A Fighting Lady for N.E.A.

A Fighting Lady for N.E.A.

Despite all the problems that plague America's public schools--too little money, too much bureaucracy, outmoded methods and taut racial tensions--there is hope for improvement in a mounting awareness by the nation's teachers of the need for change. No one symbolizes that hope better than Mrs. Elizabeth Duncan Koontz, who last week assumed the presidency of the once stodgy and complacent National Education Association. Not only is she the first Negro ever to head the 1.1 million-member organization, but she insists that N.E.A. must either lead the fight for change in U.S. schools or fold up, because "time is running out."

Tact & Toughness. Libby Koontz, 49, a career classroom teacher from Salisbury, N.C., is not the type to let N.E.A. use her as a mere black symbol of the organization's new liberalism. A poised and pretty woman, she can speak in the soothing tones of a diplomat about the need to heal the growing rift with-in N.E.A. between school administrators and belligerent teachers. Sometimes she lapses into pedaguese, as when explaining that teachers are demanding more power over educational policy so that they can "project curricula and experience that will equip students for meeting modern challenges." Then she checks herself and says it plain: "Curriculum has been a big hang-up between boards and teachers." She turns quietly furious as she talks about all the pressures--from public to principal to pupil--on overworked, undersupported teachers. "It's like hiring a surgeon to perform delicate surgery, then expecting him to do it with a can opener, by candlelight, with everybody standing around telling him where to cut."

Mrs. Koontz developed her blend of tact and toughness as the youngest of seven children in a talented black family. Both her parents had college degrees and all the children worked their way through college, even though their father, a high school principal, died when Libby was only twelve. One of her five brothers is now president of Salisbury's Negro Livingstone College, a sister is its registrar, two brothers are high school principals and another, John B. Duncan, was Washington's first Negro city commissioner. Libby recalls that family dinners were her first "class-rooms," and that a "subtle kind of teaching" took place around the table. One of the central family lessons concerned the need to share, whether chores or property. Her brothers did the laundry; her job was to clean the bathroom. And when her father brought groceries in the front door, her mother parceled some of them out to the children, who would sneak out the back door for deliveries to needier families. In her first teaching job in the small lumber town of Dunn, N.C., Libby came up against a practice that she is still fighting to change: the assignment of the newest teachers to the most demanding jobs. "They gave me all those children they were absolutely certain couldn't learn anything--when, actually, beginning teachers need the most help." She did well enough with her pupils in the twelve-grade, all-black school. But when she discovered that the principal was overcharging staff members for board in a school-owned boarding house, she led a teacher revolt and was fired.

After ten years of teaching "the supposedly mentally retarded" in Salisbury schools, Mrs. Koontz concludes that "they are not mentally retarded. They have all the basic needs and urgings of other kids, but lack the perception and skills of others because they've been ne- glected. They need understanding and patience." She employed patience of her own in climbing to the top of N.E.A. She headed North Carolina's all-Negro N.E.A. affiliate and N.E.A.'s biggest division, the Association of Classroom Teachers (820,000 members), before her election last year as N.E.A. president. She took office at last week's convention in Dallas as the organization flexed its newly developed muscles in anticipation of some rough battles next fall for more teacher pay and power.

Teachers must organize, agitate and, when all else fails, strike, argues Libby Koontz, because "communities recognize power and we must recognize the facts of life." Last year the N.E.A. staged strikes in Florida, Michigan and Albuquerque. She insists that the demand for higher pay does not mean that a teacher is more concerned about himself than his students. "We can be concerned about our kids--and well-paid at the same time. And we're not going to get able young people into teaching unless we improve conditions. All we're saying is that if the schools belong to the people, the people must act like it and support them."

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