Schools and Politics

The typical U. S. public school superintendent tolerates parents, submits to his school board but hates and fears his mayor. To him City Hall represents politics, and he feels much safer if the mayor cannot interfere with his salary, his budget or his educational program. With the cry "Keep politics out of the schools," superintendents, teachers and like-minded citizens have waged an increasingly successful campaign to make schools independent of city governments. Today, in nearly three-quarters of the 191 largest U. S. cities, school boards are elected directly by voters (the rest are appointed by mayors, city councils, judges, State agencies), and in over half of these cities neither city nor county officials have any control over school budgets.

Most political scientists think the educators are wrong. Five years ago University of Chicago began a study of school control, assigned to it an educator and a political scientist. Last week, after studying school systems in the 191 cities (33 of which they visited), the educator, Professor Nelson B. Henry, and the political scientist, Professor Jerome G. Kerwin. made a surprising report.* They agreed that so-called "independent" school systems had just as much politics and corruption as dependent ones.

Citing few specific facts to support their conclusions, Investigators Henry & Kerwin reported: "The politics with which the schools are beset at the present time are injected . . . just as frequently by school boards as by representatives of the legislative or executive branches of political government. In addition there are instances of tampering with the schools which involves collusion between the school board and a political machine. In fact, there is ground for the contention that an independent school board merely provides two possible sources of political interference instead of one."

Potent in school elections, they found, are class-conscious citizens' groups, the Ku Klux Klan, Freemasons, whispering campaigns against Catholics, Jews and Negroes, and, in some cities, the Catholic Church.

Professors Henry & Kerwin concluded that the best system is control of the schools by regular municipal executives because it: 1) enables cities to co-ordinate education with other activities, such as recreation and health; 2) enables voters to put their fingers on the individuals responsible for good or bad school management.

* SCHOOLS AND CITY GOVERNMENT. University of Chicago Press ($1.50).

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