Social Pressures and Public Education

...New York City's schools now have a modified and moderate form of decentralization, with a Chancellor responsible for maintaining minimum standards and a Central Board of Education fulfilling (among other things) a quasi-judicial function as an appellate body for the various community groups and school boards...

...Initially, America's public schools observed a Protestant nonsectarianism that later evolved into a general Christian nonsectarianism and finally, in many of our major urban areas, a kind of Judeo-Christian nonsectarianism...

...Had they [the school reformers of the 1960s] known the public schools' history," Ravitch writes, "they would have known that small districts guarantee neither community participation nor educational reform...

...5 after the upheavals of 1968 and the enactment of a moderate decentralization bill in 1969...

...Then a new generation of educational reformers came to the fore, preaching, with almost religious zeal, that the "mission" of the public schools was nothing less than righting society's wrongs...

...Early in this century, large groups of parents, teachers and students opposed the crusade for management "efficiency" and "economy" in education...

...In the 1840s, Bishop John Hughes and the newly arrived Irish Catholics waged a struggle for local autonomy against the upper-class sponsors of the Protestant Public School Society...

...This, however, can have results which do not necessarily please educational reformers, for the interest of the parents may be out of step with the latest educational thinking and may actually serve to insulate the schools against reform...

...And given the major role the church-state issue has played in the defeat of almost all Federal aid-to-education proposals from Reconstruction down to the post-World War II Taft and Barden bills (which engendered a memorable public dispute between Eleanor Roosevelt and Cardinal Spellman), I would like to see Ravitch delve more deeply into this question...

...201 particularly was worse than ever, they declared, "because the cripplers in the past [centrally assigned] have now been joined by destructive opportunistic education pimps [locally selected] who prey on the Harlem community . . . and the community's future, which is embodied in their children...

...Thus the militants proceeded on an all-or-nothing collision course with the union...

...Reviewed by Seymour P. Lachman President, New York City Board of Education Until the mid-19th century, problems arising from deep-seated social and economic inequalities were not placed at the doorstep of our schools...

...201 tale...

...In today's credentialed world, of course, aside from the schools few institutions remain that provide the means of mobility, understandably creating greater pressure now for public education to do what the historical record shows it has never been able to accomplish...

...In reality, there has never been an absolute separation of church and state in our educational system, only the appearance of such...

...201 continued to exist under the aegis of Community School Board No...

...Rather, each appears to have shortcomings as well as strengths, and this has caused a pendulum movement from one to the other...

...In those years, many dropouts found employment in America's rapidly expanding industries, and some eventually achieved high positions...

...I realize I am actually asking for a second book...

...My own hope is that the system of checks and balances that has been created within this moderate experiment in decentralization will continue to be developed and strengthened, with the central authority enforcing minimum standards...

...But the impressive skills, intense interest and open mind Diane Ravitch exhibits in this volume are precisely the qualities necessary for the undertaking I am suggesting...

...Educators had a fairly easy time convincing the public that their primary task was teaching children the "three Rs," and that this was being done with reasonable success...

...In the 1890s, "elitist" Nicholas Murray Butler led the fight for centralization against the middle-class trustees of the local school boards...

...In early 1971, though, two veteran members of the I.S...

...But Ravitch's investigation reveals that neither centralization nor local community control has solved any of the basic problems perplexing public education through the years...

...Moreover, this was no less true in the case of immigrants from Ireland in the 1840s and Italy at the start of the 1900s, than it has been with youngsters from Puerto Rico and rural America in the post-World-War II period...

...The first of the demonstration districts, and the last to survive in modified form, was then extinguished at the hands of the community school board...

...When great confusion about the direction of society resulted in indecision about the goals of education, as in the 1840s and the 1960s, the advocates of local control raised their voices and flexed their muscles...

...This is not necessarily the best possible approach for all urban areas, but it has functioned fairly well and obviously relates to the needs of New York at this time...

...Perhaps nowhere is the futility and frustration of much that has been taking place in New York's school conflicts better illustrated than in Ravitch's telling of the I.S...

...But, Ravitch observes, "Galamison was hooted by the others, who called Shanker a racist...

...Nonetheless, as Governor William Seward and his ex-officio superintendent of common schools, John Spencer, pointed out in 1840, nonsectarianism can be considered another form of sectarianism—especially if it dresses itself in the garb of a civic religion or a secular faith...

...Some observers, recognizing the public schools' past failures, believe educational success can be generated by redistributing responsibility for the system...

...they felt that even without a bill, they were prepared to get what they wanted 'the hard way,' through demonstrations and pressure tactics...

...Another key issue discussed in the first section of The Great School Wars is the relationship between church, state and the public schools...

...Diane Ravitch carefully examines those four major clashes in her vivid history of public education in New York City from 1805 to the present...

...they do bring the schools closer to the parents and make them more reflective of local interest...

...Even though the district had locally selected personnel who espoused the philosophy of community control, the resigning governing board members in effect argued, for the students little, if anything, had changed...

...It commands our attention, and it will be a frequently cited reference source for many years to come...

...Drawing upon reports by Professor Paul Hanus of Harvard and successive New York City superintendents of schools, Ravitch shows that in 1904 fully 40 per cent of the students were overage for their particular grade, and in the decade that followed approximately 90 per cent who entered the first grade did not graduate from high school...

...In 1968, the predominantly black Oceanhill-Brownsville district of Brooklyn was the scene of a bitter confrontation between the proponents of community control and the teachers' union...

...Ever since, New York City public schools have periodically been made a battlefield for social change...

...The city's original demonstration district, I.S...

...As late as April 1968, at a meeting of community control advocates, the Reverend Milton Gala-mison outlined a compromise plan he had worked out jointly with UFT President Albert Shanker that would have permitted a strong decentralization bill to be passed by the State Legislature...

...Horace Mann, for example, envisioned the educational system as, "beyond all other devices of human origin . . . the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance wheel of the social machinery...

...Education in Harlem generally and in I.S...

...When school officials knew what they wanted and projected faith in their general goals, centralization and the dominance of the "experts" prevailed, as in the early 19th century and again in the 1890s...

...And she demonstrates that the schools have not only been unable to change society, they have also failed to properly educate the growing number of poor children within their classrooms...

...201 governing board resigned, issuing a vitriolic blast against the district's recently chosen educators and its popularly elected school board...

...Scholarly yet very readable, The Great School Wars is an important study that both fills a large void in the history of education and makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of issues that remain critical today...

...Ravitch believes that accommodation by both sides would have avoided the most recent of New York City's "school wars," the confrontation at Oceanhill-Brownsville and the series of strikes by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT...