Undercover Teacher

With sure instinct for a good story, the editors of the New York World-Telegram and Sun last winter handed Reporter George N. Allen a fat assignment: get the inside dope on one of New York City's problem schools by masquerading as a teacher. Last week, after two months of teaching, Allen began his series. His school: Brooklyn's John Marshall Junior High, which became the city's most publicized last winter, after a month of hoodlum invasions, assaults and an alleged knife-point rape in a school basement ended in the suicide of Principal George Goldfarb (TIME, Feb. 10).

Reporter Allen's story is a shocker. Some of the things that strike a new teacher at John Marshall: a fulltime policeman inside the building; a teacher patrolling each corridor; students' coats locked up each morning so children will be less likely to run away from school; girls sent to the lavatory two-by-two so that they will not be attacked sexually. Allen taught English to "average" eighthgraders and two classes of ninth-graders euphemistically called "slow learners." Their IQs: 60 to 90.

One lout in the ninth-grade "adjustment class" threatened to "fix" Allen for waking him up in class. Other teachers called the boy psychotic; one predicted: "That kid will kill somebody some day. We hope to God it isn't a teacher." Said the dean of boys: "You should stop and consider the boy's condition before you wake him. Some of these kids stay out all night on benders and need the sleep the next day." Lapsing into the tone of breathless outrage chronic in newspaper exposes, Allen wrote: "I was stunned. Was this a junior high school or a sober-ing-up tank for juvenile drunkards?"

By the beginning of this week, breathless or not, Allen's to-be-continued series had made some solid points: P: "Many students there don't have the emotional stability, the mental capacity or the desire for academic learning." P: "Much of the classroom instruction is a farce, based on a philosophy that aims at 'just keeping them quiet.' " P:"There is open defiance in the classrooms . . . Teacher morale is low . . . Teachers have been threatened with physical violence by students." P:Most telling point: "The training in education I was required to take for my New York City teaching license was of little practical value." Allen, a journalism school graduate, had had enough English and writing courses to get a license after taking three education courses at Teachers College, Columbia University. At Columbia, wrote Allen, he was told that the way to deal with problem students was to "find meaningful situations in which your pupils can express their felt needs." He adds: "This phrase seemed funny to me then, but it seems tragic to me now."

Would Allen ever consider teaching again as a career? Last week, between articles, he said: "No; it's much too tough for me."

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