Public Schools: The Use and Misuse of Power

For the third time since the start of the school year on Sept. 9, most of New York City's public schools were shut down—in large measure owing to the actions of one man. At the urging of its belligerent president, Albert Shanker, the United Federation of Teachers again walked out on strike; more than 50,000 teachers abruptly abandoned their classrooms in the latest battle over the city's ill-planned efforts at school decentralization.

Before the week ended, everyone was shouting angrily at everyone else. Those teachers who crossed the picket lines in an effort to keep some 400 of the city's 900 schools limping along with skeleton staffs ran into a bitter barrage of invective. "Commies!" "Fascists!" "Nazi Lovers!" "Nigger Lovers!" shouted the highly confused strikers, many of them veterans of years of tortured teaching in the city's ghetto schools. Mayor John Lindsay, wearing a yarmulke, was jeered and insulted in a Brooklyn synagogue by a teacher-dominated audience as he tried to explain his stand on the strike. Shanker himself was shouted off the stage at a Manhattan meeting by a highly vocal crowd of black parents, who called him a white racist.

Vomit from Hell. The issue reaches beyond New York. Washington, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and other large cities are also grappling with the problem of how to run a sprawling urban school system. Like New York, they are trying or considering experiments in decentralization, and some of the arguments for such experiments are persuasive. Citywide school boards tend to become remote and impersonal; parents, particularly in ghetto areas, want more and more to have a say in choosing teachers for their children. Yet the problem of how to delegate powers to local boards without disrupting a whole system can be staggering.

New York's trouble began after a neighborhood governing committee in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn summarily transferred teachers because they were supposedly trying to sabotage the experiment. The committee was never able to document its harsher charges, but it stubbornly refused to back down, and hired its own nonunion instructors. The city's central school board finally suspended the Ocean Hill committee and its administrator, Rhody McCoy, because it refused to return the unwanted teachers to their regular duties. The move seemed to ease the crisis. The teachers were grudgingly accepted in seven of Ocean Hill's eight schools, and attendance throughout the citywide system returned almost to normal.

But in Ocean Hill's heavily Negro and Puerto Rican Junior High School 271, the controversial teachers were harassed by the nonunion staff. One acting principal, herself a Negro, claimed that she was confronted and threatened in her office by outside militants and later intimidated by Ocean Hill Committee Chairman the Rev. C. Herbert Oliver—a charge Oliver dismissed as "a vicious lie, vomited from the jaws of hell."