The George Washington Story
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
Education Report THE GEORGE WASHINGTON STORY THE AGONY OF AN URBAN HIGH SCHOOL BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Almighty God. we make our earnest prayer that Thou wilt keep the United States in Thy holy...
...In 1938, 37 of its 240 graduates were Negroes...
...They were bleeding and crying...
...They'll have a field day...
...McCord's remark is reported differently: "I'll paint the door of your house with your blood...
...When they paint your name on the door in blood...
...We were the same old faculty and we were all very nice...
...McCord told reporters, "Now we have to resort to this...
...This is nothing," he said...
...Most teachers say it became the eye of the storm, attracting a swirl of obstreperous students who should have been in their classrooms...
...On March 15 Cherkis resigned, to be replaced by Sol Levine, the fourth principal in 15 days...
...They called me a nigger wench," says a black woman who crossed the picket line...
...All the secretaries continued to type, file and sort, carefully ignoring "the incident...
...Inevitably, one of the parents proposed that a table be set up in the school lobby for the purpose of receiving student complaints...
...I'm a public servant," he notes, "but I'm not a doormat...
...I climbed the stairs and wandered into a class on Western Civilization...
...Then he adds, "This school is suffering from years of erosion...
...Eric Rosen-baum, one of the Association's leaders, recently summed up his attitude toward the table group: "They remind me of what happened in the 1930s in Germany...
...Very few teachers ventured in there, but one who did, Elizabeth Rich, a black substitute teacher and supporter of the militants, was appalled by what she saw...
...There followed two months of intricate negotiations between Levine, the table group, the UFT and the Board of Education...
...to midnight and did her homework after that...
...Many have simply given up...
...On March 13 Cherkis got a court injunction forbidding the table group from entering the school, UFT leaders had been pressing for such an injunction all along...
...FROM GEORGE WASHINGTON'S PRAYER AFTER INAUGURATION (1789) O revolution...
...Henry Kissinger, Harry Bela-fonte and Jacob Javits were precisely the sort of graduates one would expect George Washington to turn out...
...At George Washington, as elsewhere throughout the city, black parents accused striking teachers of racism, while many of the teachers countered with charges of anti-Semitism...
...She tried again...
...many spoke no English...
...Otherwise, the group argued, both its symbolic meaning and its actual purpose—to goad the school into instituting reforms— would be compromised...
...But the UFT is correct in maintaining that intimidation and terror were the table group's trump card...
...It seemed like such a simple idea...
...Kostman sighed...
...Then the kids would move in behind the cops...
...Kostman and I were soon interrupted by Miss Light, his assistant...
...One sensed now that the school was beginning to recover from that awful time...
...Silence...
...intransigent parents...
...These included more black teachers and counselors, new courses in black studies, and an end to the distinction between "general" and "academic" diplomas...
...I'm trying to save a school," he says...
...he is considered competent enough to graduate...
...The new principal is no stranger to crisis, having been part of the city school system for two decades, first as an English teacher, then as chairman of the English department at Wingate High School in Brooklyn...
...They were there to protect their friend...
...But the logic of urban hysteria, of which George Washington is only a small part, often transforms black cries into black threats...
...Harvey Scribner, chancellor of New York City schools...
...Many of the habitual absentees are actually in the building, usually in the basement cafeteria, rapping with friends or dealing in drugs...
...In his office closet Kostman keeps a little black bag full of the paraphernalia of prayer—the tallith, the yar-mulka—against any Friday afternoon disturbances that might prevent him from getting home before sundown...
...she would have to stay in high school a fifth year...
...Here is her testimony: "We had hundreds of police in the building on certain days, and one day there were at least 75 in the cafeteria...
...The parents' proposal, he said, seemed to be "a power play to gain control of the high school...
...The community, it appeared, was losing heart for integration...
...The difficulty is that there are a lot of "tough cookies" at George Washington...
...Mrs...
...Yes I do," said Noble...
...the leaflets asked, and then answered the question: "Parent power joins student power...
...The marching students changed their chant to, "Hey hey, ho ho, fuckin' Simon's gotta go...
...Inside the huge building are high rococo ceilings, marble staircases, two swimming pools, and a stone tower said to be the highest point on the island...
...During one of my many visits to George Washington I found Kostman in his office shuffling through a pile of Teacher Observation Reports...
...The parents thought the school was hopeless...
...A better solution would have been to place the girl in George Washington's new Academy, a promising experiment housed in a church and aimed at "turning on" about 40 habitual truants...
...It was the best of times, an era of harmony, achievement and self-congratulation...
...This is where much of the tragedy occurred last year—where the children screamed and the teachers trembled...
...Meanwhile, the table group was trying to persuade the Parents Association to endorse its plan...
...According to Witkin's Diary, Mrs...
...And their frustration was heightened by a new system of computerized programing, meant to provide instant scheduling, that produced an incredible tangle...
...The few teachers who crossed the picket line and kept the school open were branded "scabs" by their colleagues and shunned thereafter...
...In the cafeteria, which had become a scene of student anguish, policemen almost outnumbered students...
...The George Washington story contains all the classic elements of disaster in urban education: frightened teachers...
...confused, violent-prone students...
...Whose school is this...
...What were its consequences...
...Revolution is no substitute for education...
...The school averages more than 500 absences per day, and while the figure last year was much higher, "truanting" continues to perplex officials...
...They trust him...
...A student, standing in front of the school, had been stabbed twice in the back by an unknown assailant and the teacher had helped carry him to an ambulance...
...It turned out that the stabber was not a student and the boy's wounds were not serious...
...That's not a proper response," said the teacher...
...The main entrance, with its row of glass doors, was locked tight against intruders and watched over by two security guards...
...Not all the absentees deal in drugs...
...The dropout rate at George Washington, as at most other schools, is carefully concealed —it is not even tabulated—but seems to be around 50 per cent...
...He had talent...
...A few days later Sacks became ill and Louis Simon, chairman of the English department, was named acting principal...
...The great '50 Benefit Show," noted the editors of Hatchet, the school's yearbook, was a shining symbol of democracy at work...
...Simon was replaced by Carl Cherkis, former principal of Canarsie High School...
...For instance: • A girl was transferred to George Washington on February 2. By March 9 she still had not received a program card oi an official class schedule...
...Out of this nonincident grew a loose coalition of children and parents, including Jacqueline McCord, herself an alumna of George Washington (class of '50), and Ellen Lurie (white), a militant advocate of school reform and author of the book, How to Change the Schools...
...Kostman's initial instinct in the job was to defend the school, his fortress, against all comers—that is, against reporters, dope pushers, angry citizens, suspended students, or anyone else whose presence might upset the precarious equilibrium...
...I said to myself, 'Uh, oh.' " In the fall of 1968, during the long teachers' strike, George Washington's "one big happy family" broke up...
...She said, 'Not while I'm having lunch!' and slammed the door on me...
...They come there each day, seeking solace or deliverance from Principal Samuel Kostman...
...Whatever the merits of the students' case—and the UFT concedes that the school's counseling system needed a thorough overhaul—it appears that at the outset the parents were thinking about education, not politics...
...From that day on, nobody was ever at a loss for rhetoric...
...Where do you belong...
...This is routine...
...The table group stuck to its original idea: It was to be their table...
...And when students began to speak up, as in the case of the black sit-in, the most common response was outrage...
...The teacher put her hand to her forehead...
...The castle commands a high bluff on 192nd Street, with a view of the two rivers to the east and west...
...It is true that complaints had fallen off considerably since the previous spring...
...The stringent regulations have led to long student lines in front of the school each morning, with attendant mutterings and frustrations...
...It was horrible...
...If I can turn things around, maybe there's hope for cities like New York...
...I hope the press doesn't hear about this," he said...
...But the injunction solved nothing...
...This gave the parents their table, without front-lobby exposure, or any opportunity to deal directly with school personnel...
...McCord, "but she kept asking the right questions...
...One day—it may have been in 1967—Dorothy Gordon, a white social studies teacher, walked past a room where seniors were taking their college boards...
...The suggestion was passed along to Frank Sacks, the principal at that time, who said he would think about it...
...The school passed out bathing suits...
...Francisco...
...The school, of course, was staffed with all kinds of professional counselors and advisers who were, presumably, ready and willing to help the students...
...To an English teacher: "Teachers such as you—young, concerned and conscientious—are of the sort that George Washington High School urgently needs as we labor to restore our school to a position at least resembling its former eminence...
...The city-wide strike had been called by the UFT in protest against teacher dismissals by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school board, a predominantly black group organized to demonstrate the educational advantages of community control...
...After the sit-in, notes Dorothy Gordon, "the school popped...
...He's firm but fair," says Witkin...
...But order was restored...
...Even today some faculty members refuse to acknowledge that there was, and is, a serious communications gap between teachers and students...
...we make our earnest prayer that Thou wilt keep the United States in Thy holy protection...
...Viewed in this light, one wonders whether the table (even if temporary) was purchased at anything approaching a fair price...
...On my last visit, there was a ruckus outside the principal's office and he stuck his head out to see what was going on...
...We thought we were one big happy family," recalls a teacher...
...Well that's what you're doing when you fight inside the school building...
...Myra...
...It also gives students a voice in shaping their own curriculum...
...Kostman's next move was to remind everyone at George Washington that teaching and learning are the school's main business...
...For the most part these were not the grudge-grievances many teachers feared, but real grievances that deserved prompt attention...
...A boy who had to fix breakfast for all his brothers and sisters because his mother had heart trouble complained he was not permitted to have "a late program," which starts at 10 a.m...
...As John Bunzel, chairman of the social studies department, observed, "Most of the kids went to class and tried to keep their minds on their work...
...I took this job because I owed something to the system," he says...
...The parents would transmit these complaints to the school administration...
...They made an interesting contrast as they faced each other: the boy big, muscular and bare-chested...
...A teacher rushed in, his hands outstretched and bloody...
...He plunged into the middle of the melee...
...After she complained to the table group she got her card...
...If things really broke loose, you'd know...
...In the mid-'60s the school was redistricted to include a portion of Harlem—as far south as 145th Street—and to exclude all of white, suburban-like Riverdale...
...In the principal's office they upended the big desk, but they left the bust of Washington untouched—a sign, said some, that the children were choosy in their vandalism, that they did not want to destroy the school, only to save themselves...
...it was even integrated...
...He got an "A...
...According to Thea Manley, a table-group partisan, Simon simply took the table away one day, announcing that he was doing so by order of Dr...
...ON MARCH 2 demonstrations began inside George Washington...
...Two black toughs beat me up and called me a kike," says a teacher who had been on the picket line...
...When I got here, it was like watching a car slowly going over a cliff...
...Still, the reaction of the table-group parents and of the marching children was out of all proportion to their grievances...
...The questions are worth asking, for the pattern could repeat itself in any of several thousand high schools throughout urban America...
...Soon the parents were not suggesting but demanding...
...It was a brand new ballgame at George Washington...
...One teacher said to me, "I cannot believe there were children who didn't know what their program was...
...Transferring disruptive students to other high schools is a game every principal plays, but it solves nothing in the long run...
...It soon became obvious that the parents could not control the children any more than could the teachers...
...But the daughter remained silent, sullen...
...She, too, wanted a late program...
...Yet no one seemed to notice...
...There are 24 security guards at George Washington, hired by the city school system...
...A boy was denied his diploma because he was one week short in gym class...
...To a mathematics teacher he had written: "Your sitting down with pupils at their desks had the twofold value of enhancing pupil-teacher rapport and offering students highly individualized instruction...
...According to Mrs...
...that was the only requirement...
...On March 6 he went, resigning in protest when officials from the city Board of Education seemed ready to yield to the table group...
...Witkin claims it was the parents themselves who dismantled the table...
...Then the local UFT chapter moved in as a counterforce...
...When will you understand what they're trying to tell you...
...that if Kostman could effect enough changes in a hurry, it might regain a measure of its former confidence...
...demanded Jacqueline McCord, an angry black mother, from the principal and other school authorities as they stood amid the wreckage...
...It compelled the administrators to yield to at least some of the parents' demands...
...Tiny Tim went there, too, but he didn't manage to graduate...
...not the chapter leadership of the UFT, who viewed the turmoil, by and large, as a move for community control of the school, conceived in part by "outside agitators...
...In August a few parents got word that some of the students were planning to blow up George Washington's tower...
...But in October the table vanished, perhaps forever, in a cloud of mystery...
...Certainly the bombast of the table group would seem to justify that conclusion...
...The girl flunked math...
...He got his diploma...
...As Sacks pondered, the lines hardened...
...several small fires were started in the auditorium, and home-made bombs were discovered tucked away here and there...
...Today the school is about 50 per cent Spanish-speaking and 30 per cent black...
...To close the communications gap, he has started two weekly "rap sessions," one for teachers and one for students, and although they are sparsely attended, the gesture is appreciated all around...
...I must be dreaming," she said...
...McCord says she was misquoted...
...The strike was prologue...
...When the troubles came, we didn't know what hit us...
...More than two years after the strike a secretary at George Washington was able to tell me how I could easily find one of those teachers...
...Any objective judgment of their actions, though, must include their estimate of the school's ability to change...
...The table in the lobby survived four days...
...Somebody would scrape a chair or move a table, or make some kind of noise, and all the police would rush toward the noise...
...A member of the table group says, "Our children were determined to get that raggety bit of education if it killed them" (and the education was raggety...
...An 18-year-old boy, still in the 10th grade, had asked for reading help several times, and had only been placed on the waiting list...
...Did anybody ask a performer's religion, race or creed...
...The white teachers, a number of them alumni of the dear old school, continued to teach the way they had been taught, the way that had always worked...
...he kept shouting...
...Perhaps it was a cry in the night...
...Why was this tragedy permitted to run its course...
...Go back to your classes...
...To this day, for example, more than 90 per cent of George Washington's 250 teachers are white...
...they were coming from Georgia, South Carolina, Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic...
...More and more police were summoned, until, as one student remarked, "We had wall-to-wall cops...
...There wasn't a single black student in the room," she recalls...
...man, I don't want to ruin the school...
...He issued orders that all entrances save one be locked, and that all students be compelled to show their identification cards before entering...
...Students have accused some of pawing girls and beating up boys...
...Two years ago 1 went to a dean to ask her for some personal advice," a black girl recalls...
...An ordained rabbi and a preordained leader, Kostman came to George Washington High School last December—the fifth principal in seven months, all of his predecessors having been victims of endemic mayhem they could neither quell nor cure...
...A girl who had to support her baby said she worked at the Post Office from 4 p.m...
...It was the students' chance to tell their grievances, and much of what they told focused on the school's apparent inability to give them programs fitting their needs...
...All power to the people...
...Some teachers were physically threatened...
...All we wanted," says Saul Kalish, an assistant principal, "was a little peace and a chance to teach...
...While most of the 4,500 students went to class, about 300 marched through the corridors chanting, "We want a table...
...There may have been still another reason for their surrender, though...
...The damage was largely to property, they point out, and of the few persons injured, most were students—victims of police panic and disorder...
...The place is too big for them, too confusing, too full of challenges they can neither accept nor understand...
...Beatrice, can you help us out...
...It is just possible that if the UFT had understood the table proposal as a desperate plea for educational reform, rather than as "a power play to gain control of the high school," the ensuing conflict could have been averted...
...Besides, there was that old injunction prohibiting their entering the school, which officials might try to reinvoke...
...A boy in the front row piped up, "Boy, we smart, ain't we...
...Yet it is not easy to assess blame...
...twas a Pyrrhic victory...
...Noble, walked into a mathematics honors class the first day of school, the white teacher told him, "You don't belong here...
...Just as the teachers alienated the students, the students succeeded in alienating and intimidating the teachers...
...Despite the table, he is still on the waiting list...
...When I got here," he says, "no one was making these reports...
...he asked...
...During this entire period George Washington was intermittently rocked by disruptions, sit-ins, sleep-ins, arrests and temporary shutdowns...
...Table-group adherents insist there was little real violence...
...The blood was not the teacher's...
...But they have more or less secured the fortress, and they have dramatized Kostman's toughness...
...Thus chaos got the parents their table, and chaos took it away...
...The police were called in...
...Jacqueline McCord notes that when her son...
...I'm the principal...
...I'm the principal...
...The boy nodded...
...They were also distributing leaflets outside the school...
...She told Kostman he ought to expel her daughter...
...Most of the black and Spanish-speaking students were channeled into commercial and "general" courses, dead-end programs barring their way into college...
...It's like asking what is the color of orange juice...
...They wanted to change society...
...But if the teacher's remark implied racism, what did the grade imply...
...The table was meant to be that symbol, and the UFT's negative response to it simply confirmed the parents' worst fears...
...the school's gutsy Moses who would lead both the children and their teachers out of the pedagogical wilderness if he could...
...I found out they really didn't want to change the school," notes a teacher who had at the outset been sympathetic to the marchers...
...Kostman says he has gotten rid of the bad ones...
...not the Parents Association, some of whose members thought they saw seeds of fascism dropping from the whirlwind...
...At least one fifth of George Washington's students read below high-school levels...
...In any case, the table was gone, and the parents had no heart for another battle...
...Some of the pushers, according to knowledgeable teachers, make as much as $300 a week from their oafeteria clientele...
...Instead of cooling things down, the table only served to heat things up...
...Ultimately, it became a form of blackmail...
...Somebody's tryin' to stab my back, ain't gonna take no shit like that...
...In a memorandum to Sacks, Chapter Chairman Robert Miller declared there was no need for a parents' table, since the school already had satisfactory procedures for legitimate complaints...
...She was like a teacher...
...In the interim Levine was appointed principal of John Dewey, presumably as a reward for outlasting Cherkis, and Simon was again pushed into the thankless post of acting principal...
...Some students waited as long as two months before receiving their class schedules...
...To prove their devotion to nonviolence, the parents cite the incident that brought them together: Their first act had been to talk the kids out of blowing up the school tower...
...he says...
...a system too rigid to bend and, when confronted with chaos, too scared to get tough...
...Later I found myself in the spacious, marble-lined lobby...
...April 1970 was the school's crudest month: Roughly 7 per cent of the 4,500 students in official attendance marched through the halls singing rhetorical ditties of revolt, shattering glass, turning on fire alarms, and overturning furniture...
...We don't belong nowhere," the boy answered with a Spanish accent...
...In addition, it awoke many students, especially blacks, to the possibilities of political action within the school...
...All the boys disappeared...
...It polarized the races and shattered an old and useful coalition between black parents and white teaohers...
...She's usually in the teachers' cafeteria this period," the secretary said...
...I've visited at least 90 classrooms since December...
...Most of them were poor...
...The Parents Association turned down the proposal—or tabled it—and so, eventually, did Sacks...
...The crux of the issue, by that time, was not whether there should be a table, but who should control it...
...It was as quiet as a cemetery...
...Not the parents belonging to the "table group," who wanted to preside over a table in the school lobby where students could bring their grievances...
...by 1950 the parallel figures had increased to 98 out of 697...
...Somebody tore his pants and somebody else hit him with a chair...
...There's no one there who will listen," they kept saying...
...It seems a black student had taken a poke at him and ripped off his shirt...
...No one doubts Kostman's good intentions...
...All that may be true...
...Certainly all parties concerned—the parents, the students, the UFT—seem willing to place their future in the principal's hands...
...In another, a girl seeking extra help from her mathematics teacher was told to join the after-school tutoring program...
...When that happened the police turned around and chased the kids with their clubs...
...But the Association, dominated by white parents, tended to represent the old bunch, the people who wished George Washington were still "the castle on the hill...
...OK," said the mother...
...But two black men wearing "Security Guard" lapel cards edged closer to the student...
...A tall Dominican boy, stripped to the waist, was yelling at a teacher, "I'm tellin' ya, man, it ain't gonna stay that way...
...He began to visit classrooms and to write Teacher Observation Reports...
...McCord and others in the group, the children would have been more violent if the parents had not held them in check...
...It continued to be a haven for the children of refugees, but now they were no longer coming from Germany and Eastern Europe...
...The teacher, a pretty brunette, was asking, "What kind of government would you find in an age of autocracy...
...Everything's all right," Kostman assured them...
...The remnant of white students, meanwhile, sped along traditional academic, college-bound paths...
...I LEFT the principal's office and walked down the hallway...
...The door may have been slammed too many times on too many students...
...IN THE SPRING of 1969, five months after the strike ended...
...When they were gone, Kostman said, "Did you see the way that little girl swung her hips...
...AFTER SIFTING the evidence, one agrees with Kostman that "George Washington is a tragedy that never should have happened...
...A teacher appointed by the principal would collect all grievances from the parents and pass them along to the appropriate staff members...
...Indeed, each side finally came to see the crisis as political rather than educational— the militant parents aiming at destruction of the system, the teachers at its preservation—with both declaring their monopoly on virtue...
...Finally, some of the black students were convinced that some of their white teachers had racist attitudes...
...People on both sides of the picket line remember those times with deep personal pain...
...A former student at George Washington, now attending the Harlem Street Academy, says that among his friends the school is known as '"your friendly neighborhood drugstore...
...By and large, George Washington served the children of displaced burghers—escapees from the Nazi inferno, successful ladder-climbers from the Lower East Side and, in some cases, middle-class Negroes fleeing Harlem...
...When you politicize the schools, you are courting dictatorship...
...Scribner denies he ever gave such an order...
...She'll be sitting alone...
...The table survived the rest of the academic year, and was there again at the start of a new semester last fall...
...I don't let nobody do that to me...
...Suddenly a dozen other boys appeared at the door...
...a teacher asked them...
...One day last February, when Kostman was just beginning to get the car back on the road, a huge brawl broke out in the cafeteria between black and Spanish-speaking students...
...Gradually the community changed, and so did the school...
...The disorders continued, and even spread...
...She ushered in a black girl who seemed to have drawn a veil over her eyes, and her mother, who had skipped work and wages in order to be there...
...Back on the first floor, I stopped at an administrator's office to chat with a secretary...
...Organized along "free school" lines, the program substitutes informal, open-ended seminars for conventional classroom instruction...
...Oooo...
...The principal beckoned the boy to come in...
...While waiting, they wandered through the halls, sat in the auditorium or cafeteria and added to the general climate of educational carelessness...
...But many do not become seniors...
...Vernon and scores of slaves—still rests on its pedestal in a corner of the principal's office, the better to peer into the children's hearts...
...Ellen never told us what to do," recalls Mrs...
...He gently suggested that the girl might be happier in another school, say Benjamin Franklin...
...It's bureaucratic and barnacle-encrusted, but it's all we've got...
...Under violent auspices, no grievance procedure—however crying the need—is likely to pay off in the long run...
...More in weariness than in triumph, the table group agreed to a compromise: It would be permitted to man its own table, not in the lobby, but in a little room nearby...
...that Thou wilt incline the hearts of the children to . . . entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another and for their fellow citizens...
...In a long night of rage a handful of well-intentioned parents and some 300 misguided students nearly destroyed their school...
...He was not happy with his solution...
...More silence...
...The kids weren't coming there...
...In Irving Witkin's Diary of a Teacher, a chronicle of confrontations at George Washington published by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and accepted by most of his colleagues, Mrs...
...Administrators and teachers, through a combination of insensitivity to cultural nuances and business-as-usual bureaucracy, alienated many students...
...Twice their members had walked out of classrooms to meet in the teachers' cafeteria and pass resolutions demanding more police in the school and a tougher administration stand...
...The school seemed a fulfillment of the American dream...
...The school is much better since he got here...
...By mid-May everyone was exhausted...
...The question startled the boy...
...It is typical of the mess at George Washington that all parties claim to speak the truth—they cannot tell a lie— yet none can agree on what, precisely, took place last year...
...ONCE UPON A TIME George Washington High School was a Promised Land, "the castle on the hill" to which Jewish parents and other "ethnics" living on Manhattan's comfortable Upper West Side proudly sent their children...
...The parents managed to squelch the plot, but not before their sons and daughters had given them an earful...
...A senior who reads at the freshman level is not given remedial reading...
...O revolution...
...O revolution...
...and certainly not the children, most of whom understood less and suffered more than anyone else...
...a group of black students staged a peaceful sit-in to underline their 10 "nonnegotiable demands...
...they felt some rallying symbol was necessary to get it off dead center...
...POPULAR SONG AT NEW YORK CITY'S GEORGE WASHINGTON HIGH SCHOOL (1970) THE SOLEMN marble bust of The Father of Our Country—master of Mt...
...exclaimed the secretary, "I can't look...
...This is where the table stood...
...no one was helping young teachers...
...During all subsequent demonstrations, the initial ratio between marchers and nonmarchers held true...
...No more fights, you understand...
...On a stairway a boy and girl were holding hands...
...They were not long in testing the notion...
...She's a tough cookie...
...They do not yet trust each other, but most are ready to put aside former hostilities for the sake of peace...
...It's an easy question...
...By late February, table-group parents were appealing to school district officials and beyond...
...Whatever their peaceful intentions, the parents created a climate of violence that neither they nor the school could control...
...The gulf between teachers and students, however, was already too wide to be spanned by routine bureaucratic bridges...
...Happily, nearly all of the teaching staff would agree...
...Nevertheless, the table received a total of more than 200 complaints during its short and shaky life...
...Students had given up all hope of being heeded...
...Kostman short, slight and dressed like a banker in a dark pin-striped suit with a vest...
...But most of the violence took place before he arrived...
...IT NOW remains to be seen whether Kostman and his still benumbed staff can put George Washington back together again...
...The picture parents got that night was one of depersonalized chaos...
...In addition, he has cleaned up a large share of the programing and counseling confusion (kids really do know their programs now), and he has expanded esl (English as a Second Language) for Spanish-speaking students...
...The kids really got killed, both girls and boys...
...It should have been a great victory for parent and student demonstrators, but somehow it wasn't...
...The new boundaries created new problems as white families stepped up their exodus to the suburbs...
...Years ago these were pleasing amenities to a community as hip to the blessings of status and education as was Washington Heights...
...The new group sponsored a mass meeting in January 1970, attended by hundreds of parents and students, as well as a few teachers...
...On Monday, March 9, the parents set up their table in the lobby, with the reluctant blessings of the district superintendent of schools, Irving Anker...
...But every eight minutes and 17 seconds, the great proletarian cultural revolution would march by...
...If our table group did nothing else," says Thea Manley, "at least it got us Samuel Kostman...
...It was the first bloody incident at George Washington in several months...
...At the very least, they insisted, the principal should have the right to choose which parents would sit at the table...
...But she couldn't, because she had to get right home and take care of her brothers and sisters...
...Teachers and school officials wanted the table to be supervised by school personnel...
...What are you trying to do to us...
...That means half the freshmen never graduate...
...But in New York City, as the children had learned earlier, educational problems nearly always elicit political solutions...
...Spanish-speaking students complained that they had to swim naked in the pool during gym classes...
...As the teacher was wiping the blood off his hands, the assistant principal came in...
...The table had no real use...
...Do you want to ruin the school...
...In one case, a girl who wanted to be a nurse was informed late in her senior year that she had been taking the wrong courses for prenursing...
...Some of the kids liked to see the police exercised...
...Children were not made aware of the courses they needed in order to graduate, or of how to apply to college...
...Like Anna Lu-casta...
...School officials eventually agreed to these demands "in principle," but were either unable or unwilling to enact most of them...
...The girl had been "truanting" (at George Washington most problems eventually turn into verbs), and her mother was angry...
...The negotiations lasted two months, under the least favorable conditions...
Vol. 54 • June 1971 • No. 12
