and resources. But this amounts to nothing more than a system of educational laissez-faire, which is hardly the same thing as diversity, especially when schools are segregated by race and class. In the competition for school resources, the net effect of such a system would be to institutionalize the political disadvantages of blacks and poor people, isolate them in the competition for money, and thereby establish in custom, law, and administrative code those failures of the politics of common interest which led to the demands for control in the first place.

More important, however, is the fact that the need for diversity—for alternative cultural and pedagogic styles in schooling—cannot be satisfied by racial division or changes in administrative structure alone Diversity and excellence in schools are qualities not likely to appear unless a premium is put upon them Creating such diversity would entail the recruitment of new people to education, and new institutions to schooling: not just neighborhood boards, but universities, labor unions, churches, and voluntary associations formed for the purpose of education. The business of attracting, organizing, funding, and maintaining such institutions cannot be accomplished by further provincializing the existing structure, any more than regulating it can be left to essentially free competition

Real diversity would be costly both politically and fiscally, and would require a somewhat different view of the relationship between the state and the schools from the one now regnant. At the moment we think of the state not only as the sole regulator of public education, but as exclusive operator of the schools, this greatly restricts, for political and constitutional reasons, the extent to which the schools can be diverse. Were the state to continue its role as regulator but take less of a hand in actually running the schools, greater diversity might be possible; under such conditions the state would concern itself with maintaining essential principles of interest regulation, civil liberties, civil rights, and educational standards

The form that such an arrangement would take is uncertain. There have been proposals to put money on the heads of children—or in the pockets of their parents—but they raise problems related to segregation, and to the well-known fact that the poor usually exercise choice in a less strategic fashion than do the affluent Another proposal has been to create alternative institutions, this might obviate the problem of choice to a certain extent, but like the tuition proposals, it raises questions about the interests of parties that are presently involved in the educational enterprise

All these alternative proposals deserve careful consideration, whether one is concerned with pedagogy, political participation, or the possibilities for a democratic culture They deserve consideration not only as to their intrinsic merits, but because they serve as a counterbalance to the idea that diversity and openness in the schools can be produced solely through political arrangements designed to settle an authority crisis arising from long-standing grievances of quite another sort One might also hope that a discussion of these issues would contribute to repairing some of the deep political divisions within the democratic Left These fissures have sprung in part from the fact that organizations and individuals that would in a more civilized atmosphere have tended to take different stands on different issues—racial identity, pedagogic diversity, political participation, reduction of racial disparities in income and occupation—have in the current climate been forced to take a single stand on all at once The resulting schizophrenia has been widely displayed in the columns of all serious publications which either originate in or recognize the existence of New York City

Finally, attention to alternative forms of education might help to set in clear relief another idea currently simmering at the edges of the liberal political consciousness, namely that the best way to reduce racial disparities in children’s school achievement might be to reduce the disparities in their parents’ social and economic status Support for this notion, as I pointed out earlier, arises from a variety of considerations the dependence of achievement on parental status, the potential political, cultural, and emotional dangers of extending the system of schooling that now exists, the inherent risks of presuming that profound social change can be purchased cheaply with a bit of improved schooling

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VI

It should be plain by now that I myself am persuaded by the soundness of this analysis, yet I am also aware that its intellectual cogency is strongly and negatively related to its chances for political life and prosperity We are presently at an important crossroad, both in education and in race relations, and the path we take will probably influence the shape of things for many, many years Roughly speaking, the issue is how to settle an increasingly severe crisis of authority On the one hand, by carving up existing institutions and resources in such a way as to arrange a viable contract between blacks and the institutions in their neighborhoods, we can work out a political settlement of the tensions that have arisen from a longstanding failure to remedy basic social and economic injustice Thereby, perhaps, we can purchase peace, or, if not peace, at least the confinement of the conflict and noise within the ghetto On the other hand, we can resolve the authority crisis by attacking the fundamental disparities which produced it

It would be easy to overestimate in alarmist fashion the consequences of choosing the easier path, a good deal of this has unfortunately already been done It would be silly, or worse, to argue that educational disaster will ensue from whatever decentralization and community control can be politically arranged There will be problems, but there are problems now It seems to me much more likely that under community control the basic disparities would remain more or less intact, while the atmosphere and conduct of the schools would show improvement

A good deal has also been said to the effect that the movements for decentralization and community control are provoking a general right-ward trend in American politics That such a trend exists is clear, and it also seems reasonable to believe that it feeds upon the wilder and more vociferous elements in the movement for community control But we should remember that this trend was first noticed years ago as a reaction to the movement for integration, and that it probably manifests the underlying reality of white attitudes in a limited-resource situation, not a response to particular strategies It is unhappy and frustrating to witness the present spiral of distrust, and the struggle for control of what exists, these contribute their share to the general poisoning of the political atmosphere But they are symptoms of the underlying political weakness, not its primary cause

Of the two alternatives, it takes no great vision to see where the political chips lie The second alternative is costly, whether we measure cost in dollars allocated, status lost, stereotypes shattered, or political effort expended The first has a certain political price—as the convulsions in New York revealed—but it gives the appearance of costing little otherwise In addition to this enormous political advantage, it has behind it the gathering momentum of profound changes in black politics, culture, and society Although the politicization of these forces, and their arrangement behind the banner of community control, results chiefly from the failure of the society at large to deal directly with social and economic inequality, political facts cannot be wished away, either by dreams of what might have been or strategies on paper about what might be unless the inequalities are swiftly attacked, these forces will not be denied.

¹ Coleman, James S, et al, Equality of Educational Opportunity, Washington, 1966

² It has been argued most persuasively by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson in Pygmalion in the Classroom (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 256 pp, $3 95) In a review published in the American Educational Research Journal (November 1968), Robert L Thorndike cast serious doubt on the authors’ research