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.”

In an effort to cool tempers, School Superintendent Bernard Donovan ordered J.H.S. 271 closed for two days, while he held meetings with the school’s faction-torn faculty. Then Shanker shattered Donovan’s efforts by barging into one of the meetings, and demanding that the union should be represented. Donovan gave up, ordered the school reopened and gave its principal the right to assign the challenged teachers to non-classroom chores. With that, Shanker called for a strike. Only 8,000 of the U.F.T.’s 55,000 members bothered to vote to approve a walkout, but most of them dutifully stayed away from class. A U.F.T. rally outside City Hall drew a surprising 40,000 supporters, who paraded with signs and cheered Shanker’s hysterical statement: “We are not about to let our schools be taken over by Nazi types and gangsters.”

In the Window. The U.F.T. took newspaper ads to claim that its fight was really against “vigilantism, hate propaganda and terror in the schools.” No doubt extremists in Ocean Hill had recklessly and needlessly inflamed the situation. No doubt the union had a point when it argued that its members stood to lose painfully gained job security if local committees were totally free to hire and fire teachers. Yet many New Yorkers were outraged by Shanker’s own extremist rhetoric and by his arrogance in tying up the entire 1,100,000-pupil system over a dispute at one school.

Some union teachers cooperated with aroused parents in setting up emergency classes outside the schools. At P.S. 41 in an affluent Lower Manhattan neighborhood, 540 students attended classes in churches, settlement houses and colleges. At the elite Bronx High School of Science, parents and nonstriking teachers forced open a basement window to enter and conduct classes. Parents who did break into schools were advised by Board Member Galamison to “sleep-in to be sure the schools re-open on Monday.”

Generally, it was the black neighborhoods, where parents have long been accused of apathy toward education, that struggled hardest to keep their schools going. At P.S. 134 in an impoverished area of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, dozens of parents led some 250 children past pickets to conduct classes. Their attitude was expressed by a sign: THREE STRIKES AND OUR CHILDREN ARE OUT. WHY?

Unimpressed by the growing opposition to his strike, Shanker stepped up his demands; for the first time he insisted that the whole Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in community control be considered a failure and dissolved. He was also angered at Lindsay for appointing outspoken advocates of decentralization to the school board. Two of them, John Doar, former federal civil rights prosecutor, and the Rev Milton A. Galamison, a Negro who has led school boycotts, were elected president and vice president of the board.

Conscientious Objector. By now, the boiling controversy has become an open struggle for power by the U.F.T., which fears that control of the schools is moving from the city’s central board to local committees, and that the union is being weakened in the process. As he fights to protect his union, Albert Shanker is demonstrating that he is a shrewd and sophisticated student of the uses of power. A onetime Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Columbia, he is an admirer of Elijah Jordan, an obscure American philosopher who argued that institutions, not individuals, mold a society’s values. Shanker says he drifted toward the U.F.T. because it is an institution with “a power concept.”

His own understanding of how one can be victimized by a lack of power, says Shanker, stems from his days as a Yiddish-speaking boy in a non-Jewish neighborhood of Queens, where other kids called him a “Christ-killer.” Once they even tied a rope around his neck and tried to hang him. At the University of Illinois, he bicycled six miles daily to the campus because, he claims, closer quarters were all “listed for WASPS, right there in the official university housing bureau.” Looking back, it seems almost inevitable that he became a political activist. As chairman of the Socialist Study Club at Illinois, Shanker devoted his extracurricular time to increasing attendance at club functions from an average of 15 to 500; he helped Socialist Norman Thomas draw a bigger crowd than either Tom Dewey or Harry Truman in the 1948 presidential campaign. He picketed Urbana’s segregated movie houses and restaurants. A pacifist, he registered for a time as a conscientious objector.

All the Humiliations. As a substitute teacher in ghetto schools, Shanker was earning only $41 a week as late as 1952. Teachers, he claims, were too terrified of their autocratic supervisors to complain about poor pay and ill-treatment; to help them, he became a full-time U.F.T. organizer. “Part of the early motivation of the U.F.T.,” he says, “was to punch the administrators in the nose for all the humiliations teachers had suffered.”

When he was teaching, Shanker felt that he had unusually good rapport with Negro pupils. But he discovered that despite his best efforts, their academic progress was often slow. Thus his goal in seeking power for his union, he says, is not only to help the schools do “a hell of a lot more” for all students, but to “shape the educational environment” by building alliances between teachers and the rest of the labor movement. “A lot of things we’re trying to do for kids can’t be done in the classroom. Kids who come to school without any breakfast aren’t going to learn one damn thing. We do more for them through the civil rights movement and the labor movement by affecting the context of their lives.” An active integrationist, Shanker was a charter member of CORE, and joined protests in Selma, Ala.

Shanker feels strongly enough about union solidarity to go to jail for it. He served 15 days last year for leading a teachers’ strike in violation of state law, and he seems likely to wind up behind bars again. His faith in the future of the New York school system, however, seems less solid than his faith in the labor movement, which now pays him $16,750 a year. Last summer Shanker moved his family from Brooklyn to suburban Putnam County. There he owns a $35,000 split-level house, sends his seven-year-old son, oldest of three children, to an untroubled school that has only six Negro students.

Like Lynching. Shanker still insists that “there should be decentralization, and there will be. But we cannot have districts in which white people are taught to hate black people and in which black people are taught to throw Molotov cocktails. Even if 100% of a community wants to fire teachers without due process, it’s exactly the same as 100% of the citizens of Mississippi voting to legalize lynching. Teachers have civil rights, too.”

Unfortunately for Shanker and his teachers, many of the people directly affected—the city’s schoolchildren—do not consider the U.F.T. motives all that lofty. Konnie Karopoulis, 17, a junior at Central Commercial High, was speaking for most of her fellow students when she said: “Shanker is just using us as guinea pigs. It’s O.K. for these teachers to be parading around—they’ve already got their education. But we haven’t, and it isn’t fair.”