“The Axe,” Sir Walter Raleigh told his executioner, “is a sharp medicine but a sure cure for all ills.” A good many people seem ready to resort to Sir Walter's prescription to remedy the ills of New York's schools. One may admit that the schools are sick and still doubt the wisdom of this particular treatment.
And there can be no question that the schools are sick, or that they have failed to give a satisfactory education to a large part of the Negro and Puerto Rican population. Contrary to a widespread belief, however, the disease from which they suffer is neither new, nor peculiar to New York, nor the result of a sudden and catastrophic deterioration of the system. In the words of one school official: “We never really did succeed in educating the other side of the tracks.” Neither the Irish, nor the Italians, nor the Slavs found the road to education an easy one; in the periods of major immigration they remained to a large extent functional illiterates. In the absence of compulsory education and child labor laws, few of them completed elementary school, but the failure to teach them was masked by their early leaving of the schools.
A basic reason for this problem is that the immigrant groups in question came—as many of today's Negro and Puerto Rican migrants also come—primarily from rural areas organized on a semi-feudal pattern. For such groups adjustment to the disciplines of urban society has often been a matter of decades. The difficulties of that adjustment are reflected not only in the schools but in the crime statistics and the welfare (in the 19th century, charity) rolls.
Not all immigrants have shared these problems; the two exceptions most frequently cited are the Jews and the Chinese. Both groups adjusted with relative, but only relative, ease to the conditions of American city life, largely because they had centuries of urbanization behind them. As to the independent yeomen who left the farms of the Northeast and Midwest to flock to the cities, they had only minor problems of acculturation; they were already highly literate.
To say that the problem is not a new one, and that it has not been solved in the past, is not to say that it is unimportant or that we are not bound to seek solutions today. Both in terms of the accepted goals of society and the realities of the economy, the problem has a degree of urgency which it did not possess a century or even a generation ago. Not only is society today unwilling to accept as the natural order of things a situation in which a large section of the population is debarred from the opportunity to fit itself for anything except unskilled labor, but the opportunity for unskilled employment is itself rapidly vanishing. If we fail to give at least a basic education to our entire population, the victims of our failure will to an increasing extent be doomed to remain outside the economic process except as subsidized consumers—a condition, moreover, they will no longer passively accept.
Yet to recognize that a problem must be solved is not automatically to solve it. Whatever enthusiasts for the idea of community control may think, the failure of the New York school system—which is, by the way, less abysmal than that of most other school systems throughout the country—is more to be blamed on a lack of skill than on a lack of will. It is also, and perhaps mostly, to be blamed on a lack of money. There have always been techniques for increasing the effectiveness of education which have been neglected because they required more money than the city was able to pay. Nor has it been merely the teachers and supervisors who were deficient in skill; nobody, least of all the teachers' colleges, has offered definitive answers to the question of how children from “the other side of the tracks” can be adequately educated.
The teachers' colleges have nevertheless insisted that anyone who wants to teach must spend at least a year absorbing the non-answers available in education courses. This is certainly one of the factors which has made it increasingly difficult to recruit good teachers, although it is not of course the only one. Teaching often involves a degree of nervous strain which many people simply cannot face. Its material rewards are also limited; despite the substantial salary increases the United Federation of Teachers has won in recent years, New York City still starts its teachers at a considerably lower wage than its police and firemen.
But even if the school system were suddenly overwhelmed with highly qualified applicants, as it was in the early 30's, its main problems would persist. Indeed, despite the real difficulty in getting good teachers—or any teachers—the New York schools are today substantially better in terms of most indices than they were three decades ago. Average class size, for example, has fallen in the high schools by about a fourth since the 30's, and a similar decline has taken place in junior high and elementary schools. Average class size now ranges from 21.6 in kindergarten to 28.4 in “special service” junior high and intermediate schools—those in disadvantaged areas—and 30.1 in schools on that level elsewhere in the city.
The decline in class size, however, does not seem to have significantly improved the educational record of the elementary and junior high schools. In the Negro and Puerto Rican ghettos, the typical student is below the national reading norm from the first grade on; the median reading score in ghetto schools at the end of the ninth grade is two to three years behind the national average. Critics of the schools note that the scores fall further behind the norm as the student progresses through the grades. This is misleading: The rate of retardation is fairly constant. It should also be noted that the degree of retardation is lower in New York than for the same groups elsewhere in the country, especially in the South. Thus at every grade level there is a new infusion of children with even poorer educational backgrounds than those of the pupils already there (about a fourth of all junior high school graduates have migrated to the city at some time during their school career). Apart from the almost inevitably deleterious effect this has on the educational process itself, it pulls down the median score.
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If the record is not quite as bad as it seems at first glance, it is still bad enough to show that drastic improvement is needed. And the variations that exist among schools indicate that such improvement is in fact possible by the use of techniques already available within the school system. Sometimes, to be sure, the differences can only be attributed to intangibles such as the enthusiasm that exceptional principals and teachers are able to inspire. But in many instances they are directly correlated with specific programs.
The intangible factors of enthusiasm and talent afford a basis for hope but not a technique for realizing it. The recruitment of better teachers and supervisors is obviously desirable, but it scarcely offers a panacea at a time when the nationwide shortage of teachers has everywhere forced a sharp downgrading of standards. The New York school system, like most others throughout the country, is so desperately in need of teachers that it is ready to accept almost anyone who has taken the required education courses without fatal consequences. This does not mean that the quality of the teaching staff cannot be improved; I believe it can, and substantially. But doing so will require a drastic reduction—pehaps even the elimination—of the present education course requirements for teaching positions and the substitution of in-service teacher training.
The obstacles in the way of such a revision are enormous. Some of them are within the school system; the natural resistance of any bureaucracy to radical innovation is reinforced by the tendency of those who have invested years in the taking of education courses to protect the value of their investment. Even more formidable, however, is the opposition of the schools of education, whose domination of the educational scene would be undermined and whose very existence might in some cases be threatened by the sort of change that is needed. Under their influence the trend in recent years has, in fact, been toward making completion of the required courses the sole basis of appointment, to the exclusion of any actual test of knowledge or ability. (This is the meaning of the oft-repeated emphasis on “state certification,” which is in New York a purely formal process based on the courses one has taken, and the demands for abolition of the Board of Examiners.) The course requirements have narrowed the field of available candidates for teaching positions to such an extent that examinations must be so framed as to minimize the possibility that any of the applicants will fail. This contrasts sharply with the situation in the 30's. Then, the excess of applicants over jobs was so great that examinations were used less to test the qualifications of applicants than simply to eliminate enough of them to produce eligible lists of manageable proportions. Those who passed were usually well-qualified; so were many of those who failed.
Techniques are something else again. There are new and old procedures which help at least some pupils to learn reading and arithmetic. These can be extended with comparative ease; they threaten no entrenched interests. Few work equally well with all pupils, and many require specially trained personnel. Some also are questionable on other grounds; the authoritarian use of rote-learning procedures, for example, may produce improved reading and arithmetic scores in some cases, but at the cost of damage to the child.
Two techniques have, however, scored outstanding results. The first of these is the More Effective Schools program (MES), sponsored by the United Federation of Teachers and a major issue in its 1967 strike. This program is based on the use of a whole battery of remedial services in particular schools in ghetto areas; the ratio of pupils to staff is approximately 12 to 1 as compared to a citywide ratio of about 16 to 1. MES has not been uniformly successful; there are great variations among the test scores achieved by different MES schools. Nevertheless, when school-by-school reading test scores were made public two years ago, for the second and fifth grades, 30 per cent of the groups tested in MES schools scored at or above the norm; another 10 per cent showed a retardation of only one month.1 Almost no other ghetto schools achieved comparable results, and the average retardation for the MES groups was well under half that for ghetto schools as a whole. But it is also true that about two-fifths of the MES groups showed no significant gain. In the opinion of some teachers in the program this reflected the fact that they had received no training in the methods it required. Even here, however, there were intangible benefits; the children enjoyed school even if they learned no more.
Another technical experiment which has produced really spectacular results is the Responsive Environment, better known as the “talking typewriter.” This is a computerized typewriter equipped with a loudspeaker and viewing screen. Initially, a letter appears on the screen and is pronounced by the loudspeaker when the appropriate key is hit. Later, it can be programmed for words and even sentences. Under a grant from the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity a center with twenty talking typewriters was established in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn under the direction of Dr. Benjamin L. Israel. In the first year, staying open until 9 P.M., the center was able to serve some 650 persons, ranging from pre-kindergarten children to functionally illiterate adults. Notable progress was made on all levels. Pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children learned enough in approximately ten minutes a day to surpass by far normal first-grade reading levels; first-graders reached the second-grade norm. Eighth-grade pupils with severe reading problems improved their scores by an average of 1.4 years in about the same amount of time, divided into fewer but longer sessions.
Full utilization of the present twenty machines—six days and evenings a week—would permit them to serve about a thousand persons. But because the OEO, which had allotted $440,000 for the operation of the center in the first year, sharply cut its grant this year, the center is now operating only during the school day, and only about half as many persons as last year can make use of it.
mes and the “talking typewriter” have a number of things in common. Both demonstrably work, in terms of specific results as well as in terms of an improved educational atmosphere. Neither represents any threat to anybody. But both are expensive, MES costs about 50 per cent more per child than the present average expenditure, or $400 to $500 more a year. To extend the program to all the schools which need it would increase the school budget by about a fourth, or $300,000,000 a year. Since smaller class sizes and more services require more room, there would also be substantial capital costs. Similarly with the Responsive Environment Program; to make it available to all the half-million students in the New York school system who are currently reading behind grade would require an operating budget which might reach $300,000,000, in addition to the expenditure of up to $400,000,000 for the purchase of ten thousand machines.
Now, programs requiring large expenditures are not politically popular, unless they offer opportunities for patronage of one sort or another. The New York City Board of Education has no taxing power of its own: It depends on city appropriations and state aid. Each year the mayor and the governor seek to maneuver each other into supplying the bulk of the new money that the school system requires and shouldering the blame for the inadequacy of the amount eventually doled out. It is a game the school system seldom wins. The result is that there is seldom enough money to finance any really major innovation; what is available is dribbled away in small-scale experiments which cannot be followed up even if they succeed.
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The presence of major and pressing problems and the lack of adequate funds to deal with them produces a situation made to order for gimmickry. The basic requirement is that whatever is proposed should be, or should appear to be, cheap. It should also offer sufficient novelty to divert from the heads of those in power the wrath of groups who have reason to resent the status quo.
One such gimmick, a few years back, was the legislative removal of the entire Board of Education and the establishment of a selection panel to nominate members of a new board. In one sense it worked beautifully; the new board appointed by Mayor Robert Wagner from among those suggested by the panel was as good a Board of Education as New York City has ever had. Unfortunately, it was given neither the means nor the authority to change very much. And some of the problems which it faced could not really be solved within the framework of the school system—the problem of integration, for example.
New York's school system had never, of course, been legally segregated. But there had long been many schools with completely black student bodies, and the number was increasing rapidly as Negro immigration into the city skyrocketed while whites left for the suburbs or sent their children to private and parochial schools. (There was a corresponding decline in the number of all-white schools as the ghetto burst its boundaries.) This de facto segregation was the result of residential patterns. To fight it effectively would have required the scattering of public housing throughout the city and suburbs, as well as the rehabilitation of existing ghetto areas. It would have required the cooperation of federal, city, state, and perhaps neighboring local governments. It would have been expensive, and it would have infringed on important vested interests. It did not happen.
Instead, there were gimmicks. Some were obviously bound to fail. Thus in most cases one could almost guarantee that the “instant integration” resulting from the building of a new school on the boundary between black and white areas would quickly evaporate as the ethnic frontier shifted. Other gimmicks offered more chance of real integration in specific, if limited, situations. There were a number of places where pairing seemed capable of working for a while. But in most of these, local opposition arose and the plans were dropped. Educational parks offered some promise in a few localities, although there were relatively few suitable sites in the city. One which did exist was in Canarsie; it could have served large sections of Brownsville and East New York. But the business-oriented Lindsay administration preferred to use the site for an industrial park, and the opportunity for school integration in that area was lost.
Another gimmick, originating with the Board of Education, provided for replacement of the existing pattern of six-year elementary schools followed by three years of junior high school and three of senior high school. In its stead there were to be four years each of elementary, intermediate, and high schools. But since the existing junior high school buildings were inadequate for four grades, there was to be an interim 5-3-4 pattern. The theory was that students would be attending high schools, which had the greatest degree of integration of any section of the school system, a year earlier. At the same time it would be possible to develop feeder patterns for the new intermediate schools which would increase the degree of integration on that level.
It was a plan which had one great advantage: It was cheap. It did not, however, provide any significant integration on the intermediate school level. The new intermediate schools continued to draw the same students as the old junior highs, but a year earlier. Or rather, they would have done so if the change had actually taken place. For in fact only 3 four-year and 42 three-year intermediate schools have come into being, while there are still 96 junior high schools.
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Since the new system had been heralded as a royal road to integration, its failure to provide any integration naturally produced a good deal of frustration and resentment. One place where these feelings erupted was the new Intermediate School 201 in Harlem. In the face of protests from many elements of the community, the school had been built at Madison Avenue and 126th Street, on the border between Harlem proper and predominantly Puerto Rican East Harlem, but too far north to attract any significant number of non-Puerto Rican whites. (Integration has never been a major Puerto Rican concern, since most Puerto Ricans see their problems of adjustment as more linguistic and cultural than ethnic.)
A small group, not all of whom lived in Harlem and a number of whom were on the staff of the anti-poverty agency MEND, endeavored to channel the discontent over the choice of a site for IS 201 into a demand for a black principal. A boycott sponsored by these groups led to the setting up of a Planning Board—dominated by some of the same people who had instituted the boycott—to work out a proposal for a more or less autonomous district consisting of IS 201 and its feeder schools. While the group did not to begin with have the support of many sections of the community, overt opposition later died down. According to some parents and teachers, this was the result partly of outright intimidation and partly of the use of patronage.
The major source of this patronage was a grant from the Ford Foundation in July 1967, which was announced together with similar grants to Planning Boards for two other proposed demonstration districts, Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn and Two Bridges on the lower East Side of Manhattan. In none of these three areas had there been advance consultation with the local parents associations of the schools to be included. In Ocean Hill-Brownsville a Planning Board had emerged from the local supporters of the “Peoples' Board of Education” established by the Rev. Milton Galamison (later appointed to the central Board of Education by Mayor Lindsay). In Two Bridges, the initiative came from staff members of a local anti-poverty group who had approached the Ford Foundation for a different grant, and then asked for a grant to assist in the establishment of a demonstration school district when they learned that the Foundation was now interested in education rather than the sort of project they had originally had in mind. Although the formation of the Two Bridges district was—and still is—opposed by the parents associations of the schools included in it, the anti-poverty group received the grant and recognition from the city.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the sharp differences within the Two Bridges Local Governing Board itself and the widespread opposition to the Board within the community, the district's history has not been marked by the spectacular clashes which have characterized the IS 201 and Ocean Hill-Brownsville districts. Two Bridges is the most ethnically varied of the three districts; the two largest groups are Chinese and Puerto Rican, and there are smaller numbers of Negroes as well as remnants of the various groups of European origin who were formerly predominant in the area. In contrast, both of the other demonstration districts have Negro majorities, Puerto Rican minorities, and only scattered members of other ethnic groups.
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Although the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district eventually became the focus of a struggle which has disrupted not only the school system but the city itself, it initially seemed to have the best prospects for success. The original Planning Board had the support of the United Federation of Teachers, and teacher representatives helped to draw up the original proposals for the demonstration district. JHS 271, the key school in the district, had an unusually able principal, Dr. Jack Bloomfield. In the three years he had headed it, the school had established close ties with the community and had made substantial academic progress. Students' reading scores had improved by 3 years and 2 months and their vocabulary scores by 3 years and 7 months in a period of 2 years and 10 months. Whereas only 5 per cent had passed the algebra regents in 1965, 62 per cent passed it in 1967-10 per cent better than the citywide average. The school's magazine and newspapers had received Columbia University scholastic press awards. The school also won first prize in the Mayor's Salute to Youth for its internship program, under which students were trained for leadership in adult organizations.
The cooperative relationship which had hitherto existed between 271 and the community, however, rapidly evaporated after the Ford Foundation grant to the district. The grant was made to Father John Powis, a white Roman Catholic priest. It was Father Powis who took the lead in setting up the Planning Board, but he seems not to have waited for it to be fully constituted before taking action on its behalf. When the newly elected teacher representatives joined the Planning Board on June 29, they were told by Father Powis that Rhody McCoy had been selected as Unit Administrator.
There were other signs of rapid change as well. In June, Mrs. Elaine Rooke, as president of the Parents Association, had written in the 271 school magazine: “The teachers of the school have certainly shown you how much they too feel that you are special. . . . We have worked closely and harmoniously toward keeping Coleman Junior High School [271] among the top schools that New York City has ever had.” In July, as a member of the Planning Board, the same Mrs. Rooke was denouncing' the school in a television interview. (Although she had moved out of the district a year earlier and no longer had any children in 271 after June 1967, Mrs. Rooke served as its “parent representative” on the Planning Board and is still serving in that capacity on the Local Governing Board.)
Meanwhile, the Planning Board appears to have called meetings without notifying its teacher members; at one of these it was decided to hold a community-wide election to choose “parent representatives” from each school to serve on the Governing Board of the experimental district. This was contrary to the understanding the teachers thought they had with Father Powis, under which the parents and teachers of the individual schools would be permitted to vote in September as to whether they wished to participate in the project; only after that had they expected a community-wide election to be held.
The election was as much a surprise to the Board of Education as it was to the teachers. The Board of Education's Advisory Committee on Decentralization, headed by President John Niemeyer of the Bank Street College of Education, reported: “Movement was pushed as rapidly as possible toward local election of Project Boards, loosely defined both as to composition and function, for local special school districts equally vaguely conceived. In the case of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Demonstration Project the administration and the Board of Education suddenly were confronted early in August 1967 with the fact that an election was in full swing [emphasis mine—M.J.G.]. No guidelines or stipulations concerning legitimacy of procedure had been laid down by the Board of Education and none were expected by the local planning council. The Board of Education expected that ensuing action would await the full approval by the Board of a plan for each local project; the local representatives had no intention of waiting for such a procedure to occur, but moved to establish themselves in power.”
This contrasts sharply with the account given by Richard Karp, in an article in Interplay (August-September 1968). Karp writes as though the Planning Board had made a long and unsuccessful effort to secure Board of Education cooperation in holding an election, was unable to collect the addresses of students, and then “got sympathetic teachers to canvass students for their addresses. Then, by going from door to door, they finally got 2,000 parents registered by August.” One wonders how during the summer, when there were no students in school, “sympathetic teachers” could “canvass students for their addresses.” Did they perhaps visit them at their homes and then ask them where they lived? As it happens, we know in at least one case how the Planning Board really got the addresses; those of the two thousand children at 271 were given them by the principal, Dr. Bloomfield, with the approval of the Board of Education!
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The ensuing election itself was conducted by a staff which was paid by the Planning Board with Ford Foundation funds. To get out the vote they made use of canvassing and sound trucks. Nevertheless, only about 22 per cent of those eligible voted. Some supporters of the Governing Board have made the demonstrably false assertion that this was higher than the number who had ever voted in local elections; the usual turnout in local elections is over 70 per cent. Interestingly, those paid to get out the vote were also candidates for the Governing Board. Not surprisingly, they turned out to be the successful candidates. No formal procedures for the election or qualifications for candidates were set by the Planning Board, which also took charge of counting the vote. One result was that the “parent representatives” elected to the Governing Board from two of the schools in the district neither had children in them nor lived in the district. This did not prevent them from participating with the other “parent representatives” in the choice of “community representatives” to sit on the Board.
One wonders what theory of democratic representation, if any, can lie behind the assertion later made by Jason Epstein in the New York Review that a board so elected and constituted not only represents the community “but in a curious way embodies it.” The election itself was subsequently challenged in court, and approximately twice as many parents as had voted in the original election petitioned for a new one. Perhaps “in a curious way” they felt disembodied. (A public opinion poll taken in the district in the spring of 1968 showed that 29 per cent of the parents supported the Governing Board and that 24 per cent supported the teachers, while the rest were not sure where they stood. A third of those polled felt that they would get into trouble by taking a stand against the Board.) In any event, no new election was ever held; the Board's term of office is undefined.
In addition to choosing the “community representatives,” the “parent representatives” also tried to induce the teachers who had been elected to the original Planning Board to consider themselves as “teacher representatives” on the Governing Board. The teachers, on the other hand, claimed that they had no mandate and therefore could not vote on the Governing Board. They nevertheless attended meetings—or, to be more exact, those meetings to which they were invited. Although they were placed under great pressure to vote when they were present and sometimes yielded, their participation in discussions was discouraged by denunciations and charges of sabotage when they offered criticisms or raised questions. (The UFT later adopted a general position opposed to teacher membership on local governing boards on the ground that it could involve a conflict of interest.)
After the election, the Governing Board hastened to ratify the nomination of Rhody McCoy as Unit Administrator; this was accepted by the Board of Education. It also proposed the names of five principals to fill vacancies at four existing schools and one, Intermediate School 55, which was still under construction. None of those proposed was on the existing civil-service list for principals, a fact which subsequently gave rise to a court challenge to their appointment.2 The five did meet state certification standards; this simply means that they had some teaching experience and had taken certain courses.
No personal objections were raised against four of them; they were unknown. One—the first to be named—was very well known, however. Herman Ferguson, proposed as principal of the new IS 55, had been suspended from his job as an assistant principal after being indicted on a charge of conspiring to murder Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, and others. (He has subsequently been convicted and is now appealing the conviction.) He had distinguished himself by charging that the school at which he had previously been employed—an MES school whose students had reading scores substantially above the normal grade level—with “educational genocide.” Ferguson was not only nominated as a principal but worked with McCoy in drawing up plans for the district and interviewing possible appointees.
The Board of Education accepted the other principals nominated, but never approved Ferguson. He was nevertheless kept by the local board as “Principal of Record” for some months. (During the same period he also served as a paid consultant to the IS 201 Local Governing Board, which dropped him only when it became clear that the Board would get neither official recognition nor further Ford Foundation money as long as Ferguson remained.) Ferguson's role certainly did not contribute to the development of a climate of confidence, nor can Mr. McCoy and the Ocean-Hill Brownsville Governing Board have expected that it would.
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The 1967-68 school year opened with a teachers' strike. For months the UFT had made it clear that in the absence of a satisfactory offer on salaries and, more important, on the extension of the More Effective Schools Program, it would have to go out. (A good deal of nonsense has been written about this strike by anti-union propagandists. For example, a pamphlet published by the New York Civil Liberties Union and purporting to be a factual account of the controversy3 assets that “the Local Governing Board perceived the strike as a show of power aimed against Ocean Hill-Brownsville and specifically in relation to its hiring of the 5 principals.” If the Local Governing Board had perceived the strike that way, it would have been a clear sign either of ignorance or hopeless paranoia. In fairness to the Governing Board, I have seen no statement from anyone connected with it which would justify the Nyclu's assertion.) A settlement on economic issues was quickly arrived at, but the strike continued for some days because of the union's demand for improvements in the quality of ghetto schools.
The strike was thus essentially one for the interests of the black and Puerto Rican communities, and the teachers hoped for their support. But it was presented by the mayor, with the unstinting aid of the news media, as a strike against those communities, since theirs were a majority of the children unable to attend school. (In a number of areas, especially underprivileged ones, union teachers working without pay conducted emergency schools in settlement houses, churches, etc. This was also done in the 1968 strike. The number of students attending these emergency schools was only a fraction of the normal school enrolment, although it appears to have been substantially above the attendance at those public schools which were nominally “open.”) The same antiunion point of view was also pushed by various “militant” and “black power” organizations, as well as by the city anti-poverty machinery, in which leaders of such groups had important positions.
The teacher members of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Planning Board asked the new Governing Board to support the 1967 strike on the ground that it was primarily aimed at securing improvements in ghetto schools. The Governing Board not only refused but attempted, with little success, to recruit parent help in an effort to break it. In this it had the cooperation of Robert “Sonny” Carson, head of Brooklyn CORE (who later left national CORE after its convention had refused to adopt various resolutions he was backing, including one for all-black schools in the ghettos and another for the establishment of a separate black nation in certain parts of the United States). Carson and his friends tried to intimidate striking teachers; he warned them against attempting to return to the district after the strike ended. Under the circumstances, it was only the efforts of the United Federation of Teachers to persuade its members to return after the strike that made it possible to staff the district's schools.
Tensions never disappeared in the district, but for a while they seemed to die down. In some schools excellent working relationships developed between the teachers and the acting principals nominated by the Governing Board and approved by the Board of Education. Meanwhile, negotiations on the setting up of the demonstration district were going on between the Local Governing Board, which as yet had no recognized legal status, and the Board of Education.
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The original proposal agreed on by the Planning Board had been modified during the summer without the participation of the Board's teacher members and was submitted to the Board of Education on August 29. One major change was the elimination of a section providing that the elementary schools in the district be brought under the MES program. It is not certain who was responsible for the change, but it did bring the proposal into line with the position of Superintendent of Schools Bernard Donovan that the experimental districts should receive no better financial treatment than other comparable areas. Donovan argued that if they received favored treatment the results achieved would not be a test of the value of decentralization. (In fact, however, Ocean Hill-Brownsville has received a considerably higher per capita allowance than other comparable areas, though it has no MES program.)
The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Governing Board and its defenders have maintained that it was unable to function because the Board of Education refused to clarify its powers. The implication in such accounts as the NYCLU report and Richard Karp's article in Interplay (as well as in the articles of those like Murray Kempton and Jason Epstein who have been content with the Governing Board's version of the facts at every point) is that the Ocean Hill Board was desperately attempting to get the Board of Education to define what it might and might not do, while the latter refused to give it a hint. According to this version, all the subsequent troubles originated from a confusion which the central Board had deliberately created and could have dispelled at any time.
What actually happened was rather different. The Ocean Hill Board submitted its proposal on August 29—after it had installed Rhody McCoy as Unit Administrator, conducted elections without consulting the central Board, and nominated Herman Ferguson and four others as principals. The proposal was received by the Board of Education on September 1, and on the same day representatives of the central Board conferred with Mr. McCoy on the questions involved. This was the first of some twenty such conferences which took place before the Board of Education finally, in February 1968, issued guidelines (drawn up by the Niemeyer Committee) for the decentralized districts.
These meetings were held in an effort to reach agreement between the Board of Education and the Local Governing Board. The problem was not that the Board of Education was unwilling to clarify the powers of the Governing Board; it was that the latter was unwilling to accept the clarification. It continued to demand that the Board of Education transfer powers to it which the latter had no legal right to transfer and in certain cases did not even possess. (For instance, one of the things the Local Board wanted was the right to maintain its own bank accounts and draw its own checks; all Board of Education funds are in city bank accounts administered by the Comptroller, who pays out money against Board of Education vouchers.) It is worth noting, however, that one of the things the Governing Board did not ask for, and which was therefore never an issue, was the right unilaterally to transfer teachers out of the district or to dismiss them without a hearing.4 The attempt to attribute the Governing Board's subsequent actions in this respect to any confusion over the extent of its powers is obviously fraudulent.
The guidelines finally issued gave the Local Boards all the powers the central Board felt it was legally entitled to delegate. These did not satisfy the Local Boards, and have been violently attacked by their apologists. Thus the NYCLU pamphlet charges that the Board of Education “scuttled the experiment” with guidelines that “completely emasculated the experiment by stripping the Local Governing Board of virtually all of its substantive powers.” The Niemeyer report is rather closer to the truth: “The suggested guidelines prepared by this Committee attempted to formulate the actual authority to be delegated to the Project Boards. In March 1968, however, the three Demonstration Projects agreed upon a consensus document which demanded full authority, although the Board of Education could not go beyond the legal limits placed upon it by the State Education Law. . . . in some local communities militant groups may be expected to continue to demand powers for which no one yet has proposed legislation. That is, in order for those who want to control all aspects of their local schools to accomplish their objectives, legislative changes would be required that would seriously affect many legal and contractual relationships affecting conditions of employment, such as tenure, that go far beyond the power presently held by the Board of Education” [emphasis mine—M.J.G.].5
In the meantime, the Ocean Hill Board was consolidating its control of the district's schools, where personnel changes were occurring at a rapid pace. Only one of the seven principals who had been serving in the district in the previous school year was still there at the opening of the spring semester. Largely because of the efforts of the UFT to persuade teachers to remain, changes on the classroom level had been relatively few. At the time, Mr. McCoy seemed anxious to retain the experienced teachers then in the district.
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But the problems of Ocean Hill and the other demonstration districts might have been gradually worked out, or they might have developed to a point where the experiment would have been recognized as a failure, without involving the entire city, if it had not been for the simultaneous controversy over proposals for decentralizing the entire school system. Suddenly the demonstration districts were seen by supporters and critics of the various decentralization plans—and by themselves—as a microcosm of the entire city's problems. It was not a situation conducive to quiet and orderly compromise.
Although there had in the past been many proposals to shift authority in the school system from central headquarters to the districts, and the Board of Education had taken some steps in this direction in 1965, the idea of drastic decentralization had originally been brought forward less for educational than for fiscal reasons. The formula for the distribution of state aid to schools was such that breaking up the New York school system, at least formally, could increase the amount of aid to which the city schools were entitled. A proposal to establish five borough school systems for this purpose was advanced by Dr. Marilyn Gittell in 1966 in a report prepared, significantly, for the Temporary Commission on City Finances.
It seems likely that Dr. Gittell's suggestion was the origin of Mayor Lindsay's request to the state legislature, in March 1967, that it divide the city school system into five borough systems, but only for the calculation of state aid. The idea was not too kindly received in Albany, since any additional aid received by the city would decrease the amount available for other parts of the state. But, apparently through the intervention of the governor, a compromise was reached under which the division would be made provided that the mayor submit a plan for actual decentralization by December 1.
One effect of this which the legislators may not have taken into consideration—though one may suspect that Mr. Lindsay was fully aware of it—was that it suddenly catapulted the mayor into a central role in regard to the operation of an educational system over which he had no direct legal authority. The insulation of the schools from the power of the mayor was the result of a long struggle to free them from the grip of political hacks. To Mr. Lindsay, who had been multiplying high-salaried patronage posts at a rate unequaled by any other administration in recent years, the independence of the school system appears to have been a source of considerable frustration. Although the Board of Education (with State Commissioner Allen's backing) objected that planning the school system was its function rather than the mayor's, and the New York Times charged that the bill constituted political interference with education, the mayor said that it was too late to make any changes. While the bill was still before the legislature, the Board of Education offered its own plan of administrative decentralization, designed to give more autonomy to district superintendents and principals and a greater voice to local school boards. The Times urged the mayor to accept it.
The mayor, instead, appointed a committee headed by McGeorge Bundy of the Ford Foundation to draw up a plan. Of the Committee's members only Alfred Giardino, then president of the Board of Education, had any personal experience with the New York school system. On November 9 the Committee, with Mr. Giardino dissenting, presented a proposal for the establishment of thirty to sixty largely autonomous school districts controlled by community school boards; each of these was to have eleven members, of whom five would be appointed by the mayor and six chosen by local selection panels who would in turn be chosen by parent assemblies in the various schools. There would still be a central board which would conduct collective bargaining negotiations, set some standards, administer special and vocational high schools, make lump sum allocations to the districts from a central budget, and perform any other services for districts that these desired to obtain from it. Local boards would be entitled to recruit personnel subject only to state standards, to use their budgets for whatever purposes seemed to them desirable (e.g., shifting funds between instruction and building maintenance), to determine such matters as curriculum (subject to minimum state and perhaps city requirements) and class size, and to incur financial obligations. Central purchasing services would be available but the local boards would not be required to use them; it was not clear what this would do to existing requirements for competitive bidding.
In view of the Ocean Hill controversy it is worth mentioning that, although the Bundy committee wanted prime responsibility for recruitment and sole responsibility for the granting of tenure (except to those employed in centrally administered services) to rest with the community boards, this did not apply to dismissals and transfers. The committee proposed that while charges might be brought by local boards, all hearings on the charges were to be conducted under the auspices of the central board. And the plan provided that “No person presently holding a tenured appointment as a teacher may be transferred out of a district without his own consent; he may be transferred by the community board between schools within the district, but must be placed in a similar position.”
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The Bundy plan, as it was generally called, quickly became the center of a storm of controversy. One of its sharpest critics was Borough President Herman Badillo of the Bronx, a leading spokesman for the Puerto Rican community. He declared: “I can't think of anything that would be more conducive to civil strife. The election of local neighborhood boards would create strife because in many areas candidates would be running on ethnic lines. It makes no sense at all. . . . It assumes a civil stability which doesn't exist. It's an incredible proposal. It shows a lack of understanding of New York City today. There are many groups that don't get along. In many parts of the city busing would be abolished and extremists would be running for office.” Badillo added that the Bundy plan would introduce the same sort of disruption in the educational system that had prevented the anti-poverty program from functioning properly anywhere in the city.
The Board of Education asserted that “Hiring by thirty to sixty different school districts of teachers and others could increase political, racial, and religious interference in the selection process.” One Board member, John A. Lotz (who has since become one of the more extreme advocates of community control and chairman of the Board's committee on decentralization), warned that giving local boards the power to hire and fire would let teachers shop around and the experienced ones would wind up concentrated in middle-class neighborhoods. The Bundy report had argued against the likelihood of this danger by postulating that decentralized districts in disadvantaged neighborhoods would possess an attractiveness for which there was then no objective evidence and which subsequent experience contradicts.
President Albert Shanker of the UFT, while crediting the plan with good features which would help to loosen the existing bureaucratic rigidity of the Board of Education, warned that other aspects could promote “years of chaos and eventual destruction of the city's school system.” Pointing out that the proposals would give the mayor effective control of all positions in the school system without any restrictions from the merit system, he called the plan “the greatest piece of political patronage ever perpetrated.” And he expressed the fear that “Negro teachers would be hired in Negro areas and white teachers in white areas,” while in many districts “extremists would have veto power.” Editorially, the Times wrote: “The major worry, expressed independently by Board and union, appears to be the protection of school administrators and teachers against improper interference by political or racist-extremist pressure groups. This is an entirely legitimate area of concern. It would be indefensible indeed to exchange the present unsatisfactory system of staffing with an equally unsatisfactory system that would place racial considerations above educational effectiveness.” To some, such a system seemed not “equally unsatisfactory” but a great deal more so.
The Executive Committee of the UFT met with Mr. Bundy and offered a decentralization plan of its own. This provided that there should be not more than fifteen districts “to insure the possibility of integration within each district and to reduce administrative costs.” Each local board would be fully elected by the parents of the district and would have the authority to choose its superintendent. Teachers would be selected on the basis of the National Teachers Examination, and appointments to the districts would be made by the central board from a ranked list on the basis of vacancies.
Rejecting this proposal, Mayor Lindsay submitted to the legislature a decentralization plan which differed only slightly from the Bundy plan. A few months later the Board of Regents offered yet another modification of the same basic plan, extending the number of contemplated local districts to as many as a hundred. The mayor then threw his support to the Regents' plan instead of his own; this was not surprising, since it gave him even more power than the previous proposals. Giardino, the UFT, and the United Parents Associations expressed their opposition to the Regents' plan, with the union urging passage instead of a bill introduced by State Senator John Marchi authorizing the Board of Education to transfer certain powers to the existing local school boards of the city's thirty districts, and directing it to prepare a definitive plan of decentralization for submission to the next legislature.
In the midst of the controversy over decentralization, relatively little attention was paid to an event with somewhat more immediate impact on the schools, the city budget director's announcement—made appropriately on April 1—that funds for education would be cut by 10 per cent. All funds for educational improvements were eliminated, and the appropriation for mandatory expenses was sharply cut—which meant that the money to meet them had to be found by reducing expenditures for existing programs. The city administration obviously found decentralization a pleasanter subject to discuss than money. (Yet the Bundy report had stressed that “Decentralization is no substitute for other deeply needed changes—and in particular it is no substitute for the massive infusion of funds which the school system now needs. . . .”) The next day the three demonstration project boards threatened a school boycott—not as a protest against the gutting of the school budget but to enforce the demand that the powers they sought be transferred to them at once, despite the fact that no one had the legal authority to do so. Some days later the Ocean Hill Board actually called such a boycott; it was successful at JHS 271 and IS 55, although a majority of the children in the district's elementary schools went in.
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This was the background against which the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Governing Board suddenly notified nineteen teachers and supervisors—by letters sent to their classrooms on May 9 without prior discussion of any sort—that their services in the district were terminated forthwith and that they were to report to the headquarters of the Board of Education for “reassignment.” The Board of Education, which had received no more notice of this directive than had the teachers, immediately declared the action of the Governing Board illegal and directed the teachers to report to work as usual.
Since this incident triggered the conflict which led to the UFT strikes at the beginning of the 1968-69 school year, it is worth examining in detail. As has been pointed out by both the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court and Federal District Judge Anthony Travia, the Local Governing Board at the period in question still had no legal status and had been granted no authority. It was in de facto control of the district's schools only because those with legal authority—the Board of Education and the Superintendent of Schools—were carrying out its decisions.
The Governing Board was quite conscious of its lack of legal authority, but was still determined to assert its power. In her memorandum recommending the “removal” of the nineteen, the Governing Board's Personnel Chairman, Mrs. Clara Marshall, wrote: “We were constantly told that our demands ‘were opposed to state laws’ but we found that the people in the street considered these laws written to protect the monied white power structure of this city.” And she added: “So we will have to make our own rules for our own schools. Enforcement of these rules will have to be carried out by the people of the community.”
The question was not even one of actual, as opposed to theoretical, control over staffing. For, as Dr. John Niemeyer stated in the press conference in which he made his report public, the Board of Education had offered to arrange quiet transfers for any teachers the Local Board did not want. According to the New York Times of September 14, 1968:
He said the offer was made last spring before any controversy had developed over the Governing Board's power to make such transfers. But [he] asserted that the Governing Board was determined to prove it had control of the schools by circumventing normal procedure and announcing that 19 teachers and supervisors must be reassigned elsewhere.
Mr. Niemeyer . . . said the United Federation of Teachers would not have objected to the transfers if they had been made routinely. “It would have been worked out; it's done all the time,” he added.
The Rev. C. Herbert Oliver, chairman of the Governing Board, declined to comment last night on Mr. Niemeyer's assertion. “I don't recall any promise,” he said, “but I won't deny it.” (Emphasis mine—M J.G.)
The procedure followed was not only without legal warrant; it was also a violation of Mr. McCoy's public pledge that if teachers were not desired in the district, he would “see to it that they are transferred out only after due process.” One may also note that the Bundy plan provided that “No person presently holding a tenured appointment as a teacher may be transferred out of a district without his consent.” And, as we have already seen, the dismissal of the teachers was a violation of the Governing Board's own by-law.
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Yet granted that the Local Board wished to assert its power by defying the law and the central Board, why did it choose this particular time and mode? Several answers suggest themselves. One is Richard Karp's idea, in his article in Interplay, that the Governing Board was probably encouraged to act as it did by the mayor and other sympathetic members of the establishment. On most questions Mr. Karp is not a very reliable authority. But since almost all his information appears to come from Ocean Hill officials, his statement may indicate that the latter at least thought they had the mayor's support in their action. It is hard to believe that the mayor could have wished to encourage the Governing Board in a course with such an explosive potential, although the Ocean Hill situation certainly diverted attention from his maiming of the education budget. There has been speculation, however, to the effect that without Mr. Lindsay's authorization a member of his staff might have appeared to have committed him to support of the Governing Board. At any rate, it is an interesting coincidence that David Seeley departed from his post as the mayor's chief educational adviser before the beginning of the new school term.
But there is an additional explanation of the course of action that the Governing Board took in dismissing the teachers. On the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the principal of 271, Mr. William Harris, called an assembly. In his opening remarks he said that the white teachers might leave if they wished; they remained. Mrs. Elaine Rooke, president of the Parents Association and a member of the Local Governing Board, and Walter Lynch, its community liaison officer, spoke. So did Leslie Campbell, vice president of the African-American Teachers Association. Among other things, Campbell told the children: “Brothers and sisters, you have to stop fighting among yourselves. You save your money and finally get enough for a leather jacket and your brother steals it. You've got to get your minds together. You know who to steal from. If you steal, steal from those who have it—stop fighting among yourselves.” He was also reported to have made a number of other statements, some of them highly inflammatory, but in regard to these his version differs from that of others who were present. Following the assembly there were a number of incidents of violence. A young woman teacher was attacked by students who punched her, tore out her hair, and ripped her dress. (She had reportedly been taking down signs which read: “Martin Luther King was killed by a vicious white man—Prepare yourselves.”) A male teacher was knocked unconscious and had to be taken to the hospital. Another, attempting to go to another school, was pelted with beer cans, punched, and chased back into the school building.
The union chapter at 271 protested to Unit Administrator McCoy and asked that Campbell be removed from the school, that inflammatory signs be banned, and that community leaders explain to students in an assembly that white teachers were not the enemy. Mr. McCoy said that he would have to discuss the requests with the Governing Board. The termination notices to the teachers may have been the Governing Board's answer. As to Mr. Campbell, his reply was perhaps given in a statement he issued together with Albert Vann, President of the African-American Teachers Association, on April 15: “What courses of action are open to the parents and community leaders of the Demonstration School Project? We see only one. Disregard the New York City Board of Education and assume whatever powers you can in running your schools. Hire and fire the teachers and administrators of your schools. Revise your curriculum to fit the needs of your community. . . . While you are legally fighting for other powers assume those that you can legitimately assume.” (Emphasis in original.)
When the teachers returned to their schools in accordance with the instructions of the Board of Education, they were faced at 271 and two other schools by mobs assembled by the Governing Board with the assistance of Brooklyn CORE and others, reportedly including officials of the anti-poverty program. A series of confrontations followed. At first neither the police nor the Board of Education acted. Then the teachers were temporarily escorted in by police, but as rioting continued the affected schools were closed down by the city. Mr. McCoy and the Local Governing Board responded by closing down the entire district. A boycott of seven other schools in support of the Ocean Hill Board was called by the Rev. Milton Galamison, whose organization SCOPE had received $160,000 from the Ford Foundation to develop community action on the schools. The Galamison boycott fizzled.
In view of the stress later placed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and other partisans of the Ocean Hill Board on the contention that the teachers were merely being “transferred,” it is worth noting that Mr. McCoy was quoted by the New York Times of May 16 as declaring: “Not one of these teachers will be allowed to teach anywhere in this city. The black community will see to that.” (Emphasis mine—M.J.G.) He had already accused the teachers of “insubordination” when they reported to their schools in accordance with the instructions of the Board of Education, and had demanded that they be placed on departmental trial.
Mr. McCoy was very reluctant to file formal charges against the teachers, however, asserting that he did not wish to “smear” them. This commendable wish did not prevent him from listing new charges—but never with specifications or evidence—for each interviewer. The original accusation that the teachers had tried to “sabotage” the demonstration district was supplemented by such charges as discriminating between Negro and Puerto Rican students, disregarding the safety of the students, and letting them run wild in order to discredit the experiment.
The role of Superintendent of Schools Bernard Donovan, whose responsibility it was to see that the Board of Education's policies were carried out, can only be called an ambiguous one. Repeatedly he announced decisions and then withdrew them, made threats and then failed to carry them out. Thus on May 20 he suddenly ordered the teachers to hearings before the State Mediation Board; the UFT demanded that he follow normal procedure, under which the teachers would be given three days notice of charges before hearings. The next day some 350 other teachers from the district accompanied the thirteen to the Board of Education. Donovan canceled the proposed hearings and directed the teachers to return to their schools on the ground that Mr. McCoy had failed to submit charges. Mr. McCoy, for his part, denied that he had ever promised to submit written charges. He claimed that the Governing Board was willing to give the teachers fair hearings, but was adamant about not taking them back.
When the 13 dismissed teachers returned once again to 271, they found Mrs. Rooke and others telling the pupils to leave; several hundred of the children did. Soon after, Principal William Harris dismissed the school. No trouble developed at other schools. The next morning, May 22, the 350 teachers who had supported the 13 found letters in their mailboxes from Mr. McCoy. He wrote: “We are offering fair hearings to all teachers if the teachers and the Union are willing to support total community control.” (Emphasis mine—M.J.G.) And he directed all 350 to report to his office—which could not have held a tenth of them—at 9 A.M., “to sit with the Governing Board to clarify their working with this Board in recognition of community control.”
The teachers went home, and UFT President Shanker announced on May 23 that they would not return until they were guaranteed that they could teach their classes. On the same day Superintendent Donovan directed the principals of all the schools in the district to let the teachers return to class or face charges of insubordination; on that day, too, Mr. McCoy denied that any teachers had been prevented from entering the schools. But on May 24 he again declared that he would not let the teachers return under any circumstances, adding that he realized he was disobeying orders and faced charges of insubordination.
In response to Superintendent Donovan's pledge to act against any administrator interfering with the return of any teacher, the UFT asked the teachers to resume work on May 26. But the next day, after Mr. McCoy had announced that he was “suspending” seven of the original thirteen teachers and Superintendent Donovan had said that this meant nothing, the UFT charged the Superintendent with bad faith. (It was at this time that Mr. McCoy finally presented formal charges against the seven teachers in question.)
On June 14 Judge Francis E. Rivers, whom the Board had chosen as a hearing officer to try the charges against the teachers, recommended that seven of the remaining eleven—two had meanwhile dropped out—be permitted to return to their classes because the charges against them were not serious; the others, he said, should be assigned to the Board of Education pending the disposition of their cases. But the Governing Board still refused to take any of the teachers back and Superintendent Donovan, who had threatened to close the schools of the district in case of continued defiance, said that he would not do so because he did not wish to penalize the children who were still attending them.
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Not surprisingly, the developments in Ocean Hill had by this time made many legislators in Albany skeptical of the whole idea of decentralization. The UFT has been charged with trying to sabotage decentralization while paying lip service to it. What the union in fact opposed, and lobbied against, was the Regents' plan, and it made no secret of its reasons. “Breaking the school system up into 20 to 100 districts is a segregationist move. It leads to ethnic and racial domination of particular districts. This is apartheid education for living in an apartheid world. This is the kind of education that leads to Watts and Newark, to hate and violence, to crime and chaos. . . .
Such districts would compete for public and private funds, employing Madison Avenue techniques and educational gimmickry to gain an edge. There would be competition for good teachers too—on an ethnic or racial or political basis. Make no mistake about it: The result will be a more vicious inequality in the distribution of teaching talent. Many teachers will leave the school system altogether. Who will suffer most? Minority groups and the poor. . . .
No reform can be abstracted from the circumstances of its proposed implementation. The tendencies to polarization and extremism in our society would, under the proposed decentralization, be virulently concentrated in our schools. Racial animosity, petty factionalism, and grasping ambition would dominate the atmosphere. Our schools would be transformed from centers of learning into maelstroms of ideological and emotional conflict. This is already the scene at IS 201 and elsewhere. . . .
Decentralization is both necessary and inevitable. But it should not mean destructive fragmentation of the City. The number of local school districts should be kept under 15 in order to reduce administrative costs and to insure the possibility of Integration. This cannot be achieved overnight but much can be done. The Coleman Report and the Civil Rights Commission Report show that what children learn from each other and their social interaction in the classroom setting is a more important variable in academic success than textbooks (or teachers). . . .
Money is no more a panacea than decentralization. It does not answer complex questions about the learning process itself. But it is the precondition, the sine qua non, of improving educational quality—no matter who controls the schools.
The Regents' plan, whatever chance it might have had before the Ocean Hill events because of its massive backing from the city administration and certain big business groups, was now effectively dead. (A small group of legislators from upper-income districts threatened to stage a sit-in in the governor's office to force its passage; they got as far as the headlines and no further.) But it is important to recognize that decentralization itself would probably, at least for the time being, have died along with the Regents' bill if the UFT had not continued to support the Marchi bill, which had been modified to permit the mayor to appoint four additional members to the existing Board of Education and to authorize the continuation of the demonstration projects. In the form in which it was finally adopted, it also authorized the Board of Education to delegate a wide range of powers to existing local boards and the three demonstration districts for the 1968-69 school year. Meanwhile the Board was to draw up a definitive plan of decentralization for submission to the 1969 legislature.
The summer was devoted largely to preparations for future warfare; little effort was made to reach a settlement of either the Ocean Hill dispute or of differences on the broader issues. Mayor Lindsay appointed his four new members and a fifth to fill the vacancy resulting from the expiration of the term of former Board President Alfred Giardino. Later he was able to make three more new appointments, which finally gave him control of the Board.
Of all the new appointments, by far the most important was that of Mr. Galamison. He was the ablest and most experienced of the new members, he knew what he wanted, and he had a large staff—which he moved into Board of Education headquarters—paid for by SCOPE with its Ford Foundation grant. He also could, and did, mobilize the forces of Brooklyn CORE and similar groups to give him extra-legal support when he felt that would be useful. And through such former lieutenants as Thelma Johnson and Major Owens, who held key posts in the anti-poverty machinery, he was also able to bring that machinery into play to bolster his hand.
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Just before the schools were opened for the 1968-69 year, the UFT voted to strike. The extension of the strike from the Ocean Hill district to the entire city was partly the result of the UFT'S desire to have clauses protecting the rights of teachers inserted into the decentralization plan, and partly of the fact that the resources of the central Board had been used to help Ocean Hill replace the striking teachers. While Mr. McCoy had repeatedly stated that he had more than enough applicants for posts to fill the jobs of the 350 teachers in the district who had walked out in support of those he had sought to dismiss, this turned out not to be the case. When special examinations were held, in which the candidates were to apply directly to Mr. McCoy, only nineteen showed up. But with the aid of the recruiting facilities of the central Board, he was subsequently able to obtain replacements for all 350, although almost all of them were substitutes and most had obtained their licenses through emergency examinations. (Of the teachers in Ocean Hill at the opening of the current term, roughly four-fifths were substitutes as compared to about 30 per cent the previous year. Many of them seemed unlikely to stay in teaching for very long; they were young men trained for professions which did not carry draft deferment, while teaching in underprivileged areas did.)
On August 26 Judge Rivers presented his final verdict, which was accepted by Superintendent Donovan on September 5. Of the eleven teachers whose cases were referred to Judge Rivers, one did not appear for the hearings. The charges against three teachers—Cliff Rosenthal, Barry Goodman, and UFT District Chairman Frederick Nauman—were dismissed when the counsel for the Ocean Hill Board stated that he had no evidence to offer against them; in all three cases the charges were essentially that they had expressed opposition to the project and had contributed to the growing hostility between Negro and white teachers. In the other seven cases Judge Rivers ruled either that the charges were inadequate to justify disciplinary action even if proved, or that the evidence which was presented did not support the charges.
After two days the initial strike ended with an agreement which appeared to cover all the points in dispute. The Board of Education stated its belief that “the Governing Board will act in good faith and that their public assurance to the mayor at City Hall on Sunday will be honored. To the Board of Education this means that each teacher who wants to return to his former school and to his professional assignment will not be prevented from doing so, and that these actions will be carried out in good faith and without reprisal.”
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Everything was apparently settled, and Mr. McCoy declared that the teachers could return. But when they showed up at their schools they were met by mobs organized by the Governing Board and including members of that body as well as numerous individuals brought in from outside by “Sonny” Carson and others.
Teachers had to be escorted into 271 by the police, because Carson and others had blocked the door. They were then all sent to one room where a group including Carson denounced and threatened them. Then they were summoned to meet Mr. McCoy in the auditorium of IS 55; they found there a group of “community” people who shouted such things as: “If you try to enter the schools we'll throw lye in your face.” “Wait until we get the lights out—you'll be very visible.” (The lights in the auditorium were turned out several times while the teachers were there.) “Some of you will be going out in pine boxes.” Some teachers were hit or shoved.
When the teachers returned to 271 they were again blocked by a mob, again including members of the Governing Board, among them Mrs. Marshall and Mrs. Rooke; again the police had to escort them in. After school they were told the new teachers wished to meet them; when they went to join these teachers, the latter subjected them to the same kind of abuse as before. None of the returning teachers was given his normal teaching duties.
Mr. McCoy announced he could not guarantee the safety of the returning teachers. And Governing Board Chairman Oliver asserted that he could not control the community's opposition to the teachers, and that he hoped the community would again block the entry of the teachers on the following day. He also denied that he had ever promised the mayor that the teachers would be allowed to return to actual classroom duties. Meanwhile the Board of Education, by a vote of 7-2, approved the agreement with the UFT.
But the agreement remained on paper. Because it was sabotaged by the Governing Board, and because the Board of Education and the city administration failed to take any effective steps to enforce it, the union went back out on strike after two days. Again there were intensive negotiations and a new agreement was reached on September 29. The teachers were to be returned to the district and observers from the Board of Education and the UFT, as well as from the mayor's office, were to be present in all the schools. The Governing Board did not even pretend to accept this agreement; when the teachers returned they were again met with mob action, threats, and violence in which members of the Governing Board took an active part, as did certain individual teachers. The Governing Board even announced that it was sending its own observers into the schools—and gave credentials to “Sonny” Carson and persons associated with him. A flying squadron of pupils and teachers from 271, led by Albert Vann, marched to other schools to intimidate the teachers there.
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But this time the Board of Education and the mayor did try, initially, to enforce the agreement. First Mr. McCoy and then the principals were suspended for sabotaging it. This was followed, however, by more rioting at 271. Outsiders permitted by the police to enter the school after having been “identified” as “parents” by Walter Lynch, the Governing Board's community liaison officer, harassed teachers and observers. One Board of Education observer was threatened with death. The office of Mrs. Evelyn Farrar, a Negro assistant principal who had been designated as acting principal by the Board of Education, was invaded in relays throughout the day by groups of outsiders and “militants” among the McCoy-appointed teachers. They denounced and threatened her; the threats had special meaning for her because on one previous occasion she had been hit by a board—it narrowly missed her head—dropped twenty feet from a projection booth which was supposed to be unoccupied at the time but in which one of the “militant” teachers and a student belonging to the same group were actually present. At the end of the day Mrs. Farrar had had enough; she requested a transfer out of the district. Following this incident, the Board of Education closed down 271. For the rest of the week education proceeded in the other schools of the district.
But on Friday evening Superintendent Donovan suddenly announced his intention of reopening 271 and restoring the suspended principals on Monday, despite the absence of any pledge on their part to honor the agreement. This decision was taken without any advance consultation with the UFT—and without notifying the then president of the Board of Education, Mrs. Rose Shapiro. It apparently reflected the fact that during the week a majority of the Board had agreed to replace Mrs. Shapiro with one of the new appointees, John Doar, and to make Milton Galamison vice-president. Whether the new Board officers gave the Superintendent instructions without waiting until they had actually been elected, or whether Dr. Donovan simply anticipated what he believed to be their wishes, is not clear. In any case the UFT'S reaction was that it had been double-crossed once again, this time by the Board of Education and the mayor. By Sunday night the UFT'S Executive Board, its Delegate Assembly, and its membership had all voted overwhelmingly in favor of going out on strike Monday morning for the third time. The union now said that it would not go back unless the Governing Board, Mr. McCoy, and the principals were kept suspended at least until peace was established in the district; it also demanded the suspension and trial of four teachers at 271 accused of harassing and threatening others.
A new factor now entered the situation. Mayor Lindsay, although he had no love for the union—or indeed for public service unions in general—seems to have been considerably more interested in arriving at a settlement than his appointees to the Board of Education were. On more than one occasion he suggested compromise formulas only to have his own appointees on the Board vote them down. Board meetings reportedly were devoted almost entirely to discussion of ways to break the strike; ways of settling it did not concern the new members. Indeed, in the negotiations which preceded the first strike, an old member who sided with the new appointees, John Lotz, threatened in so many words to break the union. He had been regarded as the mayor's candidate for the Board Presidency; his frankness may have caused the mayor to change his mind.
State Commissioner Allen was also brought into the discussions on a number of occasions. He proposed the institution of a trusteeship for the Ocean Hill district under which Mr. McCoy and the principals would be in charge but would be supervised by a representative of the commissioner's office. This did not satisfy the union for two reasons; it did not believe that the presence of a trustee would bring Mr. McCoy and the principals into line, and it did not trust the commissioner, who had never liked unions and had taken an extreme position in favor of local hiring and firing without regard to civil-service regulations. There was increasing public pressure for a special session of the state legislature to end the impasse by repealing the decentralization law and wiping out the demonstration districts. The UFT itself, which had hesitated to support a special session precisely because it feared that decentralization of any sort would be killed, finally decided that there was no other recourse in the face of the intransigence of Ocean Hill and the crescendo of attacks to which the union was being subjected by the city administration, the Board of Education, and the “corporate” establishment, as well as its intellectual hangers-on, in general. (It has been suggested that the union feared that a special session world have resulted in more drastic anti-strike legislation. That could only have happened if the call had included amendment of the Taylor law; it is most unlikely that Governor Rockefeller would have subjected his alliance with labor to that strain.) But the governor, who had the power to call a special session, was not eager to do so; he preferred to let his rival in city hall struggle to extricate himself from the mess. After all, when the governor had imposed a settlement in the sanitation workers strike, the mayor had made political capital out of a demagogic attack on his rescuer. So Mr. Rockefeller simply said that the mayor had all the powers he needed to settle the strike, and let the possibility of a special session continue to hang over his head.
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Even in the absence of a special session, however, the potential role of the legislature was still an important factor. For the regular session would begin in January, and it was becoming increasingly clear that in the absence of significant concessions to the UFT the strike would still be on at that time. The union membership was in no mood for surrender, nor was there any sign of a crack in its solidarity. The almost frantic efforts of some Board of Education members, and various groups of “concerned parents,” produced a nominal 7-9,000 teachers in the theoretically open schools (as compared with an average of 18,000 during the 1967 strike when the issues were economic and educational; this time the teachers felt that they were fighting for their lives, professionally and perhaps even literally). Of these, according to reliable sources at the Board of Education, fewer than 3,000 were regularly appointed teachers. Some of the others were day-by-day substitutes, while some were people with long-dormant substitute licenses or suddenly acquired emergency ones who had entered the schools for political reasons and were unlikely to maintain any future connection with them.
In any case, whatever satisfaction having a school “open” might give someone whose main priority was breaking the teachers' union, the educational results were slim. This did not, of course, apply to those few areas like Ocean Hill-Brownsville itself, where a fairly full complement of teachers was actually present. The children in Ocean Hill-Brownsville probably learned no less than usual during the strike; as the world was informed by an endless parade of instant experts, most of whom had probably never set foot in a school since childhood and some of whom had never set foot in a public school at all, the children may even have learned more, since the absence of at least half of the student body resulted in a ratio of pupils to staff which ranged between 6½ to 1 and 7½ to 1. With that sort of ratio (not exactly testimony to actual community support of the Governing Board), it would take a very special skill to avoid imparting some knowledge.
The event which finally broke the logjam was one which had long been foreshadowed, the action of the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court in upholding the earlier decision by Judge Rinaldi that the appointment of the Ocean Hill “demonstration principals” was illegal. This enabled the city to make a major concession to the union without loss of face, while the union on its side was now willing to have Rhody McCoy remain as Unit Administrator in return for his pledge to cooperate with a state-appointed trustee. The UFT also received guarantees against harassment elsewhere in the city. To enforce them, Commissioner Allen—who may have been rather more conscious of the meaning of the coming legislative session than those less wise in the ways of Albany—appointed a committee of three persons whom the union trusted and who superseded the Board of Education in some respects.
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The strike was, of course, important enough in itself. The New York school system is the largest in the country. The UFT is the largest local union in the country.
But it was more important for the issues it involved and the forces which were mobilized around them. These issues remain, and will be fought out for a long time, whether in the political field or in future strikes. They will recur in other areas and other occupations. One of these issues is the status of public employees. An American superstition has it that there is something sacrosanct about public employment which makes strikes against the government equivalent to sinning against the Holy Ghost. In a time in which government employment is a rapidly and inevitably increasing sector of the economy, such a doctrine has totalitarian implications. (The Thirteenth Amendment bans involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime. So far as I know, working for the government is not yet officially regarded as a crime anywhere in the U.S.-though it may well be a blunder.) It was for this reason that the labor movement as a whole regarded the issue as a crucial one.
Another issue which received constant stress in the news media was the Jewish-Negro confrontation.6 The union was constantly referred to as Jewish, and the Ocean Hill district was always called a Negro ghetto. There were charges and countercharges of racism and anti-Semitism. On a more fundamental plane, the charge was made that the merit system, which the union claimed to be defending against a patronage grab by the mayor in collusion with local power seekers, was actually a device for protecting the ethnic status quo—Jewish predominance in the schools, Irish in the police, Italian in the sanitation department—and an obstacle to Negro advancement. In fact, the reverse has been historically true. The merit system has served one minority after another in its struggles to circumvent the barriers of discrimination. Negroes, too, are finding the civil service a relatively smooth road to advancement; they are already proportionately more numerous in the post office and many other federal departments than in the population as a whole.
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But perhaps the most complicated issue which emerged out of the conflict was that of the orientation of society to the problems of its least privileged sectors. There is a widespread movement now afoot to ally the bottom and top layers of American society against those in the middle—and especially against the organized workers. This strategy has its implicit assumptions; it stems from the belief on the one side that the first enemy of the man at the bottom is the man one step up, and on the other that the discontents of the most wretched can effectively be appeased without any expense to those at the top.
It also has its political implications. Such an alliance cannot, for instance, challenge those facets of the economy from which its corporate sponsors benefit. It cannot aim at the elimination of exploitation; at best—and a rare best—it can be directed against the most flagrant forms of exploitation. (I have yet to see an advertisement of the Urban Coalition urging people not to buy grapes, yet a victory in the California grape strike would be of more direct benefit to American minority groups than any number of ads suggesting that we “Give a Damn” for the Ocean Hill Governing Board.)
The natural enemies of this new alliance are those groups which are troublesome to its upper, rather than to its nether, millstone; in an alliance between the elite and the sub-proletariat, it does not take a course in Marxism to know who is going to use whom. The specific idea of community control of the schools, in the form in which it has been advanced in New York, is one which can offer quite tangible benefits to certain sections of the economic elite. For example, it affords an excuse for not increasing expenditures and taxes; we have seen the relationship in the genesis of the issue in New York. But to the people of the community, the actual community, it offers only the simulacrum of power—for they have no command over the economic resources which real power requires—in place of the reality of improved, and more expensive, education.
1 Since this was written, the 1968 reading scores have been published, showing more than half the MES at or above grade levels.
2 On March 4, 1968, Justice Rinaldi of the New York Supreme Court ruled that the appointments were illegal. His decision was upheld by the Appellate Division on November 15, 1968.
3 This pamphlet manages to compress an astounding number of misstatements and misrepresentations into a relatively short compass. I have analyzed some, though by no means all, of these in some detail in “A Critique of the New York Civil Liberties Union Report on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville School Controversy,” available from the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the Right to Teach.
4 Professor Lockwood of Brooklyn College is a consultant to the Local Governing Board. According to President Harold C. Syrett of Brooklyn College: “Professor Lockwood has shown me a copy of the Governing Board's by-laws that call for, in the case of transfer or dismissal of teachers, a procedure whereby a principal may bring such matters to the unit administrator, who then refers them to the local board, which after hearings may request the Superintendent of Schools to act in the matter. In other words, the controversial actions taken by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Board and its unit administrator are contrary to the organization's own by-laws. Professor Lockwood informed me that he opposed this action.”
5 Many such changes, affecting contractual rights, would probably be barred by the clause in the U.S. Constitution banning state laws impairing the obligation of contracts.
6 For a further discussion of this issue in general, see Earl Raab's article which begins on p. 23.—ed.
