Public Schools: Trouble for Decentralization

• Share

Decentralization is the latest battle cry in public education. The concept has been widely heralded as a cure for the ills of the New York City school system, which—like many big metropolitan systems—is cumbersome and plagued by bureaucracy. In November, an advisory panel headed by Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy proposed that New York be divided into as many as 60 semiautonomous districts with their own parent-dominated policy boards. Such local control, the panel argued, would make the schools more responsible to the needs of the community; it would also keep parents from blaming the city's board of education, a remote central power, for everything that goes wrong. The plan was enthusiastically endorsed by Mayor John Lindsay, who presented it to the legislature.

Last week, though, state legislators postponed any serious consideration of the plan for at least a year. And in the heavily Negro Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn, a pilot project designed to test decentralization ran into serious trouble. The case suggested that, if ill-defined and badly administered, the cure might be as bad as the ailment.

Quarrels Over Responsibility. With the approval of the city's board of education and the help of a $59,000 planning grant from the Ford Foundation, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment was set up last summer. Local parents elected a committee to run the eight schools in the project and were given power to select principals, allocate funds, and set educational goals and standards. The city board of education supposedly retained only the supervisory authority, but from the start, there were quarrels over divisions of responsibility. School-board officers feared that the committee had been taken over by Black Power advocates. White teachers balked at accepting the local group's authority and refused to attend meetings. The committee's appointment of four principals, who were chosen without regard to civil service rankings, was struck down by the state Supreme Court. By late spring, 70 teachers and 18 assistant principals, all white, had applied for transfers out of the district.

This month, Rhody McCoy, administrator of the project, attempted to transfer 13 teachers and six supervisors out of the schools. His only explanation for this action was that the educators had tried to "sabotage" the experiment and had "lost the confidence of the community." School Superintendent Bernard E. Donovan at once ordered them back to class. When they tried to return, angry parents blocked their way. Most of Brownsville's 9,000 students then boycotted classes, turning instead to makeshift "freedom schools" organized by parents' organizations.