School of Education Gropes Toward Reform

(This is the second of two articles on the Ed School's relationship with Roxbury.)

ROXBURY doesn't often speak with one voice, but when it comes to the white university, it agrees about some things to the last man.

Nothing has angered the community more than the condescension of white professionals or their attempts to impose solutions on Roxbury's problems. The anger is not mindless. It stems from a fervent conviction that white, suburban intellectuals can't change the ghetto if they haven't lived it. "The community people," says James R. Reed, Executive Secretary of the New School for Children, almost pleading, "would be the last people in the world to tell the professionals 'we don't need you.' The problem starts when he ignores the kind of competence we have...they have got to believe--an acceptance on a gut level--that these people have lived it, experienced it. They know what they're not getting." No Ed School project is going to work in Roxbury any more if it doesn't talk to and hire community people from the start.

But talking and hiring isn't enough. There have got to be results. Ed School surveyors aren't welcome now along Tremont Street. There has been too much research and too little action. "The community is sick and tired of talking," says Reed angrily. "Harvard gets the ideas and writes them up in jargon for grants from Washington, and they're hiring people, and they have their own thing. The black people who had the ideas are still being beat down."

There is no room for neutrality, either. For all its hostility, Roxbury wants the Ed School's open active aid for other than adivsory purposes. It sees Harvard's name and influence as powerful leverage on the school system. When the Ed School hosted school system administrators and ghetto leaders from all over the Northeast last January 22, most Roxbury leaders came from the meeting satisfied, not because of any dialogue with the administrators, but because the Ed School invitation made it possible for blacks from five states to caucus during the conference. It was inadvertent advocacy, but advocacy nonetheless.

The System and the Ghetto

In any case, Roxbury hardly views cooperation with the school system as an effective way of aiding the ghetto. The school system has been lobbied, advised, protested for years and the need remains--in the classroom, close to home, where the only hope for change seems to lie.

Generally, Roxbury wants more Harvard aid--"a pilot project here, a pilot project there" isn't enough--and it wants aid on different terms. "Do they go and drive the cars," asks Bryant Rollins, director of Community Development for the Urban League, "or do they put those resources in the hands of the community? Right now they're destroying us, not helping us." Community leaders want research and planning projects sub-contracted to Roxbury groups so they can hire the academics and staffs. The aim is not to force whites out--though the change would undoubtedly make more jobs for black professionals--but to give Roxbury control over its destiny and give blacks a chance to develop managerial skills. Community control and community development are Roxbury's byways in talking with Harvard and with the establishment. But for researchers fighting for dwindling federal grants, the words strike terror.

Finally, the community wants Harvard to admit what Roxbury has always known: race makes a difference. "There are a lot of problems white people have with black people," argues Bernard Bruce, a Roxbury resident and co-director of the Ed School's Project Pathways, one of the exceptional community successes. "One thing Harvard needs is someone who has some color."

As the community sees its, admitting and hiring blacks would not only link the School with the community but also round out the education offered Ed School students. Contact with people who've lived in the ghetto will make better urban teachers, and better teachers of urban teachers.

The Attitude Gap

The attitude gap made an explosion inevitable. It came finally during a community meeting now shudderingly referred to around the Ed School as "the January 10 Conference."

Planned as a quiet discussion with a panel of Harvard professors and out-of-town school officials, the forum quickly became a verbal free-for-all. Community representatives--consisting of most of Roxbury's prominent leaders--zeroed in on Anderson, director of Operation Schoolhouse, competing in the ferocity of their invective. The demands--control of Anderson's Boston-contracted money, immediate hiring of blacks to his all-white task force--took him by surprise, and the intensity of the hostility left the Ed School stunned. Eventually, community leaders walked out, telling the panelist that if Harvard professionals wanted to talk with the community, they'd have to pay for it--an hourly consultation wage.

In the end, the meeting was probably one of the best things to happen to the Ed School since it started turning to urban problems. For the first time, even those senior faculty with no urban concerns realized the Ed School's urban program was in trouble, and as tempers subsided, Sizer and his involved faculty started looking for concrete reforms.

It took three months and the death of Martin Luther King to push them through. They came finally with a faculty vote on April 10. In important ways, the spate of proposals constituted a real break-through in the School's urban posture. Voting to recruit minority group students, the faculty struck down the School's traditional definition of competence, admitting for the first time that race and ghetto experience are important. "The way we've been recruiting minority group students," Sizer said right after the April 10 meeting, "was the wrong way."

THE RECRUITING decision also expressed a new sense that the School as a whole has a responsibility for finding solutions to urban problems--it has to be committed and now. "We felt," says Sizer, "that we had to do something this spring."

But no one said anything about Roxbury. A lot of things at the Ed School haven't changed at all.

With its new reforms, the Ed School has committed itself anew to problems, not places or activities. There has been a change in the size of commitment, and in definition of competence, but the style of intervention remains intact. The School, in other words, will remain officially detached. It continues to maintain that research is its primary function, though now it also emphasizes the training of minority-group students to lead the ghettos to independence. And there will be no taking sides. The Ed School will work with anyone who needs help. It is staying out of politics.

To some extent, the new guidelines accurately reflect an Ed School consensus on the role of the University during an urban crisis. Most reformers agree with the stands on research and neutrality. If the university does not gather knowledge, who will? And an inflexible coalition with one side or the other in the urban morass would limit the School's options for no productive purpose. The School Department is not impressed by Harvard opposition.

But to many reformers, it is also clear that the School is inviting disaster by not committing itself to active community work. Many action programs--like advocacy planning--are indistinguishable from research and teaching.

Equally important, the Coleman Report--the triumph of the survey technique--made one thing very clear: the survey's telescopic view will never be enough. Researchers must study education at the microscopic level--in the ghetto classroom--to learn what is really wrong with ghetto schools. The small informal community classroom offers just as much opportunity for close and productive study as the stale, standardized school room. And in any case, working in the ghetto more and more means working with it or not working at all.

Gatekeepers

So far, MAT students are the only group working openly for formal community links. In a document circulated among faculty last week, MAT's asked for compulsory student work with educational self-help groups in Roxbury, and also suggested that community leaders attend courses at Harvard and discussion groups with MAT's. Eventually, Roxbury leaders would become full faculty members and, hopefully, exert some influence on the course of Ed School urban activities.

Even the MAT program, of course, would not guarantee the Ed School a prospering community program. Not even reformers know whether the Ed School's revised posture is acceptable to the community. And the rhetoric pouring out of Roxbury in the wake of King's assassination has provided little indication of where the community consensus lies. "There are going to be gatekeepers," says Thomas. "No one knows quite how these gatekeepers are going to operate, including, in many cases, the gatekeepers."

The most difficult problem will undoubtedly involve control of resources and that "gut" acceptance of community competence. Some community leaders have suggested that universities formulate codes of conduct for professors taking the urban plunge, but standards of this sort smack so much of infringement on academic freedoms that no faculty is likely to tolerate them. Many researchers are moving on their own toward paying subjects consultant wages, and employing black surveyors, but on questions of sub-contracting federal or foundation moneys, few are likely to give way. And genuine community consultation and cooperation are such personal matters that no one except the participants can make them go.

Black Businesses

There are some hopeful signs. Last Thursday, the Urban League and Boston College announced a joint project to ease the transfer of white businesses to blacks. The agreement gave the community group control of resources, which seemed the key community demand. But the problem of hard-won foundation grants wasn't involved, and there was only one project and a relatively small group of people involved. Broad, institutionalized cooperation will vastly increase the chance of misunderstanding--slighting of community advisors, and a whole range of personal problems which easily take on racial connotations.

In the end, any Ed School effort will probably depend on slow laborious work at building personal alliances with community groups. On their part, Roxbury leaders will have to be prepared to accept the School's decision to keep its channels open with the School Department. They will also have to be ready for some mistakes and ready to perceive them as personal errors, not malicious racial slurs on the Ed School's part. While they should not be led to expect too much, they cannot be disappointed if results don't appear overnight.

The guidelines are necessarily vague, for the situation is unprecedented. The key words seems to be flexibility and old-fashioned, personal politics. Mutual interest may provide a powerful incentive--for the Ed School researcher, an access to materials of his trade, and for the self-help group, assistance in teaching, in drawing up applications for grants, in conversing with the white establishment.

There is no certainty, only necessity