Public Schools: Teachers Who Give a Damn

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For the third straight week, New York City's big school system remained immobilized by a teachers' strike. Ironically, schools in the neighborhood-run Brooklyn district at the center of the controversy were fully open. While police patrolled the streets around Ocean Hill-Brownsville's eight schools, children inside the building benefited from one of the nation's youngest, best-educated and most enthusiastic teaching staffs.

The background of the situation has become unpleasantly familiar to New Yorkers. The city's board of education last year set up a pilot project in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section to test school decentralization, which would allow "the community"—the parents themselves and the neighborhood leaders—to run the schools. Only that way, supporters of the scheme claim, will ghetto children get sympathetic teachers with a more flexible approach to their special needs. Most professional, unionized teachers deeply distrust the idea. And when the Ocean Hill-Brownsville governing committee asked for the transfer of 13 teachers that it considered objectionable, 350 other teachers in the area abandoned their classes in sympathy. Thereupon, the committee set out to hire substitutes. Many of the newcomers were recruited from a special intensive-training program set up by the New York Board of Education to ease the city's teacher shortage.

At P.S. 178, a half-century-old pile of brick, stone and flaking plaster, Principal David W. Lee, 43, has assembled a staff of 39 teachers who are there, as he puts it, because "they give a damn." The group includes 24 men, a high percentage for an elementary school. Although the enrollment is predominantly Negro, 33 teachers are white. Thirty are under 25. Many are recent graduates of Columbia, Yale, Chicago, and other blue-chip colleges. Belittling his own plain-cut clothes, Principal Lee, a Chinese American, says: "I'm a bum—but most of my teachers wear Brooks Brothers suits."

Jumping Rope. There is nothing button-down about their teaching. Barry Ernstoff, 22, a Columbia graduate and N.Y.U. Law student, jolted his students one day by jumping rope with them. "Teachers don't jump rope," one boy scolded. Ernstoff explains: "We've got to humanize ourselves. Black kids are cynical about any white person's caring for them, and little by little, through affection and honesty, we've got to break that down." He repeatedly makes deliberate mistakes on the blackboard, enticing his pupils to spot them. "Some of these kids learn not to question white people. They develop a kind of slave mentality and I want them to talk back." He winces when they are asked to describe their neighborhoods and respond with what they think is wanted: adjectives such as nice, clean and pretty, instead of more accurate words like ugly or broken down.