Teachers Who Give a Damn

For the third straight week, New York City's big school system remained immobilized by a teachers' strike. Ironically, schools in the neighborhood-run Brooklyn district at the center of the controversy were fully open. While police patrolled the streets around Ocean Hill-Brownsville's eight schools, children inside the building benefited from one of the nation's youngest, best-educated and most enthusiastic teaching staffs.

The background of the situation has become unpleasantly familiar to New Yorkers. The city's board of education last year set up a pilot project in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section to test school decentralization, which would allow "the community"--the parents themselves and the neighborhood leaders--to run the schools. Only that way, supporters of the scheme claim, will ghetto children get sympathetic teachers with a more flexible approach to their special needs. Most professional, unionized teachers deeply distrust the idea. And when the Ocean Hill-Brownsville governing committee asked for the transfer of 13 teachers that it considered objectionable, 350 other teachers in the area abandoned their classes in sympathy. Thereupon, the committee set out to hire substitutes. Many of the newcomers were recruited from a special intensive-training program set up by the New York Board of Education to ease the city's teacher shortage.

At P.S. 178, a half-century-old pile of brick, stone and flaking plaster, Principal David W. Lee, 43, has assembled a staff of 39 teachers who are there, as he puts it, because "they give a damn." The group includes 24 men, a high percentage for an elementary school. Although the enrollment is predominantly Negro, 33 teachers are white. Thirty are under 25. Many are recent graduates of Columbia, Yale, Chicago, and other blue-chip colleges. Belittling his own plain-cut clothes, Principal Lee, a Chinese American, says: "I'm a bum--but most of my teachers wear Brooks Brothers suits."

Jumping Rope. There is nothing button-down about their teaching. Barry Ernstoff, 22, a Columbia graduate and N.Y.U. Law student, jolted his students one day by jumping rope with them. "Teachers don't jump rope," one boy scolded. Ernstoff explains: "We've got to humanize ourselves. Black kids are cynical about any white person's caring for them, and little by little, through affection and honesty, we've got to break that down." He repeatedly makes deliberate mistakes on the blackboard, enticing his pupils to spot them. "Some of these kids learn not to question white people. They develop a kind of slave mentality and I want them to talk back." He winces when they are asked to describe their neighborhoods and respond with what they think is wanted: adjectives such as nice, clean and pretty, instead of more accurate words like ugly or broken down.

Hung Up on Authority. The teachers of P.S. 178 voluntarily linger after class hours to share their ideas on how to draw their youngsters out of agonized attitudes of inferiority. With his students, Chicago Graduate Kenneth Schlosser, 24, employs a technique of mock toughness that they obviously enjoy. "Up against the wall, kids," he snarls as he assembles his class to march off to the lunchroom. "Forward march!" he yells, and they tramp off laughing. Arthur Iger, 23, who holds a master's degree from the London School of Economics, found his pupils so obsessed by the fear of doing something wrong that they preferred to trace objects in art classes until he insisted that they draw freely.

At P.S. 178, these imaginative but inexperienced teachers have the guidance of some competent veteran supervisors. An assistant principal at the school is Lolita Chandler, 31, a willowy black woman who has taught for eleven years in New York. She volunteered for the Ocean Hill-Brownsville pilot project, she says, because "I felt I wasn't growing as a teacher. Here I have real zest. I love it." Too many teachers, she claims, are "hung up on the authority kick," want to dominate a classroom, never listen. The P.S. 178 staff, she finds, is anxious to learn along with their pupils. "All kids really expect of teachers is that they be fair, honest and human--and these people are."

The newcomers to Ocean HillBrownsville contend that community control is an immense help rather than a restrictive burden. The teachers have the aid of eight neighborhood women who get $1.75 an hour to perform such chores as patrolling the lunchroom and distributing supplies. One of them, Mrs. Geraldine Whitfield, a huge, determined woman with leathery lungs, proved so effective at controlling unruly kids that she was dubbed "Dean of Discipline." Other neighborhood women devote free time to peripheral school activities, while eight college students are helping out in the classrooms. Two Roman Catholic nuns work voluntarily with youngsters who have special problems.

How long Ocean Hill-Brownsville's experiment in education will continue is in doubt. The strike is a struggle between the United Federation of Teach ers, which wants all the challenged instructors reinstated, and the local committee, which wants the right to staff its own schools. At week's end, both sides showed some signs of possible compromise. Even when the strike ends, one unfortunate result will be the need less hostility it has generated between the imaginative new teachers, whom the U.F.T. considers scabs, and the veteran professionals, who need all the help and freshness that the bureaucracy-dominated school system can muster.

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