I.S. 201: Disaster in the Schools
Larner, Jeremy
I. De-Integration On the first day of the Spring semester in 1964, the New York public school system was struck by a boycott through which citywide organizations managed virtually to empty every...
...Suppose, for example, that "White American Society" also accepts the metaphor and directs Supt...
...They claimed to have seven pages of complaints from parents, but refused to submit them to the then-existent Civilian Review Board...
...At the present moment there is trouble brewing at schools on the Lower East Side and in Brownsville, at P.S...
...Moreover, said Al Shanker, President of the UFT', "we don't know where you get such confidence in Columbia—has it made such a good record in training our present teachers...
...The Board then began making plans for a model school, and the plans were relatively good, involving reduced class size, heterogeneous grouping, a vast array of educational equipment, and a specially-chosen staff...
...it would have had the power to employ outside agencies of its own choice to evaluate the school...
...The parents were not kept properly informed—or they would not have produced a parent-teacher confrontation...
...suddenly became eligible to teach in New York City, the present incumbents would feel the pressure of competition...
...Shanker also has some ideas for reforming supervision...
...Since then it has made remarkable progress in upgrading the teaching profession in New York City, despite a bad press, internal dissention, and lack of support from stuffed-shirt educators, politicians, and high-class parents' organizations...
...On the following Monday, both Donovan and the negotiators wanted the teachers to take the kids into P.S...
...It will suggest that the Board single out one area—District 4, which includes 201—for immediate improvement, to 38 be followed by two the following year and three the year after...
...It doesn't blame itself in the slightest...
...The next day the teachers picketed the Board of Ed and got Donovan —who had been roundly criticized in the press—to refuse Lisser's resignation...
...The Board of Ed says the community is uneducable," says Mrs...
...The Union's resistance created antagonism in the ghetto and among the more militant teachers, who did not appreciate the professional considerations involved...
...In the heat of battle, various community representatives impugned the ability of Stanley Lisser, who has had experience at two other Harlem schools...
...We wanted 201 to be opened for these kids with this staff...
...Finally in June the parents and community groups pinned down Donovan on integration and were told the school would be integrated 50 per cent Negro and 50 per cent Puerto Rican Immediately the parent and community leaders, backed by the local board, staged a well-attended sit-in in the District Office...
...I don't want anyone else coming in to tell me what's best for me...
...The supervisors have all decided that it's easier to write up schedules and order supplies than to provide teaching leadership...
...Whether by accident or pernicious design, the true history of the AfroAmerican, both in Africa and the United States, has been omitted and ignored in our textbooks and our curriculum...
...But no one could doubt that Harlem schools are full of a) inadequately prepared substitutes, b) arrogant incompetents, and c) unconsciously condescending prigs who simply cannot reach ghetto children...
...125 in Harlem, and at P.S...
...She refused partly because she felt the offer was "fraudulent": she would be principal "in name only," without the license and therefore, she felt, with no more power than other temporary Negro principals she'd seen flounder, unable to command support, materials, or full decision-making authority...
...Each day an academic anarchist proposes a new theory, and budding manipulators scamper for funds to universities, foundations, and government...
...Not many good teachers are attracted to a school where parents can hire or fire, for reasons I will discuss later...
...But only 40 pickets 34 appeared, including a disproportionate number of nationalists, some of whom tried to prevent entrance with their bodies and were then thrown off by police...
...The advisory board would have become the first organized group to have complete access to achievement scores...
...At the same time the Superintendents' Association issued to the media a set of holy principles decreeing no parents in the schools forever...
...we're on their side...
...Perhaps most of us wouldn't like it if a private school in Queens collected a government subsidy to teach its kids, say, that suburbs are sacred sanctuaries, or that welfare is unconstitutional...
...Despite his above-mentioned troubles as principal of P.S...
...Supposedly the members of a democratic society share some values—values neither black nor white—which we would like to impart to all our children...
...Shanker would like the Board of Ed to rely on the U.S...
...The principal would then bear the responsibility of head teacher...
...Al Shanker is well aware of the kinds of bad teachers who operate in Harlem and believes that parents have a right to do something about them...
...What Allen failed to foresee was that 200 new Intermediate Schools would be required to replace the 140 Junior High Schools, each of them servicing a smaller geographic area and therefore even more segregated...
...This is the way the Board of Ed always treats parents and teachers...
...First of all, he wants an "Internship Program" within each school, "so that teachers who know how to teach can provide on-the-job training for teachers who don't...
...The Board of Ed leaked the plan to the press, thereby preempting A. Philip Randolph and other civil rights figures who were ready to present it to the community...
...36, "the school on the rocks" being built on Morningside Heights, where Columbia's involvement has already been an unhappy one...
...But acceptance of the metaphor will only tend to make it more true...
...Miss Banfield is currently writing a biography of Marcus Garvey, who she thinks has been badly misrepresented...
...On one occasion Mr...
...Nor has he given up on integration: he notes that at P.S...
...The Task Force was supposed to have been appointed within 30 days, but as of early December no names had been announced...
...Some of the parents in Harlem have been fighting for integration since the Board of Ed first paid it lip service in 1954...
...Nor can teaching performance be measured and held accountable until parents and teachers are jointly involved in setting goals and methods...
...Not only is there a lack of knowledge, but there is a vast amount of distorted history which must be rewritten...
...201, which was designed as a $5 million showpiece but opened this fall to a furor of community hostility...
...But the general rule in American education is that the more parents leave schools to professionals, the better they are...
...They reacted with bitterness...
...Now, as never before, these groups are talking about what will work and what won't...
...Still others are proposing that the public school system be abolished, that each child receive a stipend to go to the private school of his choice, that schools be run entirely by neighborhood boards, or that schools be farmed out to private institutions...
...In almost every case, the activists are going it alone and not seeking allies outside their communities...
...A way must be found to make the public school part of the very fabric of the ghetto community...
...V. The Union as Devil "I think the Union is the Devil in this whole thing," says a wealthy white foundation director, safely echoing a fashionable Harlem opinion...
...but more than that, it would have had the power to recommend and screen personnel...
...The Crisis Lisser and Banfield had picked their staff together, choosing entirely from volunteers, and ending up with 55 unusually committed teachers, nearly half of them Negro...
...Theobald promised not to build there...
...Under the circumstances, I would've rejected it, too," said Shanker...
...Kenneth Clark, wherein the Board would "contract out" 201 to an "operations board" composed of community, parents, and Columbia Teachers College...
...The teachers inspected the school and found that the Board had provided a minimum of books and a quick dusting...
...Livingston Wingate of HARYOU gave a friendly lecture on the concept of Harlem as a colony which needs self-government...
...To which one might add, why not throw it open all the way...
...The result was an unsuccessful attempt at a boycott, under the selfdefeating slogan: KEEP 201 CLOSED/FOR EITHER DESEGREGATION/ OR TOTAL COMMUNITY CONTROL...
...Meanwhile the projected summer session was canceled, and the local groups announced that the school would be boycotted if it opened segregated in September...
...Trying to come up with something acceptable, many of the protest leaders supported a new plan devised by Dr...
...And to get that we need more money, we need to attract and train better teachers, we need progress in integrating our whole society, and, most immediately, we need formalized cooperation between school and community...
...But if thousands of would-be teachers all over the U.S...
...Although most of them are not black nationalists, they have assimilated nationalist rhetoric to describe themselves and their predicament...
...Why not let in VISTA workers, unemployed artists, qualified volunteers...
...Exam for Teachers, which is given at every teaching college in the country...
...Once more the stage was set for the racist image-peddlers on either side to polarize the two groups who not only have ultimate goals in common but who are powerless without each other...
...Once an internship program is established, actual teaching success can be made the only criterion of licensing...
...and a black principal...
...119, where she led a group of teachers and volunteers who produced a lengthy teachers' guide to Africa...
...In the midst of the 201 crisis, Nelson Rockefeller proposed that schoolboards be elected—a proposal that was greeted with joy by reactionary parents in Queens...
...The richer the community, the more sophisticated educationally, the more it stays out of curriculum and personnel...
...That many teachers, social workers, and other professionals do not behave with professional adequacy in the ghetto situation is an observable and deplorable fact which must be altered...
...He say it's a two-way thing, I say I don't know, I want to see it...
...Bad teachers tend to create a certain number of "disturbed" children, and I have seen some boys and girls who were judged impossible by guidance teachers suddenly begin to read and write on an extremely high level, simply because they finally found a teacher whom they trusted...
...The negotiators wanted two things: a special council controlled by parents and community to run the school in joint control with the Board of Ed...
...It is indicative of the strong conservative minority within the ranks of teachers that this measure passed by a margin of only 486 to 375, with two chapters taking ads in the World Journal Tribune to attack Shanker's leadership...
...But if the cycle of failure and frustration continues, it will only reinforce the temptation to a sterile superiority and a righteous defeat...
...While Donovan talked to the negotiators, the teachers baby-sat for their new pupils, who milled restlessly in the gyms, yards, and lunchrooms of schools that no longer had room to teach them...
...If the Harlem community got what some of its leaders say they want, they'd get no more than what crummy rural schools have...
...for they had found that although 85 per cent of Harlem children are at least two years behind in reading levels, it was impossible 30 for parents or parents associations or local boards to hold a teacher or a principal responsible...
...Secondly, he agrees with those educators who have long called for the abolition of the Board of Examiners, with its eccentric licensing procedures...
...No knowledgeable person could deny that there is some truth in the colonial metaphor...
...The Future Since the boycott of 1964 and its disillusioning aftermath, the fight against inferior ghetto education has shifted to a series of local actions directed against specific schools and principals...
...The community had no choice but to reject the plan, despite a fairly positive statement from Clark...
...You've got to understand how the parents feel...
...IV...
...A parent delegate later referred to Wingate and Innis as "the headlinemakers...
...I feel I know what's best for me...
...They were mindful, too, that only four of New York's 870 principals are Negro, and not all of them have permanent appointments—a record that is surely attributable in some degree to prejudice, which manifests itself most clearly in the oral section of the licensing exam...
...One hardly knows where to start—you'd think there were no good reasons for public education in the first place...
...And can anyone testify that the teachers colleges, or the educational institutes, or private industry, or even poverty groups, 40 are intrinsically more efficient and less susceptible to corruption than the New York Board of Ed...
...inter-school teachers' committee now coordinates such programs in 21 schools, where reading levels have indeed been improved, although the Board is beginning to complain about the high costs...
...Yet when it came to consulting with parents, the Board merely put up a front...
...The only shade of difference that might arise is in regard to professional matters...
...There is no supervision in the public schools of New York at the present time...
...Nevertheless, Mrs...
...Donovan to cut loose the ghetto schools, so that they can be "part of the fabric of the ghetto community...
...The wording was vague and teachers might wonder what qualifications the council had for judging them...
...They wanted a black principal for an example to the children—what some of them call "a motivational image...
...Judging by distribution of UFT chapter chairmen, Shanker estimates that this procedure would result in the immediate creation of 30 Negro principals...
...But once again the image of power proved more important than the actuality...
...They had gone home thinking they had won an agreement and learned otherwise from press and TV, where they saw their defeat proclaimed "a victory over racism...
...307 in Brooklyn, 120 parents, mostly white, are bussing their children into a ghetto area to take advantage of a free all-day kindergarten, and that more parents are clamoring to do the same...
...Shanker contends that the equivalent children in middle-class schools are removed by their own parents, who can afford to send them to private classes...
...The parents claim that he often failed to transmit their complaints to the Board, since they might have reflected on his administration of the district...
...He's forgotten, perhaps, that the UFT leadership came out in support of the parents' original demands to screen out teachers to whom they had "sound and serious" objections—adding only that the accused must have his "day in court...
...At bottom, most of their demands are for a different kind of help—a kind that includes participation—rather than an end to help altogether...
...You 32 don't have to come in," he is said to have told them...
...Would the result be better education...
...103, an old school that was empty because it was condemned...
...36 Radical critics of the Union (and within the Union) tend to overlook the fact that the UFT has existed only since 1962, when it had a hard struggle simply to establish collective bargaining...
...The object was integration...
...The fancy studies on "Educational Parks" make good reading, but the Parks themselves are twenty years from actuality, and untested at that...
...And by Monday of the following week, lo and behold, Donovan and the Negotiating Team came to an agreement...
...Clearly there are areas—for example, medicine— where letting poor people take care of themselves is no solution...
...175 and P.S...
...Deriding most of the "solutions" proposed so far as "empty slogans," Shanker has come up with a series of practical ideas which would enable ghetto teachers to move beyond "survival techniques," such as setting out copy-work, buying off troublemakers, showing movies, and playing in the park...
...Although the parents appear to have successfully vetoed some of the early candidates, Mrs...
...3, 1964, the day of the citywide boycott, Miss Banfield stayed out of school and reported instead to teach at a "Freedom School"—thereby putting her new job right on the line...
...These teachers want the same thing as the parents...
...Shanker had to make it absolutely clear that the Union would not stand for any violation of a teacher's professional status, nor any hiring or firing done on the basis of color or any other non-professional criterion...
...In talking about 201, Spencer expresses an attitude that comes naturally to a man who works at helping the poor to help themselves...
...III...
...175, Miss Banfield directed a similar group in the production of a history of Harlem, and it is worth noting that the latter is a sounder, more detailed document...
...Later that afternoon at UFT headquarters, the teachers met for the first time (and last, to date) some members of the Negotiating Team...
...Principal happened to fall on Feb...
...The local board itself—which was supposed to have been given new powers in the past year—eventually resigned over the 201 affair, its members charging that they had been used to "create the picture that the Board of Education does consult with the community, when, in fact, it does not...
...But in the past two years under Shanker, the Union has begun to make proposals for fundamental changes in ghetto schools and in the system that serves them...
...An M.E.S...
...Herself a product of a completely segregated Harlem education 33 (including P.S...
...for the proposal called for the Board of Ed to supply funds with which the advisory board might hire its own staff and conduct its affairs independently...
...The council Donovan agreed to would have had funds for outside evaluation and curriculum development...
...It's because of you," said Clark to Shanker, "our children are being destroyed...
...Once more, poor communications prevented community groups from realizing how effective such a board might be...
...He also believes that positive steps should be taken to attract better teachers...
...They thought they were lied to because they were Negroes—but they got equal treatment...
...Unless parents have a majority voice, I don't think any board is worthwhile...
...But the truth is that most suburban school boards choose only the supervisor, who then controls the curriculum and guarantees the job of everyone he hires...
...Until there is some plan—or planned experiment—it will be impossible to tell which teacher, book, or method makes a difference...
...They had children entering segregated first-grade classes who are now graduating (usually with non-academic diplomas) from segregated high schools...
...Concerned parents knew that their children weren't being taught, but the standard explanations place the blame solely on the children and their homes, and the bureaucracy is too vast and principled to permit a fruitful complaint...
...If there are "outsiders" already involved in the fabric of the community, the trick is not to chase them away, but to use them, to make the most of them...
...Asst...
...A delicate point in Shanker's proposals calls for special facilities for severely disturbed children, two or three of whom can put a ghetto class in a total state of disruption...
...As for the black principal, Donovan should have scoured the earth long before then to get the best one available...
...Helen Testamark—President of the Parents Council, which consists of the Presidents of the 23 Parents Associations in District 4—succeeded in meeting with Superintendent Bernard Donovan as early as March, 1966, in order to press complaints against certain rumored choices for the principalship...
...Robert Nichols: Harlem has accepted the definition of itself as a colony...
...As this article goes to press, the UFT is about to come out with a new plan for community involvement in ghetto schools...
...At least, those were the phrases the newspapers zeroed in on, hailing the statement as a victory over "reverse racism...
...As an example, let me submit an excerpt from the newsletter of the East Harlem Protestant Parish, which is directed by the white Rev...
...If it cannot participate in White American Society, it is no longer going to be exploited by overseers who commute into the neighborhood by day, wreak havoc with the lives of the black people, and withdraw by night with big paychecks...
...If they chance to read it, members of the Negotiating Team may be surprised at Lisser's preface, where he writes: A people stripped of pride in their heritage and without accurate knowledge of their history are a people without a guiding light or a bedrock...
...But he had already committed himself to a dedicated white principal, and to betray him at that point was to betray the parents, for a racial issue was raised which shattered the immediate prospects of parental participation and gave ammunition to racists of the Right and Left...
...For the next few nights, hectic meetings were held in Harlem, while, on the outside, Donovan was criticized for "handing over the school...
...Another parent leader told me simply, "I knew Roy Innis when he was interested in Civil Rights...
...Plans and Slogans The next day 201 opened for business with Lisser as principal and the Negotiating Team utterly betrayed...
...You say "integration"—that word has stopped a lot of things for us...
...The bills that had that tag got chopped up, but it seems the others slipped through...
...At any rate, the stand he took brought him a deluge of complaints from the more conservative segment of his membership, who blamed Shanker for Lisser's firing...
...Whereupon Miss Banfield immediately announced—to the cheers of her colleagues— that she would not be chosen on the basis of color rather than competence...
...In short, the proposed board, while advisory, would have had considerable real power...
...Many of the Harlem parents think they are demanding no more than suburban parents already have, when they ask for the right to choose teachers and set curricula...
...He wants the Board of Ed to hire administrators from outside to take care of finances and supplies, and to let each staff of teachers elect its principal from its own ranks...
...The New York School Crisis," DISSENT, Spring 1964...
...175, Lisser instituted a special reading program, which, though it had no chance to achieve sensational results in the short time it ran, still produced better reading scores than those at P.S...
...She refused also because she was part of a staff that had come to serve under Lisser, a staff she knew would not have been as good without him...
...What the parents are saying, in effect, is that the traditional teachers college formulas don't count in the teaching of ghetto children...
...But both Miss Banfield's words and her motives were more complex than heretofore reported...
...A move is currently afoot to start a private Junior High in Harlem, financed by the Ford Foundation, blessed by Robert Kennedy, and run by a "community corporation...
...The demand for a black principal also reflected the leaders' desire to make the school their own, to make it respect in its very structure the intrinsic human worth of themselves and their children...
...31 It turned out that the complaints were compiled by a black nationalist teacher who first clashed with Lisser when the teacher insisted on the right to administer corporal punishment to his pupils...
...So we would have to supervise our decentralized schools somehow, probably license them, set standards for teacher training, for achievement levels, for sanitation— and perhaps end up with a bureaucracy larger and more corrupt than the one we have now...
...This reporter was unable to document one serious complaint against Lisser, whom he found to be a thoughtful, worried man devoted to the welfare of his pupils and staff...
...Dorothy Jones of the Protestant Council admitted "we should have come to you," but said she was going to "stand my ground...
...The teachers assembled that Monday at 201, where they were later informed that Lisser (under pressure from Donovan) had offered his resignation and that the school was to open with Miss Banfield serving as principal until an appropriate black male could be agreed upon...
...Today the eight paired schools (in themselves a comedown from the sixty the Board of Ed first promised) are falling apart, decimated by attacks from reactionary parents' groups, losing their white students, and ignored by sloganeers...
...201 is particularly superior...
...Shanker also had objections to "contracting out" schools—a problem I will take up later...
...Yet to say that the demands were emotionally powerful and humanly justified is not to say that Donovan should have given in to them or that their ultimate fulfillment would have made 201 a better school...
...Babette Edwards of the East Harlem Protestant Parish, "but when we object, we are branded racist—by the same people who have always called us apathetic...
...New York schools are already superior to those schools...
...Why 37 not let anyone into your internship program who has a B.A...
...All of these notions raise basic questions about the nature and purpose of public school systems...
...and it could have hired universities or other groups to develop new curricula and to run training programs...
...David Spencer, for instance, who works for MEND, a local community action project, has one child in 201 and another in an integrated Junior High in Astoria...
...We knew that if we took them into 103, we'd have lost them for good...
...Unlike the Board of Ed's plan, it will begin with the admission that pupils have been retarded in several basic skills...
...Edwards...
...What we see happening in the schools is a result of racism," says Mrs...
...But what a shade that little shade turned out to be!] When the boycott became imminent this summer, the teachers met as a UFT chapter (all but one are members), and decided to honor the parents' picket-line...
...It is true that so far most of the Union's bargaining points have concerned salaries and working-conditions, with benefits to ghetto children coming only indirectly—insofar as better-paid and less put-upon teachers will tend to teach better...
...One parent told me that they simply assumed the teachers would "do their jobs"—an assumption based on a distrust of "outside" professionals and their standards...
...119, where principal Elliot Shapiro enjoyed exceptionally good relations with the Harlem community...
...Edwards and several other community leaders have turned down appointments because they don't want to serve as "buffers between the Board and the community...
...Meanwhile attendance inside the building approached 90 per cent—an unusually high figure for a Harlem schoolday—and a dozen parents interviewed by The Amsterdam News were all against the boycott...
...Correspondingly, the Negotiating Team felt that "Beryle Banfield broke our backs...
...The Board of Ed, under fire now from Mayor Lindsay, was reduced to a promise to appoint a "Task Force" of prominent citizens to investigate the whole problem of ghetto schools and to make recommendations for sweeping changes...
...This plan, too, ran into heavy opposition, mostly from the UFT, which had decided that teachers ought to be represented on any board...
...The newspaper people don't look down at the poor parent in the corner," he said, "because these fellows over-shout 'em...
...The Parents Council was swallowed up by a Negotiating Team chosen in a "closed room" but nonetheless representing the community groups active in the neighborhood and eventually including three parents out of ten negotiators...
...Our relationship with the kids had been jeopardized already by a week of sheep-herding," one teacher told me...
...It's like saying you don't count...
...Lisser, in an act that set him apart from almost every other Harlem principal, promised to defend them against reprisals...
...For the first week of school the boycott was in force, the negotiators were meeting with Donovan, and the Board of Ed was avoiding a head-on confrontation by keeping 201 closed and sending its pupils (80 per cent Negro, 20 per cent Puerto Rican) back to the feeder schools they came from...
...But Spencer, like most of the other leaders, has been negatively impressed by the slowness of integration in jobs and housing as well as in education...
...I. De-Integration On the first day of the Spring semester in 1964, the New York public school system was struck by a boycott through which citywide organizations managed virtually to empty every ghetto school...
...What we have to get is something more like rich suburban schools have...
...The fact is that most of those who employ the colonial metaphor don't mean to be taken literally...
...For no teacher who has much respect for his teaching ability will be attracted to or remain in a system where his curriculum is dictated to him and the displeasure of a pupil can get him fired...
...The education colleges have not produced a single thing of value for teaching in the ghetto," says Herb Kohl, a Teachers College graduate and the best ghetto teacher I've seen —but the Union took the rap in the community...
...Others shared these objections...
...If one assumes that big-city politics are here to stay, what will produce progressive results is an increased adroitness at conciliating and coordinating the various interest groups, a majority of which have a positive stake in educational improvement...
...Moreover, the Board prefaced the plan 35 with a long statement of all the wonderful things they had done for ghetto schools...
...Since middle-class children are evidently not too precious to be bussed to something they can't get otherwise, Shanker suggests that the city could create new ghetto facilities for inexpensive summer camps, music schools and pre-school centers...
...Within the UFT Shanker was skating on thin ice in his attempt to lead the teachers in a progressive direction, just as he had when he proposed that the UFT's delegate assembly endorse the Civilian Review Board...
...We wanted a chance to prove that we could teach these kids," Miss Banfield said later...
...Shortly thereafter, however, the UFT prevailed upon the Board of Ed to designate certain elementary schools as "More Effective Schools," where extra funds would be spent to carry out a union-developed program for the first four grades, which involved heterogeneous grouping, smaller classes, and volunteer staffs including all kinds of specialists...
...Sure enough, the new Intermediate Schools are segregated, and most prominent among them is I.S...
...By this time, as a teacher at 201 put it, "The parents had been lied to for years...
...When we picked teachers [says Miss Banfield], we wanted people who were aware that the parents needed a voice in decision-making...
...The Board of 28 Ed blandly assured them that a borderline site wasn't necessary—the school would be so good that white parents would send in their children...
...But any potential cooperation was stymied by Roy Innis of CORE, who denounced the white teachers for their "white values" and the black teachers for being "white-oriented...
...This plan called for an "advisory board" that could not be accused of "taking over" the school, and which would consist of parent, teacher, and community representatives...
...Miss Beryle Banfield, one of Lisser's Assistant Principals, worked under Shapiro at P.S...
...Meanwhile union leaders, along with some national civil rights leaders, were formulating an alternative plan that the Board might present to the protesters...
...The Board's image was that of a generous donor, buttressed as usual by fulsome editorials derived from the handouts of its every-busy publicity staff...
...The average Harlem principal—as I reported two years ago* and as the principals themselves were to confirm by their response to Donovan's agreement—is a frightened mediocrity who runs his school like a fortress...
...Images and Personalities Most of the parents and community leaders do not regard themselves as black nationalists...
...The current vogue in super-solutions is decentralization...
...No parent could have been more concerned than she that 201 be unblemished by "teachers who are threatened...
...He hasn't ignored us," she says, "he's toyed with us...
...Here was that first "shade of difference" that caused the teachers to defy both Board and community...
...the results were eight schools paired on the "Princeton Plan," a raft of lofty proposals, and constant turmoil ever since...
...The observers may have served not only to keep the rhetoric pure but also to keep out concerned groups from the larger community...
...A man say integration, I say that's your worry, because you promised it...
...When her first day as Asst...
...The key to their first demand is accountability...
...They voted 44-10 not to go in...
...It's a tricky matter, however, to pick out the psychologically disoriented in a ghetto school where so many children are justifiably angry, defiant, and withdrawn...
...But when the site was revived for 201, the same protesters met with evasion...
...119) , Miss Banfield is thoroughly committed to giving Harlem children—with whom she has an impressively open way of talking—"a sense of identity," which for her involves both the African heritage and the counteracting of what she refers to as "white values...
...Testamark does not feel there was any real communication between herself and Donovan...
...Each Council would be funded to develop definite plans for improvement, which in turn would be subject to ratification by the Board, the local teachers, and a congress of parents...
...I don't want segregation, but if I have it, I want it on my own terms...
...Shanker will soon propose to the UFT that it accept the help of nonprofessional school aides, even to the point of letting them assist with the teaching...
...At present 37 per cent of the New York teaching staff consists of substitutes, which means that there is no alternative to incompetent teachers...
...Not sharing this perspective, the 29 Negroes went about creating a solid black front...
...it's a form of sabotage...
...That the community could so badly misunderstand Beryle Banfield is one of the most painful ironies of a situation marked by an utter lack of communication between community groups and teachers...
...Over a year ago, the Union voted down the Board's suggestion for forced rotation of teachers, an ill-conceived effort to send better teachers into the ghettos...
...In 1958, when the present site of 201 was slated for a new Junior High, the parents warned that the mid-Harlem location guaranteed segregation, and in 1959 Supt...
...But must we then con 39 dude, along with the new romanticists of poverty (many of whom are affluent whites), that there is no such thing as professional knowledge, ability, or training...
...Just as medical care for the poor must be more sen• sitively coordinated into the public fabric of their lives, so must teaching...
...Supt...
...The agreement stipulated that a teacher would not be hired if either the Board or the council had a "sound, serious objection...
...As the negotiators talked to Donovan, however, as many as 20 "observers" sat around the room, some of whom came from "black power" groups...
...Most notably, neither the staff of 201 nor the United Federation of'Teachers was asked to participate...
...Beryle Banfield is hardly the prototype of the Tom teacher...
...The most celebrated and expensive non-solution to the integration problem comes from State Commissioner James Allen, who got the Board of Ed to redesign its grade patterns from 6-3-3 to 4 4 4. The idea was to get the kids traveling to centralized schools after the fourth grade, rather than the sixth, and then on to four-year high schools a year earlier...
...The danger of such rhetoric is that it is believed both by those who hear it and those who speak it—in which case the waters are muddied, backlash cuts off funds, and children are filled with bitterness instead of knowledge...
...Under Lisser at P.S...
...Daniel Schreiber of District 4 would meet with the parents and the local school board and try to say whatever might pacify them...
...Schreiber appeared at a local board meeting to accept suggestions for naming the new school, when the Board of Ed staff paper had announced the final choice the day before...
...This accounts for the Union's public rejoicing in a "victory" at the time when the community felt most defeated...
...The outcome was that the community forces have hardened their line...
...The basic decision is the choice of supervisor—and it is true that Harlem parents have no such choice, and that they must be given some sort of participatory equivalent...
...Donovan's response to this was to send out pink leaflets to various other districts, asking for volunteers to send their children to the big new school in the middle of Harlem...
...It calls for the foundation in each area of an "Educational Development Council," which would include people from the Board of Ed as well as elected representatives from the UFT and the community...
Vol. 14 • January 1967 • No. 1
