School's Out

NEW YORK City's teachers are on strike again. Last spring it was the garbage collectors. The fall before that the teachers, and the winter before that, the transit workers. The pattern is monotonously familiar.

But it's not, really, and New York would be lucky if it were. For unlike New York's past labor troubles, this crisis doesn't revolve around the bread-and-butter issues with which the politics of compromise can deal. Behind a fog of legalisms and futile maneuverings looms a political scientist's nightmare: New York is experiencing the unbuffered collision of social forces and the situation has left its government sputtering impotently.

The central issue in the strike, community control of schools in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn, began taking shape two years ago. In September 1966, angry ghetto residents made one of the first concerted efforts to take over a local school--I.S. 201 in East Harlem.

The first response came from Mayor John Lindsay. Worried by ghetto protests and hoping the move would get him more state aid, Lindsay came out in early 1967 for decentralizing New York's schools. In December of the same year, he asked the New York State Legislature to dismantle New York's school system into a series of smaller districts controlled by joint parent-teacher-administrator school boards.

Meanwhile, the Ford Foundation decided to test the I.S. 201 formula. In July 1967, Ford gave the City money for three trial districts--one around I.S. 201, one in Manhattan's lower east side, and the third in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. All the districts were to remain within the school system, but local governing boards, elected by the school communities, gained almost complete control over their district's schools.

If Lindsay's plan had succeeded, the three Ford districts would probably have dropped from sight, submerged in a city-wide wave of reform. The legislature, however, succumbed to intense pressure from New York's United Federation of Teachers and from New York school administrators, and emasculated Lindsay's legislation. Their hopes shattered, ghetto communities concluded that the political process offered no chance for effective change, and moved on to a confrontation of raw power in the city streets. Ocean Hill-Brownsville offered the first opportunity.

Last spring, Rhody McCoy, unit administrator of the Ocean Hill district, asked Superintendent of Schools Bernard E. Donovan to transfer ten teachers out of the district schools. Donovan agreed to move the teachers if McCoy avoided making a public issue of the transfer. But McCoy wanted more than the removal of the ten instructors. Seeking a public confrontation over the community's right to hire and fire, McCoy publicly accused the teachers of incompetence and of sabotaging the district's experiment in community control. The union demanded a hearing and the issue was joined.

The dispute unraveled rapidly thereafter. McCoy refused to wait for a hearing and 250 of the district's 350 teachers walked out in protest. When a black arbiter ruled this summer that the teachers should be allowed to return to their posts, McCoy, instead of capitulating, added 100 teachers who had struck the previous spring to the list of instructors unacceptable to the community. In the meantime, the governing board hired replacements for the ostracized teachers.

That's how the conflict stood his fall when Albert Shanker, head of the UFT, led his union in a city-wide strike to secure the return of the Ocean Hill rejects. The union has portrayed its strike as an attempt to rectify McCoy's violation of due process last spring, but while the due-process issue makes good public relations, it hardly explains the union's decision to strike.

For the union, the conflict at Ocean Hill is above all a struggle for survival. The union's strength, built up painfully over the years, lies in its ability to bargain for all the City's teachers. Thus community control strikes directly at the union's source of strength. By insisting on the right of indivdual community boards to negotiate contracts with teachers, the new system would shatter the union into locals whose leverage on wage levels and teaching conditions would be minimal.

Teachers also fear, and with some justification, that in some areas community control really means black control. Alarmed by anti-Semitic remarks from some ghetto leaders, the largely Jewish union fears capricious harrassment and dismissal by local boards which are more concerned with race than competence.

For its part, the community also sees the issue as one of survival--in this case, the survival of its children. Frustrated by the intractability of the present system, ghettoes have concluded that the only way to insure that their children are educated is to do it themselves--to remake the system by putting all the power in community hands. Allowing the union to continue negotiating contracts with a central board would leave communities no leverage over teacher practices--which are, after all, most of what happens in a school.

The stakes are thus very big on both sides--so big in fact that neither side has shown the least willingness to compromise. The result has been a kind of burlesque of civil government, with the community and the union thumbing their noses at the Mayor and the school board while they slug it out in the streets.

For all its talk of due process, the union has repeatedly disobeyed the New York State law prohibiting strikes by municipal employees. Both McCoy and the Ocean Hill governing board have openly defied directives from Superintendent Donovan to admit the ten disputed teachers. Just last week, when the superintendent temporarily removed McCoy from his post as unit administrator, McCoy stated bluntly that the community wanted him to stay and he was saying. Mayor Lindsay's repeated assurances that the city would use "all the means at its disposal" to support one or another of the countless board directives have come to nothing.

The problem lies not with the government's instruments of power, but with its credibility. The police could arrest McCoy and Shanker, but it would make no difference, for they are as helpless as the Mayor and the Superintendent of Schools. On September 11, McCoy agreed to readmit the disputed personnel, only to have the community block their entrance the next day. The intermediate political institutions, necessary to confine conflict, have broken down because their constituencies are both aware and uncompromising, and the city, now forced to deal directly with the people of Ocean

Hill and the teachers of the UFT, is finding that these people no longer trust the government enough to leave their interests in its hands. Simply stated, New York has lost the consent of its governed.

Predictably, no one is really winning the New York School dispute, and everyone is losing something. The teachers have thoroughly alienated both the ghettoes and the upper middle class of New York, both of whom favor decentralization. The controversy may have slowed the tide of decentralization by scaring the legislature into delaying consideration of a general plan for decentralization. But few admit the movement toward community control, now affecting almost every U.S. city, can be permanently stopped--without destroying the system entirely.

Some pessimists are predicting just such a breakdown in New York. But even if they're wrong, the U.S. has had another little taste of the urban armaggeddon.