Strike's Bitter End

The New York City teachers' strike, which denied 1,100,000 children formal schooling for 36 school days in three separate walkouts this fall, finally ended last week. As might be expected in so bitter a battle, the terms of settlement--reached after a 27-hour weekend negotiating session--did not really please anyone. In the long view, the militant United Federation of Teachers may have lost far more than it won.

The terms of settlement named a state-appointed trustee, Associate Education Commissioner Herbert F. Johnson, for the experimental Ocean Hill-Brownsville decentralized district, which was the focus of the dispute; he will remain in charge of the area's eight schools until tensions have relaxed. Three principals named by the Ocean Hill-Brownsville local board were suspended from their jobs pending a court decision on the legality of their appointments. A three-man committee was designated to hear teachers' complaints. U.F.T. Leader Albert Shanker won reinstatement for 79 of his teachers who had been transferred out of the district or walked out of their jobs in sympathy; four nonunion teachers accused of hostility toward U.F.T. members were transferred out of the district. Administrator Rhody McCoy was suspended until he would promise to cooperate with Johnson. McCoy reluctantly did so, was reinstated.

Extra Classes. Ending the strike still left the schools with a lot of lost time to make up. The Board of Education initially announced that the school day would be extended 45 minutes daily for 14 weeks. In addition, there would be ten days of extra classes carved out of vacation periods. Protests from teachers and students led officials to make the ten days optional. While the extra sessions cannot compensate for all the instruction time lost, they will provide enough overtime for teachers to recoup most of the pay lost during the strike.

The U.F.T., which includes 55,000 of the city's 57,000 teachers, wanted to close the schools down completely during its strike. It failed to do so. Perhaps 350,000 students were able to attend classes--either in schools that remained open or in makeshift classrooms set up on parental initiative. At least 7,500 U.F.T. members violated union orders by teaching outside of union-authorized schools. In many areas, parents physically occupied their schools to make sure they stayed open; at P.S. 84 on Manhattan's upper West Side, parents took turns guarding the doors and patrolling the halls to make sure that the building was not locked by custodians sympathetic to the U.F.T. The city's school lunch program, which normally provides 400,000 lunches daily, served more than 160,000 a day during the strike, mostly in ghetto schools.

A crisis situation produced imaginative crisis response. In many parts of the city, parents improvised schools in churches, storefronts, brownstone basements and apartments. Other parental groups packed the kids off for tours of the city's museums, galleries and exhibit halls. There were cram courses in basic subjects on both educational and commercial television. Despite the potential for mischief in so prolonged a period of youthful idleness, police reported that there was no significant rise in juvenile delinquency. A feeling expressed on both sides was that it was the kids who, by their restrained conduct, showed themselves to be the real heroes of the strike.

The schools reopened the day after teachers voted to approve the settlement, but the fragile nature of the truce was illustrated when eight union teachers were prevented from entering an Ocean Hill-Brownsville school. Shanker threatened to call the teachers out on a fourth strike if they were not admitted quickly. Swift action by Trustee Johnson averted more trouble, and the schools went back into full session.

No Friends. As for the deleterious effects of the strike, Psychologist Kenneth Clark, a member of the state board of regents, argued sarcastically that many New York schools were so bad that "the children weren't getting that much education anyway." What worried him more was the growth of hostility between Negroes and Puerto Ricans, whose children constitute a majority of the city's public school students, and Jews, who dominate the teachers' union. U.F.T. pickets shouted charges that Ocean Hill-Brownsville residents were using fascist tactics and teaching "antiwhite racism," and blacks accused the union teachers of purposely holding them down. Ghetto residents generally believe that decentralization is a valid solution to the complex ills of the New York City schools. And the union's calculated attack on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment was not likely to persuade many Negroes that they had a lot of friends among teachers.

Unmistakably, the goal of the U.F.T. was to cripple the decentralization experiment, which it fears might lead to a dissolution of its bargaining power by giving local communities control of hiring and firing. Ironically, the strike seems to have furthered the cause of decentralization. Thousands of previously uninvolved city parents, white and black, who had been content to let the schools run themselves, became personally involved in their children's schools, and their operation. Those who were "radicalized" by the strike are not likely to continue to let the professional--teacher, supervisor, board-of-education bureaucrat--have full say in the question of what should be taught and how.

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