Public Schools: Strike's Bitter End

(2 of 2)

A crisis situation produced imaginative crisis response. In many parts of the city, parents improvised schools in churches, storefronts, brownstone basements and apartments. Other parental groups packed the kids off for tours of the city's museums, galleries and exhibit halls. There were cram courses in basic subjects on both educational and commercial television. Despite the potential for mischief in so prolonged a period of youthful idleness, police reported that there was no significant rise in juvenile delinquency. A feeling expressed on both sides was that it was the kids who, by their restrained conduct, showed themselves to be the real heroes of the strike.

The schools reopened the day after teachers voted to approve the settlement, but the fragile nature of the truce was illustrated when eight union teachers were prevented from entering an Ocean Hill-Brownsville school. Shanker threatened to call the teachers out on a fourth strike if they were not admitted quickly. Swift action by Trustee Johnson averted more trouble, and the schools went back into full session.

No Friends. As for the deleterious effects of the strike, Psychologist Kenneth Clark, a member of the state board of regents, argued sarcastically that many New York schools were so bad that "the children weren't getting that much education anyway." What worried him more was the growth of hostility between Negroes and Puerto Ricans, whose children constitute a majority of the city's public school students, and Jews, who dominate the teachers' union. U.F.T. pickets shouted charges that Ocean Hill-Brownsville residents were using fascist tactics and teaching "antiwhite racism," and blacks accused the union teachers of purposely holding them down. Ghetto residents generally believe that decentralization is a valid solution to the complex ills of the New York City schools. And the union's calculated attack on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment was not likely to persuade many Negroes that they had a lot of friends among teachers.

Unmistakably, the goal of the U.F.T. was to cripple the decentralization experiment, which it fears might lead to a dissolution of its bargaining power by giving local communities control of hiring and firing. Ironically, the strike seems to have furthered the cause of decentralization. Thousands of previously uninvolved city parents, white and black, who had been content to let the schools run themselves, became personally involved in their children's schools, and their operation. Those who were "radicalized" by the strike are not likely to continue to let the professional—teacher, supervisor, board-of-education bureaucrat—have full say in the question of what should be taught and how.