Back-to-School Blues

Unsoothed by a summer's vacation, the nation's restive schoolteachers last week faced the reopening of classes in a belligerent mood of complaint and protest. Last-minute compromises prevented strikes that would have shut down the school systems of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Toledo. Teachers did go on strike in East St. Louis, Ill., as well as in scattered school districts from Rhode Island to Utah, including 16 districts in Michigan.

Most of the disputes centered on better pay, but that was not the issue in the most serious situation of all: New York City. There, the militant, 55,000-member United Federation of Teachers was threatening to repeat its opening-bell strike of last September. Then, the main issue was more money for the teachers. This year, the dispute centers on a controversy over efforts to break up the city's huge, bureaucratic system and turn control of the schools over to community-run local boards. Some such decentralization was ordered by New York's state legislature last year in return for providing the city with more state funds. The move has aroused racial passions, challenged teacher security, unsettled the bureaucrats and touched off public hassles.

Due Process. Most of the anger swirls about a demonstration district in the heavily Negro Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Set up last year to test the potential problems and benefits of decentralization, the project gave a community-controlled committee the right to evaluate teachers, supervise curriculum and spend funds allocated by the central school board. The hope was that community involvement would lead to closer rapport with teachers, more interested students, a better curriculum and, above all, a halt in the steady decline in student skills.

The procedures under which the local committee was to act were never clearly defined. When the committee tried to get rid of 13 teachers and six supervisors last May, New York School Superintendent Bernard E. Donovan called the action illegal. Many outraged parents kept their children out of class, and equally irate teachers walked out in support of their colleagues. The teachers were stoutly backed by U.F.T. President Albert Shanker, who denounced the dismissals as a denial of "due process."

Technically, the community committee had a weak case. Rhody McCoy, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville administrator, finally filed charges against ten of the teachers. He cited the "excessive lateness" of one, the failure of four others to maintain class discipline, unspecified opposition to the decentralization experiment by others. A retired Negro judge appointed to hear the cases found that witnesses could not document incidents or convincingly detail the teachers' failings, recommended that the ten be retained. McCoy insists that they cannot return. Shanker and the central school board insist that they must. The U.F.T. fears that decentralization would break up its power base and leave teachers vulnerable to the whims of unstable local militants. On the other side, there is the justifiable--but unprovable--contention of Negro parents that too many white teachers consider their children either unteachable or inferior.

In a 12-hour public hearing last month on the central school board's decentralization plan, speakers on both sides of the issue were jeered and sometimes jostled by a mixed audience of 1,000 ghetto parents, teachers and concerned spectators. When Shanker opposed the plan and defended the ousted teachers, a dissenter jumped up and shouted: "Send the pigs to the slaughterhouse." Superintendent Donovan stalked out of the hearing and told a central-board member: "You can fire me if you like, but I won't take this abuse. This board of education and this school system cannot be run by mob rule."

Taking Freedom. Last week another angry crowd jammed a board of education meeting that approved a one-year decentralization compromise. The plan gives 33 community school boards power to run the schools--but not to fire teachers--and Superintendent Donovan will retain a veto right over local actions. So many catcalls followed the board's seven-to-one vote in favor of the plan that the meeting was adjourned after just four minutes, thus becoming the shortest in the board's history. Carrying on their own meeting, the dissidents grabbed microphones to assail the board's action. Declared Negro Teacher Ralph Poynter: "Nobody ever got freedom by picketing. People win freedom by taking it." A white school janitor repeatedly screamed his objections, and was finally hustled into a broom closet for his own safety.

In that volatile mood, New York moved toward a showdown over neighborhood control of schools. School Board Member William Haddad* argues that "there is right on both sides. But the potential for violence is frightening. If we have a strike, we're going to have guerrilla warfare and schools surrounded by cops." That was a real prospect. As school-board members groped for still another compromise, Shanker warned that his teachers would boycott the schools this week unless the ten teachers were allowed to return to their classes and all teachers were protected against dismissal by local boards. Since teacher strikes are illegal in New York state, the union would be breaking the law in order to preserve lawful rights for its members.

* Who became an object of controversy last week when he publicly labeled the city school system "a disgrace." Haddad, married to a Whitney heiress, said that "I'd hock my suit, my car and my shoes" to get his children into a "decent" (meaning private) school.

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