Pursuit of Power

In New York and Detroit last week, teacher strikes all but paralyzed the cities' public school systems. In Baltimore and parts of Florida, classes opened only after teachers had won gains in salary or working conditions in hotly contested contract disputes. Feeding the new mood of teacher militancy is the rivalry between the 1,000,000-member National Educational Association and the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s American Federation of Teachers (membership: 142,000), which have long vied for the allegiance of the nation's teachers. Last week the two organizations seemed to be in a muscular contest to show who could be tougher in talking--or not talking--with school boards. A.F.T. locals were responsible for the power plays in New York, East St. Louis, Baltimore and Detroit; elsewhere in Michigan, where 14 school districts were closed, N.E.A. affiliates took the lead, as they did in Florida.

Despite their rivalry, both organizations seemed to interpret the mood of U.S. teachers in similar terms. "We have a new type of more aggressive, more alert teacher all over this nation who wants to help determine the policies that affect him," declared N.E.A. President Braulio Alonso. "This is the beginning of a real revolution in the teaching profession." Teachers, echoed Albert Shanker, president of New York's United Federation of Teachers, a local of the A.F.T., "have to have power--this is a revolutionary change."

The Right to Fire. Salaries were the dominant issue in all the disputes; yet teachers also insisted--perhaps a little too often--that they were equally concerned about the conditions that keep them from doing their jobs more effectively. Some of the requests seemed reasonable enough. In addition to a $500 salary hike, Baltimore teachers, for example, won the right to refuse such time-consuming chores as toilet patrols and supervising afterhours playgrounds. But there were other contract demands that school boards clearly could not consider. Striking teachers in Oak Park, Mich., demanded the right to fire their principals and to turn off school intercoms when announcements interfere with their teaching.

Union determination was most visible and disruptive in New York City, where 45,000 out of 55,000 teachers in the city's public schools ignored a court order to report for work after rejecting a two-year, $125 million salary increase. Supervisors and volunteers--ranging from rabbis to S.N.C.C. Leader H. Rap Brown to an assortment of eager but inexperienced parents--tried to keep classes going, but they served as little more than baby sitters. At P.S. 146, Assistant Principal Royce Phillips even picked up a guitar, led pupils in a sing-along session.

As student absenteeism climbed to 60%, city attorneys sought a criminal-contempt citation against U.F.T. leaders for violating the earlier court order; Shanker and his aides could go to jail, while the union could be fined up to $10,000 a day. Negotiations, meanwhile, reached a standstill. Alfred Giardino, president of the board of education, charged that "to the U.F.T., negotiation is a one-way street--the board must accept its lists of many demands or else."

Table Pounding. By going on strike, the U.F.T. has managed to alienate countless citizens who otherwise are sympathetic to the teachers' long-running battles with the bureaucracy-encrusted board of education. Many failed to see how the union could turn down the $125 million offer--proposed by a mediation panel consisting of three university law professors--which would have raised salaries at least $1,000 a year. At one negotiation meeting, Mayor John Lindsay pounded the table in anger over the union's blunt refusal to respect "the integrity of asking a third party to judge the issues."

Another source of animosity was the union's insistence that teachers should have a say on whether to expel unruly students who are disrupting classes--a responsibility that the board of education insists should be reserved to supervisors. While on the picket lines, teachers were taunted by irate Negro parents, who saw the union's demands as a plot to deprive their children of the right to learn. Some parents, regardless of race, seemed to feel that ignoring a court order was an unprofessional way for the teachers to achieve their goals. "You never had it so good!" cried one woman to pickets outside Manhattan's P.S. 82. "Two-month paid vacations--what more do you want?"

"Castrated." What they want, admits the U.F.T.'s Shanker, is "power." Right now, he argues, the public holds teachers "accountable for the failure of the schools, but they are not accountable because they are without power" --over curriculum, discipline or innovations in teaching. "Teachers have been castrated," he contends, by administrators across the country, many of whom are merely "ex-football coaches," who ask teachers to act like professionals but do not let them make professional judgments. "Does a hospital administrator come down to the operating room and tell an anesthesiologist or a surgeon what to do?" Shanker asks. School boards, he argues, should "decide what the product of schooling shall be," but teachers have the best knowledge of how to develop that product. The deadening devotion of many teachers to time-encrusted routine, however, makes this point debatable.

On the picket lines last week, many of Shanker's teachers did seem as concerned about their demands for smaller classes, extension of a U.F.T.-initiated program of stronger specialized staffs in ghetto schools, and new ways to deal with class-disrupting kids as over salary. "We don't want to throw a kid out just for the hell of it," one woman picket explained, "but if we don't do something, the entire class can't operate." Summed up another: "We want to be treated as professionals, we want to do a professional job, and we want professional conditions." Whatever the outcome, teachers in New York and elsewhere are not likely to abandon their new militancy. Predicted N.E.A. President Alonso: "There will be more turmoil next year than this year."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.