Education: Ousting a Reformer

When Philadelphia police broke up a demonstration by black high school students in November 1967, School Superintendent Mark Shedd protested angrily to Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo. In Shedd's view, the cops were unnecessarily rough with the students and had undercut his efforts to negotiate with them about a black studies program. The commissioner strongly disagreed, and as Shedd recaHs their meeting, Rizzo told him: "If it's the last thing I do, I'm gonna get your ass."

Rizzo did. He made Shedd's "permissiveness" a major issue in his successful campaign for mayor this fall. Immediately after the election, Mayor James Tate at Rizzo's behest appointed two known opponents of Shedd's to the school board, thereby reducing the supporters of the superintendent to a minority. Last week, just before the board met to fire him, Shedd, 45, accepted the inevitable and resigned.

Fast Redo. Shedd has been widely regarded as one of the nation's most progressive and innovative school officials. His basic problem in Philadelphia, as one suburban colleague puts it, was that he "tried to redo fast a school system that had just been through 30 years of inactivity." Shedd graduated from the University of Maine and has a doctorate in education from Harvard. He first came to the attention of politicians and educators in the early 1960s, when, as superintendent in Englewood, N.J., he successfully cooled the racial tensions that flared over school integration. In 1967 he took command of the school system of the nation's fourth largest city.

Soon after his appointment, Shedd began to decentralize the large (285,000 students) and cumbersome system by giving principals greater autonomy. At the same time, he streamlined administrative procedures. In the wake of the 1967 protests, Shedd installed one of the nation's first large-scale black studies programs, including courses in Swahili. Shedd's best-known project was developing the Parkway "school without walls" (TIME, March 23, 1970), which tried to combat student restlessness by holding classes throughout the city, in museums, factories and even in Rizzo's police academy. Morale in the system rose; in a number of schools, so did elementary reading scores, spurred by an intensive remedial reading program.

Alienating Whites. Philadelphia, meanwhile, was inexorably generating the kind of pressures that have cut the average tenure of big city school superintendents to three years during the past half decade. The foundation grants and federal aid that Shedd had obtained to launch his lively ideas were cut back by the recession. In addition, his reforms provoked opposition from the entrenched school bureaucracy, which did not take to Shedd's often aloof and highhanded manner. Although his new programs were not designed exclusively for the long-neglected problems of black students, few of the innovations percolated into the classrooms of low and middle-income white children, whose parents are Philadelphia's voting majority.