Battlefield Communique

Though National Guardsmen have not been needed to quell their disorders, in the past three years U.S. high schools have become far more frequently troubled than college campuses ever were. Almost two-thirds of the nation's high schools--expensive new suburban complexes as well as the blackboard jungles of inner cities--have suffered disruptions. The incidents range from peaceful sit-ins protesting censorship of the student paper to savage riots between blacks and whites. Last week a fresh report from one of the worst battlefields, New York City, suggested that schools have themselves partly to blame.

The panel issuing the report, appointed by the public schools' new chancellor, Harvey B. Scribner, was hardly composed of radicals. It consisted of a high school principal, a policeman and one representative each from the teachers' union and the association of supervisors. The four observers visited a 20-school cross section of the city's 92 high schools over a period of two months last spring and polled principals at the rest. Their most optimistic finding was that a majority of the schools were no worse off last year than the year before. Still, the "typical" city high school required one full-time policeman, three to four civilian security guards, and 15 paraprofessional aides doing security work.

No Missiles. The panel's simplest recommendations forecast schools resembling prisons. All classrooms would be locked when not in use (many already are) and teachers would have to return their keys to the principal's office before leaving each night. Outside handles would be removed from all doors save the main one, to deter students who had been suspended or expelled from coming back in and roaming the halls. Every student would have an ID card. Since fights often break out in cafeterias, the panel suggested that schools substitute plastic garbage bags for the metal cans that are now turned into missiles.

Many underlying pressures for disruption, the panel conceded, are linked to problems that schools cannot fully control: drugs and racial hostilities. But in addition, "the schools are unstable to a large extent because of student alienation and boredom." The panel implies that the students can scarcely be blamed. City life, jobs, and the makeup of the student body have changed almost beyond recognition. The student population, for example, is now 29.9% black and 17.5% Puerto Rican. The schools' curriculum, however, is not very different from what it was 50 years ago. Above all, the youngsters expressed a feeling of "depersonalization" and requested over and over that there be somebody on the faculty with enough time to talk individually with them. Such contacts are nearly impossible in schools with enrollments of 4,000 or so, especially where teachers are forced to do too much besides teach, and where one guidance counselor may be responsible for 1,000 students.

The panel found that vocational high schools were the least troubled. Hence it suggested loosening up schedules in regular high schools so that more students could take vocational courses. Huge high schools built for economic reasons should be subdivided into smaller "schools within schools" offering a far wider range of academic courses.

Like many cities, New York has a sluggish school bureaucracy that is used to spending its limited money in traditional ways. The chances for widespread changes may have been foretold most clearly in another finding. Promising new programs--combinations of career training with academic work, intensive courses for college preparation, and summer classes for bilingual students--have already been worked out, some as long as five years ago. They are still reaching less than 5% of the city's high school pupils.

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