Tragedy at Ocean Hill
Brooks, Thomas R.
Last summer we invited Thomas R. Brooks, an experienced labor reporter, to write an article on the festering conflicts in the New York City school system, especially those in the Ocean...
...A memo sent out by the Council Against Poverty (the central city antipoverty agency), headed by Major Owens, a Lindsay appointee and well-known black militant, urged affiliated agencies to do all they could to open the schools and suggested concrete ways of doing so...
...Financially, the district boards would be empowered "to determine needs, develop programs, and apportion available funds among the programs...
...The other two districts are: I.S...
...But the question is, how much longer do you expect these people to string along...
...The position of the UFT hardened...
...Ramparts, Sol Stem huffs: "Caught in the But middle-aged and middle-class white "New Leftists" assumed that they could manipulate the cross fire of rising demands from the black Spanish-speaking community into opening the ghettos in which they work, and confronted school...
...The reason was economic: perpupil cost in the UFT-sponsored MES schools is roughly $915 as against the estimated city-wide average of $485...
...Subsequently, McCoy said, "They were suspected of trying to sabotage the demonstration project...
...Understandably disturbed, the UFT leaders in the district met with McCoy to explain the problem and seek ways of preventing repetition of such provocative acts...
...B B EFORE THE MARCH on Washington in 1963, Michael Harrington and Bayard Rustin argued, convincingly I believe, that the movement of black people in America could serve as a catalyst for a new era of TRAGEDY AT OCEAN HILL progress...
...THOMAS R. BROOKS about the unrepresentative nature of the governing boards...
...271 reopened...
...A few paragraphs later, Doar adds, "It is our position that a basic conflict exists between labor union concepts and civil rights concepts...
...TRAGEDY AT OCEAN HILL crying...
...no doubt, some of our readers will disagree with it...
...But funds are to be distributed "under a city-wide objective formula," not on the basis of any given community's need...
...Indeed, I believe it would be a serious error for the city to allow bargaining to take place on money, benefit, and basic working conditions on a local board-by-board basis...
...The Board of Education again suspended the local Board and subsequently suspended McCoy and seven of the district's eight principals for failing to comply with an order to reassign the returning teachers to their classrooms...
...55 opened in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, teachers were relieved to find that Herman Ferguson, a militant separatist who had been indicted and subsequently convicted for plotting the murder of Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Jr., and others, would not be principal...
...But in reality no one really wanted the dispute to go to the legislature...
...The handbills cropped up again last spring...
...We will exercise the same prerogatives that superintendents and principals have at any other school in the city of New York [in appraising teacher performance...
...in I.S...
...Lindsay and Doar, the Ford Foundation and the establishment have been trying to make something give these last few months in New York...
...201 which comprises 3,813 pupils—mostly black but with a substantial Puerto Rican minority—with four feeder schools (kindergarten through fourth grade) and intermediate school I.S...
...As Patrick Harnett, a teacher, points out in a perceptive article in the Village Voice (October 31, 1968), "The thrust of the present attack on school problems is against teachers as failures and not against a school system that has failed...
...The point is made more explicit by some black militants, who theorize that black boards would be in a position to dictate that black construction workers build schools...
...Here's how McCoy described the situation to me last winter (December 1967): For three months, we've been in a state of persistent anxiety...
...Despite one widely disseminated charge —"What the [Ocean Hill-Brownsville] Governing Board found wanting in these teachers [the 19 whose dismissal set off the conflict] was a genuine desire to teach the children...
...The teachers' disenchantment with the "experiments" was reinforced by their experience with the governing boards during the 1967 two-week contract strike...
...The money was quickly taken, and the parents in the area have been deeply and bitterly divided ever since...
...The aim was to decentralize the system but not 12 The UFT has been accused of spreading racism and of "insinuating that black anti-Semitism is at the heart of the conflict...
...Decentralization and community control by now are loaded political catchwords, lacking precise definition...
...Its findings indicate some confusion among parents as to what exactly "community control" is and extraordinary decisiveness as to whom parents did and did not want to participate in the affairs of their schools...
...The courts have so far held the appointments illegal...
...The percentage of black or Puerto Rican administrators, however, is virtually nil and for teachers only slightly better, roughly 12 per cent...
...A A BRIEF RESPITE...
...Rhody McCoy, the administrator of the experimental district, told me in December 1967 of his pride in the way the teachers, specifically including the UFT teachers, accepted his appointees as principals...
...Parents also tended to blame the UFT for going on strike rather than blame Mayor Lindsay for his ineptness...
...The role of the Ford Foundation, at this point, is unclear...
...They were not successful, despite the urgings of the antipoverty warriors...
...I I NDEED, IT WAS THE UFT that brought de centralization to Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a grim, run-down corner of Brooklyn...
...Specifically, Jason Epstein in the New York Review of Books charged that the union doctored two handbills: one, combining a black manifesto written by super-militant Ralph Poynter with an anonymous anti-Semitic diatribe...
...All of the several possible consequences of such a labor policy in a decentralized school system, I believe, would work to the disadvantage of the politically weak districts—and there are bound to be several of these...
...Fear of a stiffened Taylor Law was one factor...
...Significantly, in the spring of 1968, Leslie Campbell, vice-president of the AfroAmerican Teachers' Association, 8 was trans 7 The UFT District Chapter also urged that theprincipals named by McCoy be retained despitethe court decision holding the appointments illegal...
...But when asked who should be influential under a strong decentralization program, 28 per cent of the parents opted for "parent leaders" and 35 per cent for the "professional school staff...
...Bayard Rustin, particularly, was instrumental in persuading the UFT not to go for a "punitive" settlement...
...How do you document a sneer...
...They escalated a localized—admittedly complicated—conflict into a city-wide near disaster...
...There have been consistent and persisting complaints from within the experimental districts 15 There are two pragmatic arguments for decentralization, which explain why a majority of New Yorkers favored and perhaps still favor decentralization...
...TRAGEDY AT OCEAN HILL "Sonny" Carson of Brooklyn CORE had announced that he considered the five principals in the area "fired" and demanded that at least half of the teachers in the area be black...
...14 Indeed, Bundy's proposal for the formulation of district boards is quite conservative...
...Campbell what he did not do in I.S...
...costs--district superintendents, for example, get $30,000 a year—from eating up additional money that will become available when decentralization takes place...
...It states: "At first—and this appears to be a fact that is not generally known— McCoy tried to transfer the 19 teachers within the experimental district...
...What in fact did the Board do...
...But the Niemeyer advisory commission did...
...They view decentralization as an opportunity for greater community participation, but they expect and prefer that professional educators participate in planning the education that their children receive...
...Still, there is no need to repeat Puerto Rican, 10 per cent "others"), where history in quite the same dismal fashion, the UFT chapter vote was 35 for and 10 here or elsewhere...
...THOMAS R. BROOKS role as adviser to the decentralization project and his expressed hostility to whites profoundly disturbed the teachers...
...The teachers— the "monied white power structure...
...Some, no doubt, were angered at being passedover...
...We are, I believe, in for more of this sort of action...
...This request was denied by Superintendent Donovan...
...The Bundy recommendations, however, were not as radical as many seem to think...
...The closing of schools would have generated broad pressure from parents and the public for settlement—and conceivably one more to the liking of the Board than the union...
...The settlement provided for the return of the ousted teachers, full salary payments for the teachers who engaged in the 10 Later, one of the charges levelled against the teachers was inability to control the students...
...At present (December 5, 1968), the Board is debating such questions as it draws up new decentralization proposals for submission to the next session of the Legislature...
...Every dime was spent before we came into existence...
...As a result of the Board's betrayal of promises to integrate their new school, I.S...
...among Puerto Ricans, 9 and 34 per cent...
...After Campbell's speech, bands of youths roamed the school's corridors...
...This, from another handbill:] It is impossible for the Middle East murderers of colored people to possibly bring to this important task the insight, the concern, the exposing of the truth that is a must if the years of brain washing and selfhatred that has been taught to our black children by those blood-sucking exploiters and murderers is to be overcome...
...Meanwhile, agitation for a larger parental voice in the affairs of the school mounted...
...After training, the board would select a full-time administrator to hire and fire teachers and to set educational goals...
...We've got all the ingredients for a meaningful change right here in this District...
...Some teachers cooperated with the parents until they could no longer take the verbal abuse, and then quit...
...But he was frustrated, in part, by the hostilities between his staff and the Governing Board following the September 1967 strike (hostilities that he had, with UFT support, succeeded in cooling somewhat) and by lack of 5 Of the district's 18 assistant principals (allwhite) however, 17 requested transfers in protest...
...His Board of Education, instead of working in the interests of all the parents of the city, has actively sided with a minority faction within a minority community in a struggle for control over that community...
...At the same time, however, the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council ran out of funds for several of its antipoverty and educational proj ects...
...Said Rev...
...The union charged the Board with breaking its agreement and encouraging vigilantism...
...That is the accepted view among liberals...
...1° Finally, on May 27, the teachers decided to maintain the walkout until the issue was resolved...
...At that time, threatening and racist literature began to crop up in teachers' letter boxes and has reappeared off and on since...
...Unfortunately the so-called disruptive child issue did poison the atmosphere...
...The way to a settlement was cleared when Superintendent Donovan took action against four teachers accused of harrassing union members when they last returned totheir posts...
...Yeshiva University, as consultant, would set up a learning center for youngsters with reading problems and a learning laboratory to examine the educational problems of slum children...
...They insisted on involving the UFT, and the first of the decentralization plans evolved...
...Subsequently, a black woman was named acting principal, and last year the I.S...
...Itwas the ATA Forum that carried the now famous, or notorious, article by John F. Hatchett, then a school teacher and subsequently head of New York University's Martin Luther King, Jr., Center, entitled "The Phenomenon of the Anti-BlackJews and the Black Anglo-Saxon...
...The UFT leadership tended to view the boards as potential employers and therefore held that teachers ought not to sit on boards as members...
...The union charged the Governing Board with sabotaging the agreement and struck once more...
...By spring, the situation worsened...
...One can imagine how pleased Fortune readers must feel as they read, "Union concepts of security and seniority were formulated in the period of struggle between company and union...
...Its re port became the basis for the Mayor's recommen dations to the state legislature...
...The UFT properly insisted that the 19 (10 teachers, 9 administrators) be reinstated, or that charges be filed...
...An analysis of the racial composition of grades one through eight prepared by the Bundy panel's staff shows 13 predominantly (50 per cent or more) white, 6 black, 4 Puerto Rican, and 7 Negro-Puerto Rican...
...The creation of the Two Bridges district illustrates the manipulative approach of the Ford Foundation...
...The antiunion role of these agencies became clearer still during the 1968 strike...
...201 Governing Board named Ronald Evans to fill the spot...
...the other, presenting excerpts of a magazine article about Leslie Campbell's teaching in another school but assigning the lesson to I.S...
...Requests for refunding were turned down by the Ford Foundation: "We're not interested in that anymore...
...There is no need to concern ourselves with such esoteric matters as the oil depletion allowances, or tax loop holes allowing millionaires to escape scot-free from income tax payments, or even to consider that David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan is in fact a much more powerful man than the mayor of our city...
...The UFT offered the use of resource people to help in the development of special programs, but they were never called on.7 As Fred Nauman, UFT chapter chairman, explains this period, "The meetings seemed at first to be fruitful but as the months passed we noticed that while some of our suggestions were well received, nothing seemed to be done with them...
...All of the above is subject to honest differences of opinion and the city needs more, not less, debate over decentralization...
...For the rest of the strike she neither worked nor picketed...
...Conventional liberalism, sometimes preen 11 Pressure also mounted within the labor movement for a settlement...
...the Governing Board refused...
...In the interest of stressing the comhappened...
...The Mayor, after all, could have forced talks to proceed at a more intense pace much earlier in the summer...
...His departure eased tensions, and there was, in fact, a fall-off in "community" attacks on the UFT and the teachers in the district...
...Over the summer of 1967, the parents of the Two Bridges schools participated in the successful fight to name Dr...
...As the result of an incident at a nondemonstration project school, the union demanded, "when a teacher is charged with action that may result in an involuntary transfer, a `U' rating, or dismissal, that the matter be referred to impartial third-party arbitration...
...One, the formula for state aid applies to school districts, and the city suffers because it is now considered one district...
...TRAGEDY AT OCEAN HILL lieved—and still believes—that such a review board would provide due process for teachers, enable parents to air their grievances, and enable the system to rid itself of incompetents...
...and the addition of 10 days to the school year, and 45 minutes to the school day to make up lost time...
...Violence broke out at I.S...
...13 At present, the city has 30 districts (plus the three experimental districts), each averaging roughly 30 schools with 36,000 pupils (roughly the size of the Evansville, Indiana, school system...
...The evidence is that the Governing Board not only did seek either the dismissal or punitive transfer of the 19 but knew all along that what it was doing was illegal...
...Again, a settlement was reached: this .time, it entailed the suspension of the Governing Board until the ousted teachers were reinstated...
...If the money is controlled already, we're not decentralized...
...As radicals, we have always recognized the existence of racism among white workers, condemned it and at the same time tried to point out how it worked against the best interests of working people...
...4 The antipoverty agencies, by the way, are Lindsay's major source of patronage, and sometimes his way of buying off black militants...
...Since the issues raised here are both urgent and difficult, we invite comment from various points of view...
...Two, it will eliminate the present Board, which many favor and possibly break-up/shake-up the 110 Livingston Street bureaucracy, something to be hoped for...
...If the devil himself had desired it, no other policy would have succeeded so well in spreading racial antagonism throughout the city...
...However, Some UFT chapters in the experimental districts did elect representatives to sit on the new boards, while other chapters refused all along to do so...
...My guess is that if we get decentralization, local board budgetary powers will be carefully circumscribed...
...what's more, the two key wings of the coalition— the labor movement and the civil rights movement—are being egged on to fight each other...
...It sought the defeat of some perfectly good legislators...
...In The Burden of Blame, a report on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville controvery put out by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) on October 9, 1968, the UFT was charged escalation of rhetoric, [which] exposed the deep fears and hostility that existed between the white middle-class educational establishment and the black community...
...Luckily, it lost...
...Ironically, as it turned out, McCoy told me, "We have no intention of screening teachers...
...Next," continues the NYCLU, "McCoy requested that the 19 be transferred to another district entirely...
...The Niemeyer Report of an advisory commission appointed by the Board of Education to study decentralization and chaired by John H. Niemeyer, president of Bank Street College of Education, is cited as evidence for this statement...
...Among Negro parents, the comparable percentages were 21 and 49 per cent...
...The legislature, as I understand it, is committed to applying that formula at least borough by borough, if the city comes up with an acceptable plan...
...This termination of employment is to take fired by NYU for calling Shanker and HubertHumphrey "racist bastards...
...Black militants immediately charged that the demand was aimed at black children...
...Clara Marshall, Chairman of the Personnel Committee of the Governing Board, in recommending the "removal" of the teachers, noted its illegality...
...If slums are caused by racism, then we need to look no further than at the teachers, plumbers, or steel workers...
...The Board, however, opened the school with a white principal, then transferred him out, precipitating a walkout of black and white teachers in protest...
...One may wonder why...
...Jimmy Breslin, Nat Hentoff, Mur1 The teachers and most of the parents at P.S...
...271, the center of much of the controversy this year...
...9 " Superintendent Bernard Donovan, under pressure from the union, insisted that the "fired" teachers were still assigned to the district...
...One reason the fact is not "generally known" is that it is not a fact...
...With roughly 8,000 pupils-75-80 per cent Puerto Rican with a sprinkling of "others"—in five elementary schools (kindergarten through fourth grade) and two intermediate schools (fifth through eighth grade), Ocean HillBrownsville is one of three experimental districts set up with an assist from the Ford Foundation...
...However, said a Ford man, "If you're interested in school decentralization, we might do something for you...
...You know what I mean, brothers...
...No reasons were given for the firings in the letters...
...It refused to take back the ousted teachers, as well as all those who walked out...
...As Maurice Goldbloom points out in a critique of the NYCLU report distributed by the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the Right to Teach,6 the activities of the "extremists" and "militants" "had become a serious problem well before the establishment of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district...
...However, the truth is something else again and a good deal more complicated...
...It favors 15 districts on the grounds that this is economically more feasible and would prevent administrative 14 Jason Epstein in his second article on Ocean Hill in the New York Review of Books makes much of the power over money that would accrueto blacks and Puerto Ricans under decentralization, enabling them to have a say not only over teaching jobs but in construction, the kitchens, and custodial work...
...16 per cent felt, "in general," that there was "too much," and 42 per cent that there was "too little...
...Within all three districts parents and teachers fought, often bitterly, over the "how" of the experiment...
...In my own neighborhood same reasons that made the strike all but school (P.S...
...But when the teachers returned to work, the Board of Education could not—or would not—enforce its part of the agreement...
...Mediation efforts collapsed when the Governing Board refused recommendations made by Theodore W. Kheel as a basis for further mediation efforts...
...And, to make his intention clear, McCoy later declared: "Not one of these teachers will be allowed to teach anywhere in this city...
...Then the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court upheld three to two a lower-court ruling that the Ocean HillBrownsville principals had been illegally appointed...
...Ferguson's tually counted on the poverty workers to force them open in their respective neighborhoods...
...13 McGeorge Bundy chaired an advisory panel on decentralization at Mayor Lindsay's behest...
...The community began to accuse the teachers of scuttling the experiment, and the teachers, having resigned from the Local Governing Board, began to talk about black extremists and black racism...
...When a group of us from the Ad Hoc Committee responded to an invitation from Dr...
...As Maurice Goldbloom points out in his critique of the NYCLU pamphlet, "Apparently, the community control the Governing Board demands does not include community control over it...
...The "community" attacked both the teachers and the Board, even though the teachers had something of a case and the Board did not...
...But when they reported to work, they were barred from their classrooms and 350 9 One further note on how the NYCLU pamphlet handled all this...
...the second is the UFT's alleged opposition to decentralization...
...This for twelve- to fifteen-year-olds...
...There has been a sudden flow of foundation and corporate money into "black capitalist" ventures...
...But I'm not the local government...
...If you think this oversimplifies what is going on, listen to John Doar, Lindsay's appointee to the Board of Education and its president, as quoted in Fortune, January 1968...
...A condition of one of its offers to take the teachers back was that there should be no new elections...
...Another "fired" teacher was one of the two chosen earlier as the best in the district for a TV filming of the experiment...
...William D. Firman, as trustee of Ocean HillBrownsville...
...As Professor Gordon told me, "The Board made it clear that it would not come up with the money necessary to implement our educational plans...
...Ironically, one of the demands turned down by the Board was a UFT proposal for a public review board to hear parental complaints against the teachers...
...Two Bridges which comprises 5,148 pupils-40 per cent Puerto Rican, 36 per cent Chinese, and 12 per cent black—with four feeder schools and a junior high school on the Lower East Side...
...The three named in the suit were directed, under the terms of the settlement, to report to the district office pending further appeal...
...Unhappily, the UFT not only lobbied, which was its right, against the Bundy-Lindsay plan, but it also sought to punish its "enemies" in the legislature politically in last spring's primaries, which was unwise...
...it now insisted on the removal of McCoy, the governing board, and those "scab" teachers who had threatened UFT THOMAS R. BROOKS teachers with what Mayor Lindsay termed "verbal abuse...
...Significantly, one of the things the Ford Foundation never asked as it maneuvered the three experiments into "community control" was what "community control," if any, the parents wanted...
...271 and to link crude anti-Semitism to Mr...
...These included the return of the "dismissed" teachers, except those against whom "serious" charges were levelled...
...I'm not saying that decentralization means more money, but it does mean control over money...
...Professionals may well ask themselves how you disprove such charges...
...Meanwhile, the Ocean HillBrownsville Governing Board recruited new teachers, 75 per cent white and mostly Jewish, to take the place of the 350 on strike...
...When ordered to return, they found teaching conditions intolerable—irresponsible youths were permitted into the schools to harrass them and to encourage school youths to act up...
...An I.S...
...As one very middleSince so few New Yorkers wore Wallace class "militant" put it when she was asked if she thought that the parents of P.S...
...Within the decentralized districts, governing board members vowed vengeance...
...271 were blocked by "the community," a euphemism for "Sonny" Carson of Brooklyn CORE and his young men, assorted antipoverty staff, and others from outside the district, a scattering of residents, and a handful of parents...
...No event in recent history has so embittered and divided the people of New York, and this division has also shown itself among the intellectuals, within the union movement, and on the Left...
...But he apparently thought the teachers would follow his advice to remain in school rather than pursue their own self-interest as teachers and trade unionists...
...The Board dangled the prospects of "community involvement" before the parents and community activists, saying in effect, "If you don't play our way, no game...
...Hatchett was ferred to I.S...
...Niemeyer "asserted that the Governing Board was determined to prove it had control of the schools by circumventing normal procedure...
...Later, he said such a meeting was not possible...
...it was not based on race or other extraneous factors...
...It participated in training parents for the local governing board and its "candidates" are a majority on the board...
...Their organization challenged the appoint ments in court, charging that the new principals, drawn from state certification lists but not on New York City's civil service list, were not qualified...
...201 in East Harlem...
...Black unionists, too, added their weight...
...against authorizing the strike, there were Perhaps the tragic conflict of the last few good teachers on both sides.' In another dismonths will yield some measure of under-strict, a UFT member, disagreeing with the standing...
...For example, only a minority of the three districts' black teachers crossed picket lines, and attempts at running classes with parents failed, as they did elsewhere in the city...
...Reconciliation in New York City may indeed be the first step in rebuilding on a stronger foundation the coalition of conscience that has been the source of all our progress in recent decades...
...Hopefully, blacks will soon realize that "community control" is another bag woven by Whitey, that the only way to escape manipulation by the white upper-class establishment is to make common cause in fruitful political action with one's natural allies, those "others" who also suffer the consequences of an inequitous economic and so cial system, as well as with organized labor, urban and urbane liberals, other minorities, youth, and the "new South...
...DECENTRALIZATION, however, is not "community control," and here we move to much more debatable ground indeed, as the controversy over the experimental districts shows...
...But," she added, "we found that the people in the streets considered these laws written to protect the monied white power structure of this city...
...A certain lasting bitterness, however, was engendered...
...In Two Bridges, the percentages were 6 and 33...
...Roughly, half the black parents believed that there had been an increase in community control in the three districts...
...The 19, it is now said, were merely transferred, not fired...
...Can we describe this as the UFT, to quote the New York Civil Liberties Union's statement, fanning "the flames of social fears" as it increasingly harped on "extremism," the "militants," and "black power...
...The teachers, in turn, were pleasantly surprised by McCoy's appointment of one Puerto Rican, one white, and three blacks as principals of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools.5 Two were selected for praise in an article on decentralization by Eugenia Kemble in the United Teacher...
...Neither the parents nor the Mayor is very strong on labor relations...
...When the new I.S...
...So, one attempts analysis...
...I can't vouch for all of them, but one was so warmly greeted by a pupil on her return that she was reprimanded by a supervisor for being "overly demonstrative...
...The Ocean HillBrownsville Board—with the support of the Mayor and his appointees on the Board of Education—has fought every effort to secure new elections...
...When the UFT shut down the schools, the Mayor and the Board might have taken a leaf from sophisticated management-labor relations, recognized the reality, and sat down to negotiate...
...271, and dislike for another man at another school...
...Unfortunately, the white liberal establishment shows little understanding of the need for teacher-parent cooperation if education is to improve...
...29 in Brooklyn...
...punitive transfers--but only with due process...
...One was judged capable of handling his job, the other not...
...The Bundy panel recommended up to 60 autonomous districts, which might mean districts on the order of the Norwalk, Connecticut, school system—say, 16,000 pupils each...
...the establishment of a threeman committee with the responsibility of ensuring teacher rights and the power to act where violations occurred...
...It declared the schools open, named the first teacher in as principal, and invited angry parents to slug it out with their teachers who were forced, as the Board must have known they would be, to mount mass picket lines...
...In Two Bridges, for example, staff members of the Parent Development Program,3 an antipoverty agency training parents for para-professional tasks in the schools, issued a leaflet in the name of community parents that viciously attacked the teachers for striking...
...Parent representatives" from two schools in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, for example, neither have children in those schools nor reside in the district...
...But what other teachers on Instant liberalism has already produced an the job had to say about their striking felexplanation for the strike—"white teachers' lows upset her so much that she fled home, racism...
...The Superintendent of Schools may make "involuntary," i.e...
...Brooks's article strikes us as an honest and competent account of an enormously complicated event...
...12 The evidence for this rests solely on the UFT's public fight against the so-called Bundy plan...
...The UFT subsequently proposed an eminently sensible and fair solution to an admittedly difficult problem...
...Naturally, this article was transformed into a report on the teachers' strike and its ramifications...
...Also contrary to received liberal opinion, the UFT teachers in Ocean Hill-Brownsville initially were not unfavorably disposed toward McCoy...
...Community control," obviously, means something quite different to militant black separatists than it does to most everybody else...
...Parent assemblies in each school are to nominate delegates to a district assembly, which, in turn, would nominate six members to the "community" school board for a four-year term...
...As the final speaker at a school assembly following the murder of Martin Luther King, Campbell whipped up the already aroused, deeply disturbed students with cries, "Don't steal toothpaste and combs, steal things we can use...
...271 in a caption by the UFT...
...8 Herman Ferguson is a leader of this group...
...Teachers seeking to return to I.S...
...Most parents, even those in the experimental districts, are dubious about its ostensible virtues...
...How many witnesses are needed to convict teachers of the failure to love their children...
...Demonstrations were held to enforce this demand...
...A petition seeking the removal of the present Governing Board secured 3,000 signatures in the district, just about twice the number of votes cast in the election of the Board...
...Teachers were divided...
...T T HIS TIME THE STRIKE stretched out until it looked as though the whole mess would land in the lap of the state legislature, and the atmosphere in New York City became appallingly tense...
...201 teachers who participated in the walkout were told that they would face an "indepth screening" on their return to work...
...Community control" is big this year with THOMAS R. BROOKS the foundations...
...So what if taxes are inequitable, incomes maldistributed, and housing conditions determined by banks, insurance companies, and real estate magnates...
...and a representative by the supervisors...
...The social fabric of the plexities of human conflict, I report that a city was severely tried and suffered grievous goodly number of teachers divided their time wounds...
...strike, went in...
...The day after the ouster, it was McCoy himself who demanded that the Superintendent place the teachers on departmental trial...
...Something has to give...
...the three others were removed from their classrooms, pending the outcome of hearings...
...As we all know, the coalition has fallen apart...
...The mayor would appoint four members to the central Board from a list of three to five for each vacancy submitted by a prestigious-type selection board, as well as five members from a list of three to five for each vacancy submitted by the chairmen of the district boards...
...This was the decentralization plan fought by the UFT...
...How do you prove a tone of voice...
...Evidently anxious to do a good job, he was at the time I interviewed him an exceedingly frustrated man...
...When I looked into the three districts for The Reporter last winter, it seemed to me that most of the people involved were attempting to cool the passions created by past controversy...
...We promise to print as many communications as space permits, asking only that these be reasoned arguments briefly presented.—ED...
...The parents, however, refused to give their backing...
...How indeed...
...Then, on May 9, mid morning, registered letters were delivered to 19 teachers and administrators on their jobs, stating: "The Governing Board of Ocean Hill Brownsville Demonstration School district has voted to end your employment in the schools of this District...
...Unfortunately for the NYCLU, there is nothing of the sort in the Report...
...Three other cases were dismissed because lawyers for the Governing Board were unable to produce witnesses or evidence supporting the allegations...
...there were good teachers among the 19...
...Only 2 per cent called for either local politicians or local poverty workers or black militant leaders, 3 per cent for local religious leaders, and 5 per cent thought civic leaders ought to be influential...
...Finances are so structured that it would be difficult for the community boards to pressure the city, or the state, for additional funds...
...The UFT be 2 Not all the governing boards were fully formed at this time...
...Niemeyer said that, before the last controversy, the Board had offered to transfer any teachers unacceptable to the governing board...
...It provided for a governing board composed of ten parents and five teachers (one from each school) to be elected by parents and teachers respectively...
...If there is to be reconciliation, it must be built upon that foundation...
...29 ray Kempton, and James Wechsler have all wanted above all to maintain the good relation chimed in...
...The mayor would name the balance of five, giving him a fair chance of dominating the boards...
...Instead of mediating, for example, Mayor Lindsay fostered the spread of conffict...
...The judgment was professional and based on experience...
...Elliot Shapiro superintendent of District Three...
...In the November 1968 issue of ship that has made the school a fairly decent one...
...A letter urging this was signed by almostevery member and sent to the Board of Educa tion in March 1968...
...He helped to polarize the situation in Ocean Hill-Brownsville...
...But, according to the New York Times, Dr...
...The third strike followed...
...Like most parents, they did not like school strikes, which are especially hard on working parents who need the schools not only to educate their children but to watch over them while they are at work...
...The UFT's excuses—"We had no areal clearing house," etc.— are weak...
...15 In addition, although this is provided for in the Bundy plan, the union wanted strong guarantees that it would not have to go back to the year Alpha in collective bargaining...
...and that of the community...
...It is important to note that there was a minority on the governing board who thought the teachers should have a hearing...
...When the enemy taps you on the shoulder, send him to the cemetery...
...Throughout the controversy, there has been a good deal of finger-pointing—at the teachers and their union...
...The district was shut down for several days...
...2 Some of the teachers active in the planning for the experiments hoped that the parents would back the UFT in its negotiations with the Board of Education since several key demands were aimed at improving education—expansion of the MES program, smaller classes, and the like...
...five community repre THOMAS R. BROOKS sentatives were to be selected by the parent members...
...McCoy said that any action would have to be taken by the Governing Board and that he would arrange a meeting...
...All this is rather elementary but I raise it because we are now being told that white working men-and especially their unions—are the cause for black people being locked into black ghettos...
...As the Niemeyer Report concludes, "Although twice as many parents support as oppose the concept of decentralization, they do not believe that it means they or any local group will or should have complete control...
...I was among the signers, and if that indicates a bias, let it here beacknowledged...
...You know who your enemy is...
...Yet, "Personnel" knew nothing about "reassignment" and had no jobs for the "transferred" teachers...
...Voluntary transfers within the system may be arranged under specified conditions aimed at keeping transfers out of "bad" schools at a minimum...
...set parent (preferably Puerto Rican) against with the necessity of adaptation to black au-parent (preferably white), teacher against teacher, and presumably everybody against the principal thority, white middle-class New York teach who has enjoyed both the confidence of his staff ers may quietly vote for George Wallace...
...178 in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, could not get the Board of Education to remedy physical defects in his school, UFT president Albert Shanker wrote a letter to the Board and made it public as a means of exerting pressure for the needed repairs...
...The plan called for a two-year program...
...He needed, I suspect, a substantial gain, a major educational accomplishment, to demonstrate that the project was working—and to head off the extremists on his flanks...
...Community control is nowhere as popular as the liberal press would have it...
...Community activists, however, were eager for control almost on any terms...
...THOMAS R. BROOKS effect immediately" (italics added...
...201 group, including David Spencer, the president of the Parents' Association and an aggressive young social worker on the staff of MEND (an antipoverty agency), met with two educational consultants from Yeshiva University, Sol Gordon and Harry Gottesfeld...
...The Governing Board of Two Bridges, coincidentally, wound up in the hands of the very same people who took Ford money to educate and prepare the community for decentralization...
...Of Ocean Hill-Brownsville parents, 19 per cent felt there was "too much," 46 percent "too little...
...That strike supposedly ensured that due process would be built into any decentralization plan...
...The idea was to build a coalition that might do something about jobs, education, housing, health problems, even possibly affect the inequitable distribution of wealth...
...OF COURSE, one wishes that the 1968 we cannot really tell how teachers voted...
...The faculty asks, where are the innovations, the new curriculum...
...In short, the parents seem to reject the very kinds of leaders currently dominating the boards in the three experimental districts, and those leaders most favored by the Lindsay administration, the Ford Foundation, and the liberal white establishment...
...In May 1967, the preceding year, Robert 6 The Ad Hoc Committee is chaired by TomKahn and Michael Harrington...
...In September, the UFT struck the system to enforce Judge Rivers' arbitration award and the Superintendent's orders that all the teachers return to their posts...
...The new man in the White House has already talked favorably about "black capitalism...
...On October 11, for no good reason, the Board of Education, in its composition now a Lindsay Board, reinstated McCoy and the seven principals and ordered I.S...
...Much has been made of the last sentence in the letter the dismissed 19 received, which reads: "You will report Friday morning to Personnel, 110 Livingston Street, Brooklyn [the home of New York City's central Board of Education], for reassignment...
...In all, the three strikes had kept 50,000 teachers and 1 million pupils out of school for 36 of the first 48 days of the fall school term...
...201, parents voiced demands for "quality segregated education" and for a black principal...
...Judge Rivers ruled that the cases against the other seven teachers were "unproved," and he ordered their return to continue teaching at their schools...
...Behind the natural inclination of the parents toward disapproval, however, there is some evidence of social-worker manipulation pushing experimental district boards into a hard line against the strike...
...Observers were assigned to the disputed schools, too...
...Not one of the charges was ever supported by evidence...
...Separatist tendencies within the black community are being encouraged...
...The NYCLU pamphlet adds, "In fact, many hundreds of such [involuntary] transfers take place every school year, apparently without the UFT's objection...
...In my interviews with teachers then and since I found admiration for William Harris, principal of J.H.S...
...Now the struggle is between the Negroes and unions...
...Reconciliation is to be hoped for, between picketing and campaigning hard for but I fear it is unlikely, pretty much for the Paul O'Dwyer...
...And it is a very difficult charge to prove in a court of law...
...This cleared the decks for the basic settlement—which called for the appointment by the State Board of Education of Associate State Commissioner of Education Herbert F. Johnson, later replaced by Dr...
...The leaflet was later withdrawn since its social-worker authors had not bothered to consult with the parents.4 3 PDP is a daughter agency of the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council...
...Kenneth Clark to meet RhodyMcCoy and the Reverend C. Herbert Oliver, chair man of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville GoverningBoard, it was Hatchett who appeared as McCoy's"second...
...All we need to do is bust a union...
...After all, if the overwhelming majority of blacks voted for Hubert Humphrey and by extension for inclusion in our society, where else are Republicans to go...
...How they came to be that way is a story of frustration and anger, a consequence of fruitless attempts to get action from the circumlocution office that passes for a Board of Education in New York City...
...TRAGEDY AT OCEAN HILL teachers walked out in sympathy...
...80-90 per cent inevitable...
...ing itself as "radical," advances two reasons for the strike—one, as indicated earlier, is the teachers' white racism...
...Still, I do not think the basic accusations hold up...
...nine people were arrested (most of whom did not even live in the district) and ten policemen suffered minor injuries in a clash between Ocean HillBrownsville supporters and the police, seeking to open the schools to students and teachers...
...An appeal by UFT president Albert Shanker averted a mass walkout of 490 teachers in Ocean Hill-Brownsville at the end of the contract strike...
...In short, while the Lindsay Board of Education ordered schools to be open, they acHE THREE EXPERIMENTAL DISTRICTS Were the locus of the only serious attempts at union-busting during the contract walkout...
...Other reasons were advanced at various times to different reporters—discriminating between Puerto Rican and Negro children, endangering the safety of the children, inability to maintain order, etc...
...The Board cautiously announced its desire "to experiment with varying forms of decentralization and community involvement in several experimental districts of varying sizes...
...Clearly, racism has been used by employers, demagogues, and the less fussy elements of the establishment to prevent black and white workers from working together for common goals...
...Minority-group children make up just over 50 per cent of the total school population...
...But in the Bundy plan this is one of several vital budget decisions that would remain firmly in thehands of the central Board, although there would presumably be more consultation than now existsbetween district boards and 110 Livingston Street on such matters...
...Others still cooperate, despite conflict...
...support from the Board of Education, from which all things still flowed...
...McCoy is a warm, likable man...
...Since, however, the planning committees for promoting decentralization, funded by Ford, by and large became the governing boards, I believe I am justified in treating them as continuing bodies...
...Poynter's manifesto is reprehensible...
...another was simply that unionists are also parents...
...Over the summer, Judge Francis Rivers, himself a black, heard the cases against seven teachers...
...The union wanted—still wants —elected school boards...
...As a New York Urban League advertisement put it, "What the governing board found wanting in these teachers was a genuine desire to teach the children in their charge...
...I believe the thrust is a good deal broader: New York City is a testing ground for a new establishment theory of "counterinsurgency...
...After a departmental hearing, one was transferred to another district...
...Again, this is just not so...
...We'll see to it that they are transferred out [if warranted] only after due process" (my italics...
...Actually, in trying to indicate the general atmosphere of an escalating conflict, the UFT has been restrained in its "leafletting" and has held back a large number of documented horror stories...
...Ocean Hill-Brownsville feared that such a step might well mean the death of decentralization and the UFT that it could also mean a stiffening of the state's Taylor Law, which bans strikes among public employees but provides comparatively light penalties for violations...
...Understandably, they were eager to reap the benefits of that struggle...
...Since the Board would have had to underwrite the expansion of the MES program into experimental districts, it balked...
...The black community will see to that...
...The elementary schools were to become a part of the More Effective Schools (MES) program, which was sponsored by the UFT and in effect in 21 other schools throughout the city...
...C. Herbert Oliver, chairman of the local board, "We agree on the first point [Kheel's appointment as mediator], then part company...
...To ascribe to Mr...
...Even Murray Kempton, who has been close to hysteria in his denunciations of the UFT, had praise for its proposal, although he found a tortured reason for condemning the union because it acknowledged a mistake and corrected its error...
...A sizable minority of the union continues to disagree with the course taken by the majority on this matter...
...201, 24 and 49...
...The UFT, for its part, made a major blunder when it demanded that the teachers be given the right to oust "disruptive children" from their classes...
...Last summer we invited Thomas R. Brooks, an experienced labor reporter, to write an article on the festering conflicts in the New York City school system, especially those in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district...
...spring stoppage, and a guarantee that any teacher dismissed or disciplined by a local governing board could appeal to a three-man arbitration panel...
...Three teachers were attacked...
...29's children buttons or voted for him, and since we could wanted decentralization, "Why, we are doing it not follow teachers into the voting booths, for them...
...But it apparently put up little or no fight for MES, although it came up with roughly $173,000 for "planning" in each of the three districts...
...The tenor of this scurrilous stuff may be gleaned from the following quote from several handbills: Get off our backs, or your relatives in the Middle East will find themselves giving benefits to raise money to help you out from under the terrible weight of an enraged black community...
...The union offered to submit to arbitration...
...When David Lee, principal of P.S...
...one was taken to the hospital with a concussion...
...And it is not racism—black or white...
...The UFT fought for the educational advantages and lost...
...At a press conference making the Report public, Dr...
...TRAGEDY AT OCEAN HILL necessarily make way for community control...
...Or New York teachers' strike had not can we...
...It issued a statement upholding the right to teach, and in support of the UFT's struggle for due process forteachers under decentralization...
...These percentages shifted a point or two from district to district and as between black and Puerto Rican parents...
Vol. 16 • January 1969 • No. 1
