Community Control Fails the Test
RAVITCH, DIANE
Community Control Fails the Test THE POLITICS OF SCHOOLS By Robert Bendiner Harper & Row. 240 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by DIANE RAVITCH Contributor, "Urban Review" and "Change" About two months ago,...
...the localities raise only 17.6 per cent and contribute 52 per cent...
...Not the least of the local board's problems is its inability to find new money for the schools...
...The Politics of Schools confronts the problem head-on, and anyone seriously concerned with the future of U.S...
...It would be segregated racially and probably economically, with no prospect of integration...
...Bendiner believes this trend toward consolidation of small districts is not only necessary but healthy, since small districts can provide neither integration nor quality...
...Bendiner suggests that by each of his three criteria, a decentralized community school district would fail...
...Harlem would get some of Scarsdale's money, but Scarsdale's member would have to check on what Harlem did with it...
...The rare success stories are furnished by Ev-anston, Illinois and Berkeley, California...
...Bendiner recognizes that the major problems of education are political in origin and can only be resolved on a political level...
...Bendiner would respond that educational regionalism is an equalizing device, taking from the rich in the suburbs and giving to the poor in the city, not through the highminded philanthropy of a volunteer Urban Coalition, but as a formalized arrangement...
...Though the excessive centralization of New York's mammoth school system makes some kind of administrative decentralization necessary, dividing the city into autonomous school districts is educationally irrelevant, however, expedient politically...
...are determined administratively...
...For unless the city and the suburb share a common tax base, urban education cannot be improved...
...Its delegate would take the budget to the central board, where the total fund available would be portioned out by a representative group...
...For Bendiner has had the audacity to discover that local control has not only been fairly common across the country, but that it is withering away...
...2) to negotiate with militant teachers' unions...
...Indeed, he considers the movement for community control in New York City a "desperate throwback," an educational anachronism...
...He dwells at length on the example of Toronto, which allied its central city with its rapidly expanding suburbs, creating a federal system...
...There are only 21,704 independent school boards in the nation today-less than half the number that existed 10 years ago, and only one-fifth the total 20 years ago...
...The Federal government, which raises almost 65 per cent of all tax revenues, contributes 7.7 per cent of the education budget...
...The property tax, he argues, is "the tax that failed," because it is of doubtful equity and diminishing yield...
...The crisis of the school board, in short, is that the demands on it have grown far beyond its capacity to cope with them...
...In thus declaring decentralization both desirable and inevitable, Monserrat was restating what has become the new conventional wisdom...
...Fortunately Bendiner, now a member of the New York Times editorial board, is an excellent writer and a reporter with a keen eye...
...it would be overwhelmed in dealings with a powerful teachers' union...
...The truculent board of Mal-verne, Long Island fought integration long after all possibility of winning was past, eventually exhausting the community and driving out many white parents...
...The formula for New York City in such a combination, for example, would be "decentralization under a centralized but representaive authority . . . with regional wealth and talents to draw on and regional space for maneuvering...
...The real challenge facing the schools today is to equalize education at its highest common denominator in city and suburb...
...Frequently, too, big cities have as many as half their school children in parochial and private schools, making increased expenditures for the public schools politically unpopular...
...Exchanges between white suburbs and black ghettos are good, he says, but not enough...
...Furthermore, the school financing has fallen most heavily on the individual localities where the taxing capacity is weakest...
...The smaller the district, too, the greater the possibility of interference with academic freedom, and the greater the vulnerability of teachers and school board to intense pressure from extremists of the Right or the Left...
...The principals (who, according to the New York Times, were "noticeably cool" to the scolding) might have defended their alleged laggardness by citing Robert Bendiner's excellent new book...
...education will have to read it...
...He does not attempt to isolate ghetto schools or urban education as special phenomena, but analyzes them as part of the broad fabric of a troubled American educational system...
...Financed by a grant from the Carnegie corporation, Bendiner spent two years studying school boards...
...Regional control of this kind, Bendiner maintains, offers the only hope of achieving integrated, quality education...
...Yet the same parents who demand small classes and good instruction for their children are leading the growing middle-class revolt by voting against expanded school budgets in what "has become almost an annual spring rite...
...While Bendiner does not deny the legitimacy of the taxpayers' anger, he thinks it wrong that school budgets must go before the public when budgets for other services-police, public health, sanitation, etc...
...Bendiner's answer to the dilemma is the adoption of metropolitan school districts...
...It favors the wealthy community while forcing others to encourage overindustrialization to widen their tax base, and by now there is general agreement that it simply cannot provide adequate financing for education...
...With rising teacher salaries, new educational technology (computers, teaching typewriters, etc...
...Ultimately, as the sources of educational failure remained untouched, the frustration of the local community would be even greater than before, there no longer being an Establishment to blame...
...in these cities, a strong and dedicated superintendent, a supportive board and a willing community (possessing a large number of university people) combined to achieve integration without bitter controversy...
...In the many fascinating case histories it offers, school boards are repeatedly shown to be weak, ineffectual or, at best, merely the instruments of other, more powerful forces...
...new curricula, remedial teachers, language specialists, and a host of other necessities required merely to keep abreast of the times, the costs of education are forever spiraling...
...the exchange should be part of a comprehensive regional approach...
...As school people," he said, "why didn't we think of decentralization and spearhead the movement instead of having to be pushed into it...
...A few years ago, sociologist Richard Cloward warned that regional government was a sophisticated gimmick to deny political power to blacks as they approached a majority in the cities...
...The Politics of Schools provides the reader with a good foundation for works like those of Jonathan Kozol, Herbert Kohl and Nat Hentoff...
...In less skilled hands, the result might have been a ponderous technical report that concluded with the usual trumpet blast of dire warnings...
...But where a local board is beset by neighborhood conflict, court orders and vacillating leadership, Bendiner warns, it is foolish "to expect its part-time, unpaid, powerless membership to deliver social justice, ready-made...
...Under a regional system, each locality would have a board (Bendiner thinks it irrelevant whether a school board is elected or appointed) that would prepare its own budget...
...And vice versa...
...Reviewed by DIANE RAVITCH Contributor, "Urban Review" and "Change" About two months ago, the president of the New York City Board of Education, Joseph Mon-serrat, chided a group of 50 principals for falling "behind the times...
...And he supports his finding with a study that put urban, suburban and rural school boards to a three-part test designed to determine their ability (1) to provide equal educational opportunity, regardless of race or income level...
...The impact of these three requirements, it develops, has hastened the demise of small school districts...
...In the large cities where schools must compete with other vital public services for limited funds, ethnic rivalries are sending the taxpaying middle class fleeing to the suburbs...
...Perhaps equally important, the size of the regional units would give them the political power to demand more money from the Federal government...
...He cites a number of studies to show that the overwhelming majority of Negro parents would prefer integrated education, despite loud talk of "educational genocide...
...3) to finance their schools, whose costs are largely determined by the first two factors...
...The small district, moreover, is at a disadvantage in bargaining with teachers' unions...
...his book is devoid of the jargon and rhetoric which mars much writing concerning education...
...He avoids as well the romanticism that has characterized several popular works about the schools, particularly those aimed at exposing a regime secretly bent on educational genocide of black folk...
...Bendiner contends that far from helping either suburb or city, local control has contributed to their present plight...
...The give-and-take process of representative democracy would replace the "anarchic individualism that passes often enough nowadays as 'participatory democracy,'" a process Bendiner also describes as "demand-and-reject...
...it would lack the political power to demand new funds from state or Federal government...
Vol. 53 • January 1970 • No. 2
