Academic Sickness in New York

Every day, somewhere in New York City's public-school system, at least one teacher is shoved or struck by recalcitrant students; uncounted others are cursed and threatened with beatings. Last week, in the wake of 13 such student assaults in the past six months, teachers at Bronx Junior High School 98, where 96% of the students are either Negro or Puerto Rican, finally got fed up. Among other things, they asked Principal James Mandel and the school board to provide more protection than the single patrolman already on full-time duty there, give them the right to kick abusive students out of class. When school-board officials failed to meet the demands, 79 teachers--about 30 of them women--protested by turning in their resignations. After a three-day walkout, they were persuaded to return.

The mass resignation was just the latest painful symptom of the sickness that prevails in the nation's largest and least efficient public-school system. To service a student population of more than 1,000,000, and pay a teacher staff of 54,600, New York next year proposes to spend $1.1 billion--more than is spent by 26 states to operate their entire governments. The budget breaks down to an expenditure of about $1,000 a year per student, roughly $400 above the national average; teacher salaries are among the highest of large U.S. cities. Yet the results are academically deplorable: recent surveys showed that New York students ranked well below national norms in such basic skills as reading and arithmetic.

Trapped. Appalled by the inadequacies of the system, middle-class white parents are increasingly steering their children into private and parochial schools or moving out to the suburbs.

Last week a new census disclosed that a majority of New York's students are now Negroes (29.3%) or Puerto Ricans (20.9%)--a situation common to many other major cities.-As it happens, the Negroes and Puerto Ricans, who see education as a way for their children to escape the ghetto, are no happier about the schools than the whites. "They put all their faith in the schools," says a consultant to the Office of Economic Opportunity, "but they know the schools are doing a lousy job on their kids and feel trapped." It is also true, of course, that many ghetto parents expect the schools to perform miracles in overcoming their own neglect of family obligations.

Nonetheless, the parents have cause for complaint. P.S. 80, for example, is an obsolescent fortress, erected in 1924, that serves Manhattan's East Harlem district. Nearly all of the 886 students in the primary grades are Negro or Puerto Rican. An alarming 82% of its second-graders, 90% of its fourth-graders and 94% of its fifth-graders read below national norms. Every year, more than half of the students shift to another school as their parents change tenements. Of those who remain at P.S. 80, half will drop out of high school.

"Educational Genocide." Last December, parents became so angry over the inadequacies of P.S. 80 and other ghetto schools that they formed a self-styled "People's Board of Education," held a rally to berate the appointed school board for its policy of "educational genocide" and demand that the schools be turned over to local control.

But when an assistant principal asked quietly: "All right, what do you really want us to do in the schools?" the audience was agonizingly silent. Last week parents of students at West Harlem's P.S. 125 kept 1,500 children out of school to dramatize their demand for a bigger voice in school affairs.

Even when aging structures are replaced by ultramodern schools, minority groups continue to complain. Last fall, the school board formally opened the all-new, air-conditioned Intermediate School 201 in East Harlem, which featured a low teacher-student ratio and special tutorial help. Outraged that it was not fully integrated, Negro neighborhood leaders ordered a boycott, kept it closed for five days, demanded that the board provide an all-Negro teaching staff. Since then, unruly students have reflected their parents' pique by disrupting classes, committing wanton acts of vandalism. This month, the embattled white principal, Stanley R. Lisser, quit to take a better-paying job in educational research.

Teacher Turnover. The fact is that no one has any solution to the problems of New York City's schools. "I think we've done as well as most cities, and God knows we've tried hard--but we just haven't done it," concedes Superintendent Bernard E. Donovan. In trying to prevent de facto segregation, for example, the school board in 1959 adopted an "open enrollment" plan, providing free buses for Negroes to attend white schools; too few cared to make the trip. It also tried the "Princeton Plan" of pairing white and Negro schools so that all students in each grade would attend the same school. But white parents objected to sending their children into Negro areas, and physical barriers between white and Negro neighborhoods reduced the number of suitable pairings to a mere eight schools.

The city's United Federation of Teachers, which is the nation's strongest local teachers' organization, seems to have no answer either. It refuses to permit school administrators to shift veteran teachers into slum schools against their will. Beginners are thus thrown into some of the toughest teaching tasks in the nation--and are shaken by the experience. "I'll never forget when I was sent into that class, I had to show those children not how to read but how to open a book," says one recent Vassar graduate. Recalling his first day in a slum school, one teacher says that his only help from the principal was the order: "Keep 'em in the room." He did. He also recalls that it took him three lonely years to learn how to teach them.

School board leaders spend much of their energy coping with segregation problems--even though the bigger issue is the quality of the education and the teachers' expectation of transmitting it. But even segregation defies solution. Superintendent Donovan, a suave Irishman and cool mediator who climbed up through the system's ranks to replace Calvin Gross two years ago, hopes to check it through a gradual shift to a 4-4-4 school organization. (At present, students spend six years in primary schools, three in intermediate or junior high, three in senior high.) This will enable children to stay in their own neighborhoods for the early years, then move to integrated "middle schools" drawing from a larger geographical area. But this transition will take a decade.

$100 Million Parks. School officials also see "educational parks," in which all grades are housed in campuses drawing from a wide area, as a promising device. New York is planning two, both in The Bronx, which could handle a total of 18,000 students. But the cost of one alone is estimated at up to $100 million; it may take ten years to build, and the transportation problem will be complex.

Desegregation may, in the long run, solve some of the city's educational problems, but it will not in itself guarantee a viable urban school system. Far more important, to some observers, is the need for decentralization of authority, better teachers with improved working conditions--and a willingness on the part of students to learn. Where teachers and students do work together, as in such showcase schools as the Bronx High School of Science and Manhattan's P.S. 6, the system shows what it can do. What is needed above all is a more co operative attitude on the part of minority-group parents and their children--less bitterness and violence, more concern about the real business of learning.

* Other cities with high nonwhite school enrollment: Washington, 91%; Baltimore, 63%; St. Louis, 62%; Philadelphia, 58%; Detroit, 57%; Chicago, 53%; Los Angeles, 43%; Kansas City, 43%; Pittsburgh, 37%.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.