Quieter Opening Days

It had become a familiar yet alarming summer rerun. Every September teachers in scores of communities across the nation would go on strike, loudly demanding higher pay and better working conditions. In other cities, white parents would take to the streets, outraged that a federal court had ordered them to desegregate their schools even if it meant busing their children into formerly black schools. By last week, however, it was clear that this year was different. Despite the harsh, unsolved problems of integration and finance, U.S. schools passed through the annual two-week period of school re-openings with far fewer crises than anyone could have forecast when they closed for vacation last June.

Opening days were not, of course, entirely peaceful. Teachers struck in about 105 districts. While that about equaled the number of strikes last year, it was nowhere near the record of 181 set in 1969. Moreover, many strikes were brief, as in Providence, where teachers stayed out for only four days.

The biggest walkout was in Philadelphia, where 13,000 teachers demanded a 34% pay raise, shorter working hours and smaller classes. In response, the school board, which already faces a $52 million deficit, proposed that 485 jobs be eliminated and that teachers accept more work and only token pay raises. Both sides predict that the strike may last as long as three months. In Detroit, on the other hand, the city's 11,000 teachers agreed that because the city is nearly bankrupt they would accept a new contract containing neither pay increases nor improvements in working conditions.

Contract disputes often centered on issues that were not merely monetary. In the Boston suburb of Somerville, for example, some 500 teachers struck after being ordered to handle seven rather than six classes a day. Frequently the issue was job security, a key concern of teachers at a time of a shrinking job market. Chicago, for instance, had three applicants for each of 3,000 openings for new teachers. According to the National Education Association, about half of the 234,000 men and women who graduated from teacher training programs last June have not been able to find teaching positions.

The cautious national mood was seen most clearly in New York City, where a new three-year contract was negotiated for 60,000 teachers. The thorniest issues were nonmonetary demands by the teachers--among them, that the school board hire 6,000 guards to patrol the city's public schools, in which reported crimes and acts of violence rose from 333 in 1970 to 580 last year.

Just days before the schools reopened, the United Federation of Teachers, headed by powerful, blustering Albert Shanker, reached an agreement with the Board of Education. The board dropped demands for more work from teachers, promised to hire 1,200 more security guards, and gave in on a few other points, such as reducing the number of years needed to attain tenure from five to three. The board also agreed to pay raises that were small for beginning teachers but made experienced ones the best paid in the nation. In the contract's third year, a teacher with advanced degrees and 7 1/2 years of experience will earn $20,350. For their part, the teachers dropped demands such as a "no layoff" policy and elimination of nonteaching duties. On balance, the exchange was roughly even.

Thus when New York's 1.16 million children returned to public classrooms, only two schools remained closed, both because of neighborhood disputes. In one case, a community school board refused to enroll 90 black students in a junior high school in East Flatbush, as demanded by the city's central board, on grounds that it would make the school less than 50% white. That made it one of the few schools closed for reasons involving race.

Although several districts operated under new desegregation plans, schools were shut down because of them only in Las Vegas, where school administrators fought a court order to integrate. Last week Supreme Court Justice William Douglas refused to stay the order, as had Justices Powell and Rehnquist in similar cases (TIME, Sept. 18).

In a sense, however, the small number of strident school crises was illusory. It did not signify an end to the perennial problems of race and money. Many school districts--among them, Detroit and Chicago--began the school year knowing that they probably could not afford to finish it without new taxes or increased state aid, and that there was little prospect of either. Moreover, the big city desegregation cases, such as those involving Detroit and Richmond, were simply stalled in the courts. Barring a reversal in the federal courts' direction on school integration, it seemed likely that these crises--like money problems--had simply been postponed until later in the school year.

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