Undercover Uproar

When English Teacher George N. Allen quit his job at Brooklyn's slum-sick John Marshall Junior High School and unmasked himself as a crusading New York World Telegram & Sun reporter (TIME, Nov. 24), he sweetened his expose with the promise that the $490 he had earned teaching would be turned over to a teachers' retirement fund. But the New York City Board of Education refused to act like a grateful teacher. Last week, while Allen continued to churn out his lively eyewitnesser under such headlines as "HEY, TEACH . . ." is SIGNAL FOR BEDLAM and SLOW PUPILS CHEATED BY OUR SCHOOLS, the board coldly told off the "undercover teacher."

Obvious Threat. Unanimously the board resolved that Allen's series "seriously violates the moral and ethical standards of the teaching profession." The horrified educators deplored: "The effect upon children of learning that [Allen] was in fact a spy prying upon their privacy and using the special privilege of the position of teacher as a vehicle for sensationalism; the effect upon teachers when they learned that the exchange of confidence between educators . . . can no longer be safely indulged in; the effect upon a community of the realization that the teachers with whom their children sit may be consciously concerned not with the solving of educational problems but rather with the stimulating of them for the purpose of cheap exploitation." The board's solemn summing up of Allen's trespasses: "Their seriousness in terms of a threat to our American way of life is certainly obvious." More to the point: the board is working hard with scant funds to solve an awesome juvenile delinquency problem, does not like to be reminded that it can not yet claim any great success.

Board Chairman Charles Silver advised at first that members forget about feuding with the Telegram, pointed out that there was much truth in Allen's series. But Board Member Francis Adams, former New York City police commissioner, was fighting mad, and smooth-talking Baptist Pastor Gardner Taylor, the board's only Negro member, smelled a race issue in Allen's statement that a 15-year-old John Marshall girl often played truant, spent her days as a Harlem prostitute. The board voted to investigate the affair, including, as Adams said pointedly, "the manner in which Allen got into the school --whether it involved a misstatement under oath." (Allen admitted in his series that he used a false employment record.)

Softened Impact? Board Member Adams and John Marshall Principal Mrs. Florence Hornung charged that much of Allen's series was untrue, but refused to point out any specifics. Reporter Allen, a Briton whose application for U.S. citizenship is pending, stuck to his guns, defended the truth of his series and the propriety of his espionage. The Telegram stood by what it had printed. Said one editor: "We studied every article carefully and toned down all of them. Conditions are much worse than what we said." Superintendent John Theobald complained, but the Telegram planned to let Allen's expose run its full course this week, end with a series of pointed recommendations. Among them:

P: Premium pay for teachers in difficult schools and "adjustment" classes.

P: Lower school-leaving age to 15, so that hoodlums and reluctant learners can be sent to work.

P: Clerks to relieve teachers of their paperwork load.

P: In a windup editorial, the Telegram backed up Allen, added a cold-water cure of its own: for extremely hard cases, custodial schools or modifications of the old C.C.C. camps, with classes, sports, physical labor.

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