Teachers Get a Hand In Running New York

New York City's public schools opened in high spirits last week. Teachers were pleased: by threatening to strike they had won a pay raise of sorts and improvements in working conditions. Calvin E. Gross, superintendent of the nation's biggest school system, was relieved: he could turn from being a labor negotiator to being an educator. Students--more than a million of them--were grateful that the city had provided a teacher for every one of them, in contrast to past years.

The schools will need high spirits--and more. For back of last week's optimism lie all the system's old problems and some serious new ones.

A Share of Management. Most Americans take a dim view of teachers even threatening to strike. The 858,000-member National Education Association, old-line rival of the upstart 82,000-member American Federation of Teachers, deplores strikes as unprofessional. New York law forbids strikes by public employees. Nevertheless, the A.F.T.'s New York local, bargaining agent for the city's 43,000 teachers, won not only money but something more significant than money: a voice in how the schools will be run. The Board of Education committed itself to consulting the United Federation of Teachers regularly on such of its former prerogatives as ways of hiring teachers, size of classes, curriculum and general "educational policy and development."

Some of what teachers want--typically, smaller classes--is what good education needs; that it took a union to get such improvements is a measure of the city school mess. But the principle could well come back to haunt the board. It has already begun to find the union objecting to improvements unless the union first "negotiates" them.

There is plenty to improve. With more pupils than Baltimore has people, New York has high schools so overloaded that some of them have five daily shifts. "Lunch" begins at 9:45 a.m. in cafeterias filled with students "stored" there until a classroom empties. Last year 57,500 children got only four hours' daily schooling.

Teacher Dropouts. New York has some of the country's brightest youngsters, best specialized high schools, and far more than its share of national scholarship winners. But the city is losing students to the suburbs, and hard-to-teach Negro and Puerto Rican children are on the increase--they comprise 76.5% of all elementary school pupils in Manhattan. Such children are often so transient that in some schools teachers get two sets of students between September and June. The city has poured extra cash and supplies into 274 "special service" schools, but none of it goes far enough. A third of all junior high students are at least two years retarded in reading, 90,000 kids can barely speak English, and more than half of all students drop out of school before graduation.

Last year 1,018 teachers dropped out too--many leaving for the suburbs. The union estimates that 13,500 more regular teachers are needed. Last fall the New York State education department issued a 710-page report that complimented the city school system for having "moved mountains," and then proceeded on almost every page to rip it apart with criticisms of "heavy teaching loads, meager instructional materials, and limited or inept supervision."

Paper Curtain. New York's worst affliction is the paper curtain that separates teachers in the classroom from administrators at "Livingston Street," or Board of Education headquarters, an ugly box of a building in Brooklyn that once housed the Elks of the region. Livingston Street is awash with able, well-intentioned administrators, but most of them live by the numbers and have lost touch with the troops in the trenches. Teachers have to punch time clocks, use rigid "lesson plans" that often do not match student needs. They find principals too busy to talk--and principals in turn find their superiors too busy to talk.

Many vital problems never reach Livingston Street. Requests to fix a falling ceiling vanish in a Byzantine fog. It may take years to get an updated syllabus in math or science. Everyone has horror stories about "The System," including Superintendent Gross, the highly skilled administrator who arrived from Pittsburgh last spring to try to bring order out of chaos. "I know one girl who was in the building for six hours just looking for someone to find a job application for teaching," says Gross with cool fury. "I'm going to humanize this system if I have to turn into a monster to do it."

Power Struggle. It was just this goal that led teachers in 1960 to eye the U.F.T. as a possible savior. With fewer than 10,000 members, the union staged a one-day strike that wrung from the Board of Education the right of all teachers to choose a single bargaining agent. In the resulting election, the union beat an N.E.A. group by two to one, emerged as the teachers' voice.

Ironically, the union soon had a rival in reforming zeal: a lively new Board of Education, born of construction scandals that had sent the old board packing. But in trying to assert its power, the new board confronted a union mentality that distrusted "management" and seemed more obsessed with pay than pedagogy. Union demands soon demonstrated the fallacy of the idea that the board is management, for the board has no power of the purse and does not control its assets. It must appeal for money to the city's Democratic administration, which in turn depends on the state's Republican legislature for about one-third of its school funds. Union pressure against the board is thus a charade: the real game is to leapfrog the board and play off the rival politicians.

$580 a Year. So it fell, in the showdown of this year's strike threat, to Mayor Robert Wagner to spur a settlement. He sent in three mediators who essentially suggested money next year, and the union rapidly agreed. The teachers won a raise averaging $580, most of it to come in 1964-65. The city will then be offering a $6,425 starting salary for beginning teachers with a master's degree, and the "super-maximum" will hit $11,025.

Where all this may lead depends largely on whether the union works with and not against Superintendent Gross, who saw clearly that the union's demand for a voice in policy could be turned into a constructive force. Gross hopes now to revamp New York's school system drastically, using such sharp tools as team teaching, programmed learning, a crash program for slow readers. To give teachers a genuine feeling of "getting results," Gross may well reshape administration from stem to stern. Calmly taking the measure of his task, he says: "I don't think the school system can be administered effectively in its present state."

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