New York's Mire

The Board of Education of the nation's largest and sickest school system last week was awash in a mire of corruption and politics. New York's Democratic Mayor Robert F. Wagner, running for reelection, needed a show of indignant action to drown out the crescendo of scandals in school construction that took place under the nine-man board (which he appointed). He set about dumping the board, and five agreed to go. Governor Nelson Rockefeller, aroused by the school mess (and bucking for Wagner's Republican opponent, State Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz), called on the legislature to launch a reorganization of the city's school administration.

Undoubtedly a board as impotent as New York's in the face of corruption, stagnation and inefficiency deserved to be fired. Investigators charged board employees with taking bribes from contractors to the tune of at least $1,000,000 a year. The chief of construction, a crony of Mayor Wagner's, was suspended. School Superintendent John J. Theobald himself was grilled (but not criminally charged) for using vocational high school students to build him a boat. But New York City's real problem lay in the anatomy of the system, the "overadministration" that afflicts big-city schools across the nation.

A Year to Get a Film. New York's 836 schools enroll nearly 1,000,000 students, more than all the men in the U.S. Army. This year the schools cost $567.7 million (plus $66.6 million for new construction), more than the budget of the state of Missouri. The schools employ not only 40,000 teachers but also more administrators than all of France. The system is smothered in a bureaucracy so ponderous that vital problems never reach "Livingston Street," or board headquarters, a soot-stained Brooklyn building that once housed the Elks of the region.

The city is divided into 54 local school boards, which supposedly handle local needs, but everything is still red-taped by Livingston Street. Sometimes it takes a year to get a film from the central library; highly trained teachers languish on cafeteria patrol; requests to fix sagging roofs vanish in a Byzantine fog. For years, the bureaucracy left unspent most of the millions allocated for repairs to the schools (267 of them are 50 years old or more); the backlog of needed repairs is about $75 million. Bureaucracy stifles new teaching methods, which flourish in suburban public schools. Each year, the system drives more parents to the suburbs, feeding the decay of city schools.

In contrast to most of the nation's school districts, the New York school board must run all this with no power of the purse. It cannot write budgets or set tax rates, instead appeals for money to the city's Board of Estimate. In turn, the Democratic city depends on the Republican state legislature for nearly one-third of its school funds. With distrust rampant, school budgets become political compromises.

A Political Creature. Last year President Henry T. Heald of the Ford Foundation described New York schools as bogged down in ''administrative inefficiency, political manipulation, official timidity and fiscal imprisonment." Heald pointed directly at the chief weakness of the Board of Education: it is a political creature. Board members, who get no pay but plenty of prestige, have long been screened by political bosses and appointed for seven-year terms by New York mayors on an irrelevant formula of residence and religion (three Jews, three Catholics, three Protestants). The system has produced good board members--and others whose main loyalty is to city hall.

Typical of the board was its method of choosing a chief administrator in 1958. Instead of scouring the nation, the board stopped at the office of then Deputy Mayor Theobald. A former president of Queens College, he qualified as an educator, but more obviously as a politician. Also symptomatic was the mind and manner of Board President Charles Silver, a rich, onetime woolens salesman who never finished high school. A product of Tammany politics, he says: "If I run across someone that don't like me. I find out why." His performance, though devoted, seemed to consist mostly of being helplessly "shocked" at shabby classrooms.

"Nine Best Men." The man who blew the whistle on Silver & Co. was their legal boss. State Commissioner of Education James E. Allen, Jr. For years, Allen has tried to get the city's schools fiscally free, politically sanitized and decentralized, with more power going to the 54 presently impotent local boards. For weeks, he has urged the top board to clean house or quit. Asked by Governor Rockefeller to recommend action, Allen called for a special session of the legislature to organize an interim school board, appointed by the State Board of Regents, and set up an advisory council of leading citizens to fill the school board with "the nine best men in New York City."

"A grandstand play," snorted Candidate Wagner, who countered by summoning his own advisory council, headed by Ford Foundation President Heald. The council criticized Allen's "caretaker"' plan as inefficient, but also urged the expulsion of Silver & Co. The mayor happily agreed. Then, concerned about charges of state interference in city affairs. Rockefeller toned down Allen's proposal to make reorganization of the board's functions its key item.

While all the furor did the schools no good, a remodeled system might be the best thing that ever happened to them.

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