From a Harlem School

...And they grew up not in the South but in the North where such an attitude can be disastrous...

...The majority, for example, did not take ad vantage of the Emergency or Freedom Schools set up by the union teachers, but neither did they send their children to the regular schools unless desperate for babysitting...

...The night before the strike began all of this seemed crystal clear and inescapably sensible to me...

...For the moment it was, fortunately, this other mother who had been mistaken for the spy in their midst...

...There appear to be three general responses to the ghetto school problem...

...I slumped down in my seat, since I had been explicitly told that no teachers were allowed, and had come only because I was, after all, the mother of three neighborhood public-school pupils...

...We'll stay and we'll see that they teach...

...While they do not dissociate themselves from the blackpower extremists, they are still "victims" of a hope that something less than complete destruction might suffice...

...But times have changed...

...In a world in which the hypocrisy of men in authority seems increasingly clear, it is certainly fitting that those with the most to be angry at should revert to the simplest beliefs about society, history, and the nature of education—beliefs easily understood and resting not on magical thinking but on simple assumptions about cause-and-effect...

...They sometimes smiled in open pleasure at the anti-teacher denunciations, even as they added their own qualifiers...

...And because they were rarely confronted with the anger or rebelliousness of the black student, they were probably less aware of their own biases...

...They were almost totally confused about the ruckus going on at IS 201, but they were clearly FROM A HARLEM SCHOOL open to believing the worst about the school system...

...Most were content with basic literacy skills—skills Negroes also obtain today but which we correctly label as totally inadequate...

...W W HILE THE MAJORITY OF PARENTS in Harlem repudiated their more militant leaders by not volunteering as scabs and by maintaining a semi-friendly or neutral posture toward the teachers, it would be a mistake to assume that the hostile response was symptomatic only of a mad minority or that it is a put-up job of "outside agitators...

...Thus, the intense demands made on the schools by Negroes is paralleled by the fiercest pressures from the middle class on the educational establishment, as social and economic status is more and more tied in with academic success...

...How is this conspiracy now carried out...

...They remained in the background, uneasy, frightened, sometimes protesting, and perhaps sometimes vicariously pleased at the actions of the black nationalists...

...despised minorities in the past succeeded only when they took over the system and saw to it that teachers didn't get away with not teaching or replaced the "in" teachers with others of their own ethnic background...

...Or, if all these techniques fail, the teacher is causing the children to be disruptive so that they can be kicked out altogether...

...As I talked on the phone I heard, in one case, some abusive remarks in the background about where teachers belonged, while the mother politely assured me she FROM A HARLEM SCHOOL was all for the teachers and the Union...

...There were of course a number of well-publicized exceptions, in places such as IS 201...

...They want soldiers...

...Still many others, sometimes confused with the passive, at other times with the "extremists," are parents who cling to hope and cannot, at least as yet, accept mere vengeance...

...It was they who roundly repudiated Poynter's attempt to take over the school in behalf of black parent power and black male power...

...Most were paper groups, lasting only for a meeting or two, producing new steering committees, resolutions, and press releases...

...Underneath they may identify with the anger, but many are probably unable to express it even to themselves and have buried their rage beneath an apathetic view of life...

...And teaching seems a simple skill compared to some others white America has conquered...

...But during the next three weeks, as our program got under way, many parents worked with me...

...The Negro community answers, defensively, "but you had a good education, and they won't let us give our children one...

...Their desire for a less racially bitter world for their youngsters makes them willing to work with their children's teachers in order to produce a better school system...

...and precisely these former immigrants are constantly reminding Negroes that they succeeded, after all, despite all these handicaps...

...I left that packed meeting with fear and sadness...

...There are those who remain passive, motivated by the old fear of trouble...

...It says, simply, "The rich ruling class wants SERVICE...

...While the West Side Committee for Decentralization— an amalgam of black and Puerto Rican nationalists, just plain angry parents, and more moderate school "reformers"— held meetings of hundreds in September, today its meetings are poorly attended...

...That's what life is all about...

...The teachers' demands were of a kind parents had always favored and besides, she said, in the long run weren't teachers needed to rebuild a good system and wouldn't their cooperation be important in any community decentralization...

...The penalties are less murderous...

...What the UFT does, what white Americans do, and what the city and federal government decide the next few years will be decisive in pushing black parents one way or another...

...There were moments those first few weeks of school when I did wonder whether I had been completely fooled and deceived by those hysterical parents at hysterical meetings...

...If learning is not occuring, it follows that the teachers must either not make children listen, or not be telling them the truth, or refusing to make them repeat the correct answers, or failing to test them often enough...

...only when blacks "take over" can the current conspiracy be foiled...

...We must use our children as a whip to crack over the heads of professionals," said a sober statement passed without protest by a well-attended meeting of the West Side Committee for Decentralization...

...Despite the furor at IS 201, the parents at 201 and its four feeder schools were not often heard from or seen...

...While antiwhite feeling in Harlem is surely on the increase and probably no Negro is immune from it, still it was the parents at Harlem's PS 175, and not the Board of Education, the UFT, or the white principal, who decided that Ralph Poynter and his able promoter Queen Mother Moore (one of the newly fashionable spokesmen for black power—a witty, perceptive, oratorically skilled evangelist) did not represent DEBORAH MEIER them...

...Still others, too intimidated themselves to enter the school, would nevertheless "support" the teachers by harshly punishing their children if the teacher sent home a disapproving note...

...Only today is the school a crucial factor in obtaining any kind of decent employment...

...it will be us who will be in charge when that teacher decides to come back...

...Despite all the claims about how the parents were going to man the schools and begin their "take-over" during the strike, few black volunteers showed up...

...The statistics belie these claims, and we know that the quiet, passive, orderly Negro children were in fact learning almost nothing...

...Manhattan's West Side, Bedford-Stuy vesant, East Harlem, Central Harlem—all were rife in September with new ad hoc organizations, formed to represent parents and the community and organized around anti-teacher and pro-decentralization slogans...

...If that beautiful new world we used to sing about cannot be created, at least they are determined that those who have made them and their children suffer will henceforth suffer too...

...Many who remembered me from the year before greeted me warmly...

...The parents I knew personally seemed so reasonable and communicative...

...The attempt neatly to define who is who and which group is bigger or smaller is probably impossible and even useless...

...The names of the leaders were often familiar and the same ones popped up many times over...

...they chide...

...Vengefulness and suspicious fury had dulled their ability to distinguish targets...

...What's wrong with you...

...A woman shouted furiously, shaking her fist: "Has a teacher ever told you your home was unfit...

...I spent three weeks walking the streets with children—bringing them to and from their homes, playing with them in various parks, and visiting area stores—and there were no incidents...

...The parent's job is just telling the teacher when and what to teach—the how is up to her...

...One night I found myself among a hundred Negro and Puerto Rican women on Manhattan's West Side...

...The poor, in fact, are asking the school to do something it has never had to do before, and neither they nor the rest of society realize it...

...Because the professionals respect the general range of social values that are part of their students' world and succeed in producing students who succeed in that world, there is not the same distrust of professionalism and professional power...

...Most immigrants or their youngsters got only a 6th to 9th grade schooling...

...Children who know how to read and write properly (which she also tends to see as the only proper function of the school) will not cause trouble...

...What they seemed to tell their children was: Don't come to me for support...

...If trouble comes, you are always Wrong...

...Psychological problems do not handicap learning, they are merely the result of bad teaching...

...Milton Galamison for the express purpose of keeping an eye on teachers and textbooks...

...What the parents in the slums fail to realize is that parents in good suburban schools (of course there are bad ones run according to this EQUAL mother's fantasy) know how to organize schools so that professionals, in fact, have very great freedom...

...A few months ago the attendance was primarily Negro and Puerto Rican...

...While on the picket line, while riding in Harlem subways, while walking down Lenox Avenue to school, I saw no angry looks, heard no angry words...

...Just teach them to read and stop psychologizing them, she declared...

...At which point one woman shouted out: "No teachers allowed here...

...Learn what you can from them, pick up any tricks they can teach you...

...But they have been embittered, if not altogether shattered, by the present collapse of the nonviolent integrationist movement...

...When I asked her afterward whether she expected any good teacher could be effective in such a parent-run classroom, subjected to such humiliating working conditions, she answered, "Why not...

...The rest of the statement denounced all the fancy explanations for learning failure and placed responsibility where "it belonged": on teachers...

...They declared with certainty that there were no disruptive children, "just disruptive teachers...

...A United Federation of Parents was organized by Rev...

...It is assumed that all whites have access to fairly unlimited power and could, if they chose, do almost anything with it...

...This may have been an apt approach to coping with survival in the South, even though its psychological and intellectual toll was incalculable...

...How can we face parents and tell them we cannot teach their children to read properly...

...The parents won't be doing the teaching, after all...

...But I soon concluded that the hysteria was not unrepresentative of parent attitudes even at my seemingly calm school...

...After Labor Day, the season was on for community protest meetings...

...FOR SOME TIME NOW I have been teaching in a Harlem elementary school and trying to understand the attitudes shown by the parents toward the school...

...When Negroes ask for the same, they are told about "cultural deprivation" and "bad speech patterns...

...Since for him there were no color barriers, the expanding economy helped the immigrant escape from the lower class...

...But in such environments teachers also appeared less mean and less hostile...

...They were expressed in more traditional "Marxist" terminology by the Progressive Labor party in a pamphlet widely distributed in the ghetto: "We Must Rule the Schools...

...All that would accomplish would be toendanger you and myself without the slightest chance of changing things for the better...

...No longer will only black people be humiliated in our schools—let teachers experience a little humiliation too...

...He "made it" not because of his good schooling, but because the expansion of the labor market, the development of new skilled trades and the organization of unions coincided with the period of mass immigration...

...And despite her assurance that she was not a teacher, the audience continued to bait her...

...It was this approach that made the parents shout with approval when one white leader of EQUAL said: "Once we go into the schools during the strike we will take over the classes...

...For some of my friendliest parents responded with approval, nodding their heads and adding their own points, to stories repeated to them about those angry speeches of the EQUAL and CORE leaders...

...If the parents were middle-class, would the teachers be so horrified...

...The mothers who were so angry in September are no doubt still unhappy...

...I don't like or trust them myself: But if I responded to my likes and dislikes, I'd have to tear this world apart...

...Aren't they good enough for the teachers...

...The vast majority is merely unwilling or unable to deal with life on these extreme and frightening terms...

...A second group can no longer bear to see another generation destroyed...

...Even months later, however, when the much-publicized elections for the governing board of IS 201 were held, less than a third of the 1,200 parents from the five schools who had registered to vote actually did so...

...A second related myth, often heard in Harlem, is that things used to be better: Harlem schools really used to teach and children really learned in them, Southern segregated schools are superior to Northern ghetto schools, teachers in the South and teachers in the old Harlem were less biased than they are now, etc...

...The chairman concluded the white mother's defeat by saying it was pointless to have her remarks translated into Spanish, as was customary...

...The dispute over decentralization reflects the same mythology...

...The average PA meeting is a quiet and ineffective affair indeed, with desperate PA presidents trying to produce life, stir discussion, get new parents to volunteer for office, hold cake sales and arrange for class pictures, organize polite luncheons for the teachers, get along with principals, and occasionally to agitate on some issue...

...we know we need experts for that...

...The white mother paused, looked forlorn, shook her head sadly and said, "No...

...And my experience was not unique or based on a special personal reputation...

...But for them the concerns of daily life must take priority, and bitterness that leads to no immediate change in the scenery of life cannot long be sustained at fever pitch...

...Stay in line and at all costs, avoid trouble...

...We don't want no teachers...

...the high-school graduate was still in the minority and the college student a novelty...

...While the PLP may, for Marxistic reasons, partially exempt workers and union teachers from this conspiracy and place the blame on some abstract "capitalists," the parents transpose this explanation into more concrete personal experience with teachers...

...The cluster of unemployed men on the corner of Lenox Avenue engaged in their usual passing comments: "How're the kids behaving today...

...Now opportunity has been dangled before their eyes, only to prove unavailable in fact—and the resulting frustration is perfectly normal and understandable...

...When I called upon parents for hells in arranging an emergency program, I got my share of evasively pleasant and polite answers—"anything you say, teacher...

...But in shouting out that something is rotten in our school system, they spoke, I felt sure, for something deeply felt in Harlem, Spanish Harlem, and even in anxious, increasingly suspicious middle-class communities...

...And the relationships I developed with the parents of my students had never begun more favorably...

...Because prejudice was built into the system openly, the teacher's own prejudice could be more disguised...

...Last September, the teachers' strike forced me to speculate on how the hostilities of a minority and the passivity of the majority fit together...

...But didn't the immigrants suffer from these too...

...First of all, they believe that the lower classes of the past—the immigrants of the early twentieth century who came from rural and deprived European communities —were, unlike Negroes today, given an adequate education which enabled them to "make it" in the mainstream of American society...

...unthinking workers who will be forced to work in lowpay jobs...

...M M OTHER AFTER MOTHER got up that hot September night on the West Side of Manhattan and repeated bits and pieces of these myths...

...Most of the volunteers who did show up were not black militants but appeared to be the usual middle-class Harlem ladies who thought all strikes a disgrace, or retired teachers who believed striking was "unprofessional...

...Like most teachers I remember how shocked I was at first when parents would tell me that I had their permission to beat their child for the slightest infraction...

...Principals in Harlem now are more tense and teachers more wary...

...It was no different this year, although it was clear I was a teacher on strike...

...Part of this I knew from years of teaching in ghetto schools in New York and Chicago...

...Like my own children, raised in urban interracial neighborhoods where the poor were always black, they basically disbelieve the claim that there are many more poor whites than poor Negroes in America, and that these poor whites are equally powerless and handicapped in school...

...they spent time and money helping the class, in a way I had never before experienced...

...Yesterday's children are today's parents...

...I realized that in one form or another I had been hearing these theories for almost a year—ever since I moved to New York City—at one hysterical meeting after another...

...The angry leaders speak, I believe, to something deep within all Harlem parents —those whose anger runs over into a kind of desperate paranoia, and those whose "sense of proportion" prevents them from rude behavior, who still want to "get along," whether from apathy or hope...

...I dreaded going to central Harlem where I taught and where I would be easily identifiable as a teacher (white women in Harlem are generally either teachers or social workers...

...Speaker after speaker expanded on how the teachers destroyed children, and the audience cheered, stomped and shouted "You tell 'em...

...Most of the parents shied away from all trouble, routinely condemning all parties concerned...

...The white folks have the power...

...It was the experience of most of the teachers at my school and most of those I knew who worked in Harlem...

...If one is made to listen, if one is told true facts, if one is forced to repeat such facts and frequently tested on them, then learning must occur...

...I was torn between sympathetic admiration at their determination to do "something" and irritation at the perversity of that "something...

...And, of course, it is undeniable that the failure of ghetto schools to teach and the anger, chaos, and bias present in such schools does harm children psychologically...

...Here we are, a nation that has the knowhow and wealth to send rockets to Saturn and spend billions in Vietnam...

...you're right, there is no way to communicate...

...Would we really be any better off if the union were destroyed...

...They were not the ones who shoved and kicked other parents or threatened teachers...

...Antiunion efforts in conservative white neighborhoods also had difficulty producing volunteer scabs on any regular basis...

...Y Y ET WHEN I CAME TO LENOX AVENUE to join my picket line, I found a normal atmosphere, the same casual friendliness or indifference of past years, neither more intense nor more angry, although more confused...

...Nor did he obtain one...

...Anything said against schools was guaranteed to produce enthusiastic anger...

...If they get out of line, just tell me" "How about teaching me to read...

...In a world becoming hopeless for those with only minimal literacy, this failure is no mere prty...

...And the anger, directed at both the system and the teachers, seemed for the moment logical...

...today it is mostly the white middle-class parents who still show up and vie among themselves for the support of the few nonwhites present (who in confusion often drift away altogether...

...How would I work with children whose parents' angers are so intense...

...Yet the sad truth is that together with this response there are confusions which make things worse still...

...A third myth believed by urban Negroes and Puerto Ricans is that only those of color are deprived of an adequate education...

...They turned a deaf ear, it seemed to me, to the legitimate anxieties, fears, and defeats that their children daily underwent in our school system...

...It's absorbing information and remembering it...

...DEBORAH MEIER T T HE URBAN NEGRO POOR suffer from a heightened sense of grievance based on four widely held myths...

...It is probably true, however, that poor blacks are more sensitive FROM A HARLEM SCHOOL to educational failure and more motivated to change it...

...The myth of education as the great social leveller has been with us so long that it has obscured the historical reality...

...In the past the poor "knew their place," and few of them took seriously the idea that they could share in affluence...

...In this nostalgia Negroes are forgetting that it was not assumed then that children would remain in school until the 12th grade, and that simply learning to read and write was then considered sufficient schooling...

...The failure of teachers, most of whom are white, is thus explicable only as a conscious decision not to let black children learn: the "ins" run schools so that they and their kind alone will learn...

...the teachers represent them...

...Few parents ever seemed to listen to their own child's version of school life...

...They voted him out of his selfappointed principalship (which the TV cameras helped promote) and reappointed the white principal...

...No psychologists, guidance workers, or social workers are needed in our schools, said EQUAL chairman Rosalie Stutz (who had some otherwise perceptive things to say about the schools...

...In fact, however, America did not give the lower-class Italian, Pole, or Irishman a good education...

...The logical, simple, "scientific" explanation is easy to see...

...If the school teaches you only that, it's worth it and you might as well learn it young when the penalties for making a mis take are less severe...

...The fourth myth involves a belief in the omnipotence of American know-how and the complicity of all whites in the "power structure...

...My students come mostly from families on welfare, yet several parents offered financial assistance during the strike...

...They are also mistaking the orderliness that used to exist in segregated and thoroughly authoritarian all-Negro schools for a true learning experience...

...They feel that parents are more likely than in the past to raise a fuss if a child claims to have been hit or pushed, if children are not getting enough homework, if a fight breaks out in the school yard, if the teacher is not sending home the proper change from the milk money, if a child is transferred to another class or placed in a special program without properly notifying the parents, or, of course, if children are suspended from school...

...The feelings of the extremists are, I believe, shared by the vast majority...

...They don't want to give our boys and girls good schooling...

...What, after all, is learning anyway...

...Don't expectme to appeal your case to any higher authorities...

...At one point, a white mother rose and suggested that she also was bitter about the school system, but she could not, as many speakers had suggested, scab on the teachers...

...And the more I heard, the less I felt able to refute...

...And let them try to get us out...

...Mothers in Westchester and Queens and mothers in DEBORAH MEIER private schools, she claimed, already are doing just this...

...These myths make their problems appear both more grotesque and simpler than the reality...

...Is there something wrong with working for these parents...

...The average parent in Harlem remains inactive in regard to school issues and if he becomes active, it is still in the more traditional Parent Associations which, despite poor participation, probably involve more parents than all the black-power groups combined...

...Speaker after speaker got up to expand upon the statement's denunciation of the UFT on the issue of "disruptive children...

...While I wholeheartedly supported the UFT and felt proud of the teachers for going out on non-wage demands, their position seemed impossible to communicate to the people who most needed just what the UFT was demanding...

...Don't complain to me about injustice...