Attacking the School 'System'

...The phrase "power and status" recurs so many hundreds or thousands of times that about midway through it seemed to become a single word, powerandstatus...

...He is now in Philadelphia running a "school without walls" (where the students learn on location, in museums, factories, or wherever the lesson seems to lie) for the public school system...

...It is, to say the least, interesting, since the author is both white and Jewish...

...Mrs...

...Kenneth Clark, and the innovative superintendent of the Berkeley public schools, Dr...

...This kind of manipulation is a thing of the past, however, because the largely minority-group paraprofes-sionals in the city have voted to join—guess what—the supposedly racist uft...

...The kind of teachers who emerge through the merit system are "bookish (not necessarily or even probably intellectual), cautious, conforming, detail-loving individuals (something like what the Freudians would call anal types...

...Incredibly, the audience rose to give the man a standing ovation...

...Reviewed by Diane Ravitch Contributor, "Urban Review," "Change" A few years ago, I attended a panel discussion on New York City's schools that promised to be of more than routine interest...

...Slum schools in New York have always been the most crowded and the most dilapidated for the simple reason that slums are the most crowded and the oldest neighborhoods...

...At a recent meeting of school board candidates' on Manhattan's liberal West Side, a Poor Puerto Rican woman was asked whether she thought students should have an equal voice in policy-making...

...The only thing left to discuss in the question period, it seemed, was alternatives to the public school system...

...She believes, as do other advocates of community control, that it is hopelessly racist...

...In addition, it serves "to strengthen the preference for cautious, administrative-oriented personalities over bold, education-oriented personalities...

...And she laments the fact that the path to promotion and success for a teacher lies not in the classroom, but in the administrative echelon...

...The "community" would ostensibly get rid of poor teachers, select only innovative principals and accept nothing less than orderly and creative schools where everyone involved would be freed of the repressive ways of the old order...

...Wasserman seems not to realize that due process, far from being a "historical curiosity," is a constitutional guarantee and the poor's most effective shield against oppression...

...speaker after speaker blasted the schools for "destroying" children's lives...

...The question of "due process" is for her a put-up job, a smoke screen to obscure the fact that "the union's real objection was to allowing parents, especially of poor dark children, to control their schools...

...But when she purveys her sociological and political analyses of why certain things happen, she arrives at some outrageous and foolish conclusions...

...Quite specifically, she tells how a supervisor may legally harass teachers he does not like personally—by assigning them to the "worst" classes, by giving them extra chores, by observing their classes more often than is customary, by embarrassing them before their pupils, etc...

...Such boards are on the whole notoriously conservative...

...Discussing a vicious diatribe written by a militant black teacher, "The Phenomenon of the Anti-Black Jews and the Black Anglo-Saxon: A Study in Educational Perfidy," which advanced the thesis that Jews and Uncle Toms are guilty of educational genocide, Mrs...

...Leaving her attitudes aside for the moment, The School Fix presents an invaluable description of the inner workings of a New York City public school...

...A typical "well-run" lower-class school has "courtesy, if little goodwill...

...The principal had promised her the first opening, but when it occurred, he gave the position to a vocal and influential parent, thereby converting a potential critic into an employe...

...No soap—in the teachers' room or in the children's room...

...Even if all children, by some Utopian scheme, received a "quality education," she says, those at the bottom would still be at the bottom, relatively speaking, and so would improve only in their "exploitabil-ity...

...most of those just elected in New York are dominated by a conservative point of view...

...Where Mrs...

...everyone "is a child to the person above him and a despot to the people below him...

...Italics mine...

...In short, the reason poor children fail is educational racism...

...Wasserman accepts the Coleman Report's observation that peer group influence is a significant factor in a student's ability to learn...

...Besides being racist the school system is, in Mrs...

...The machine is functioning, but it might as well be grinding out sausage meat...

...One New York City local governing board hired an innovative, highly unconventional educator who set about shaking up the system...

...Bernard Friedman...

...No matter...

...Wasserman turns to why this is so, she posits that the school system is organized primarily as a "status-reinforcing institution...

...Among the participants were the late Senator Robert Kennedy, Harry Ashmore of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Dr...

...Neil Sullivan...

...It is strange that so many white liberals assume the poor, the black and the brown are educationally or politically radical...

...and control, if little learning...

...Pseudopsychology is shortly followed by pseudosociology: "It may or may not be historical accident that at this time in the city's ethnic history, the Jewish population produces so many individuals with these status-serving characteristics, and the Negro and Puerto Rican population so few...

...At that time, it should be noted, local school boards controlled the system...

...It is the poor blacks and Puerto Ricans who are picked to be the losers by the betters and the managers—and by the other contestants...

...Wasserman's chief conspirators in the plot against minority-group children...

...Thus the link between the reactionary corporations and the teachers' union is made: Both appeal to due process while exploiting the weak...

...He then quietly, unemotionally described his province, District Seven, inhabited by some 200,000 people...

...educationally, not much is happening...

...Middle-class children (black or white) show greater academic achievement than lower-class children (black or white...

...Wasserman dismisses it as mere hyperbole...

...In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she points out, corporations used the term to oppose humanitarian legislation—like that prohibiting child labor—as a denial of their rights...

...A "slum" is not defined as such because of the race of its inhabitants, but because of their poverty...

...The audience, by now preparing to leave, stopped and took notice...

...Unlimited though her faith may be, mere faith it remains...

...For her, poor physical or mental health caused by slum conditions, or "cultural differences, commonly called 'cultural deprivation,' " have no bearing on the problem...

...after a stormy relationship with the district's parents, who did not take to radically new approaches, this unit administrator was forced out...

...Unfortunately, this book is so trapped in its conspiracy theory of history that it offers no vision of the future...

...There has as yet been little evidence of educational miracles wrought by either the small "community-controlled" districts that characterize school systems all over the country, or the demonstration projects in New York...

...When you'd complain, they'd say 'bring your own.' They steal it if you put it there—or teachers steal it...

...Moreover, the brutality and repression are products of "the system," the present patterns of power and status...

...A distinguished black jurist heard the dispute, and ruled that the teachers had indeed been denied due process...

...Despite the boundless enthusiasms of Mrs...

...quiet, if little communication...

...Wasserman argues that "bold" teachers shun competitive examinations, for mystical reasons having to do with their independent spirits...

...Suddenly, everyone else seemed irrelevant...

...What is more, she insists that these results are intended, that the schools subtly yet purposely conspire to undereducate black and Puerto Rican youth...

...One teacher describes the dehumanizing impact of her first assignment, a ghetto school with a tiny lunchroom to serve 1,100 children (who slide on their benches as they eat—when they reach the end of the bench, lunch is over for them), and a bathroom with so few urinals that boys waited in long lines or urinated on the floor...

...She says it was adopted "when college graduates languished for jobs and when the number of teacher candidates in New York City far exceeded the number of teacher openings...

...And, if the audience didn't have the message yet, she let them know just how little she thought of "miniskirted women and bearded men who call themselves teachers...

...The flow from superior to inferior in each of these situations, she contends, is brutal and repressive...

...Wasserman is writing about the way things happen in the schools, the little hustles teachers devise to make their lives easier, or when she interviews teachers and students, the book is wonderful...

...No paper towels at all, because the children would stuff up the toilets with them...

...The tape-recorded monologues of individual teachers and students are as fine as anything written by critics like Jonathan Kozol and Herbert Kohl...

...When Mrs...

...It is all well and good for educational progressives to agree that reading scores or marks generally are outdated and irrelevant...

...She observes that within the school hierarchy, from the pupils on up...

...Wasserman's estimation, a "despotism" existing only to protect the powerandstatus arrangements teachers and administrators have set up for themselves...

...This sort of critique displays an almost slavish admiration of anything associated with blacks or Puerto Ricans (though only poor blacks or Puerto Ricans), and a persistent distrust for the motives of whites, particularly Jews...

...The teachers say they walked out because 19 of their number were fired without a fair hearing on the charges against them—that is, without due process...

...Friedman explained that he wished to make a statement...

...The great value of The School Fix is its depiction of the bankruptcy of the school as we know it today...

...But she says the verbal violence was justified, because it was in response to a rather mild criticism of the IS 201 complex (the Harlem demonstration school district) printed in the newspaper of the United Federation of Teachers (uft...

...Wasserman was...

...Wasserman, I don't believe a popularly elected local board—particularly one that is parent-dominated—can provide a strong base for experimentation in education...

...Since "education in New York and elsewhere is a jockeying for status," someone wins, others lose...

...You were not a person...

...Chiding those present for their easy condemnations, he paraphrased Camus: "You put out my eyes, and then you beat me with a stick because I cannot walk in a straight line...

...In short, the "power to the people" sloganeers rarely take into account who "the people" are, or what kind of change, if any, they actually want...

...but in her house, adults made decisions, not children...

...You just were no longer a human being...

...I know a black woman from Harlem who worked for years as a lunchroom assistant, waiting patiently for the chance to move up into a job as a librarian's assistant in her school...

...I was reminded of this incident while reading The School Fix, NYC, USA...

...A few words more and he sat down...

...As the program drew to a close, a short, graying, somewhat portly man rose and identified himself as a district superintendent from the south Bronx, Dr...

...The School Fix champions community control as the necessary response...

...Since she sees the school system as an extension of a racist social system, the uft becomes a prime beneficiary of the corrupt, repressive powerandstatus game...

...Attendance was taken, cutters reported, flags saluted, records kept, and textbooks given out and returned...

...The heart of this corrupt institution is the merit system...

...In some of the demonstration projects, principals have made patronage plums of the paraprofes-sional jobs in order to keep parents content and protect their own interests...

...In other words, middle-class children are given an education that will make them efficient members of the middle class, while poor children are given an education (or a handicap) that will forever mire them in poverty...

...But her extrapolation from this finding is that public school teachers treat all black students as non-achievers, separating out the occasional achiever as a "deviant...

...I think this assessment, which is central to the book, is radically wrong...

...As a matter of history, it was instituted in 1896, when there were very few college graduates, when a great many teachers were wholly incompetent, and when the basis of appointment and promotion was entirely political...

...It was, he said, an area victim to high unemployment, low incomes, infrequent garbage collection, rats, filth, disease, inadequate hospital space, few doctors...

...She shocked the predominantly white middle-class gathering by replying that she had six children...

...she sees no violation of the teachers' rights whatsoever...

...Further, it is her notion that due process is a "historical curiosity" to protect the powerful from the rightful demands of the powerless...

...that she listened to them...

...The teachers' union is one of Mrs...

...The author regards New York's decentralization law as meaningless, however, for although it led to the election of community school boards, it did not alter the basic relationships between teachers and students, teachers and parents, administration and teachers...

...On the contrary, it is the middle-class child who is "culturally deprived...

...At no time did the local board acknowledge that in reality the central board lacked the legal power to cut Ocean Hill-Brownsville loose, even if it had wanted to...

...The Ocean Hill-Brownsville governing board insists the instructors were not fired, but simply transfered to central headquarters at Livingston Street for reassignment elsewhere...

...Perhaps if the author understood the origin of the merit system, she might not be so quick to attack it...

...But it would appear, given the plasticity of American institutions and the availability of unused technology, that we are on the verge of a major revolution in education—one whose outlines are still dim...

...Wasserman fails to see any issue between the contestants...

...Mrs...

...Throughout the evening, the one constant assumption was that New York education is an unmitigated disaster...

...She may be blinded by her crusading faith in community control...

...Only a teacher, as Mrs...

...Its author, Miriam Wasserman, unhesitatingly asserts that the failure of poor children to perform as well as middle-class children is solely the failure of the schools...

...try telling it to parents who want to see their children's report cards...

...The district that originally hired him was so badly split into an ethnic battleground that few protests were uttered when plans were presented for its dissolution into a larger district...

...But the governing board, determined to assume a revolutionary stance and win complete autonomy, refused to accept the judge's verdict...

...This interpretation naturally conditions her understanding of the long and bitter 1968 teachers' strike...

...She concedes that the teachers specifically attacked in the article were in fact "exceptionally gifted and committed," and that perhaps its "tone" was "strident and vulgar...

...could have written these sections...

...Here, in their very midst, was a ranking official of the hated school establishment...