The Decentralization Fiasco and Our Ghetto Schools

Back in 1954 when the Supreme Court made public its historic school desegregation decision I was president of Hollins College in Virginia. Having once been a member of the national board of the ADA, I had enough liberal credentials to qualify for a modest amount of mail from some Southern brethren pointing out that I was a Communist and probably also a nigger lover since I raised some money for the United Negro College Fund.

When the Supreme Court desegregation decision came out, I promptly lost all of my liberal credentials by giving a speech against desegregation. I even got a letter of commendation from the then governor of South Carolina, James Byrnes.

They, the governor and the other segregationists, had, of course, missed the point. The point was hardly complex — that the simple ordering of desegregation would not help the Negro, it would probably hurt him. It would take unprepared black boys and girls who had been historically given poor educations and put them with white boys and girls who had historically been given better educations. The Negro students would suffer the psychological wounds of sure defeat in an unfair competition, and the Negro teachers would not be hired by the predominantly white school boards.

So, I concluded, this was not really a ruling that would help Negroes, but rather one that would keep them from getting into the American mainstream and would destroy one of their most meaningful areas of employment. The American liberal had concocted a solution that would achieve his enemy’s ends because he misunderstood the process of education as well as the function of schools.

This is not to say, of course, that ultimately this nation should not have totally desegregated schools, housing, jobs, and all the rest. All Americans have equal rights in this nation, and certainly no one group has the right to oppress and depress another. And full American equality cannot be achieved until we are all truly color blind and creed blind. But this blindness is not going to be achieved by creating a situation that is as inherently unfair as pro-1954 segregation.

And now, the American liberal has done it again in New York City. This time he has decided that if predominantly Negro sections of the city want to have their own school boards, with authority to hire and fire teachers and influence subject content, then by all means give them the power to do so.

They go even further. The liberal Brooklyn College faculty voted to take into its freshman class two hundred unqualified Negro students as a gesture of its concern for their future welfare. Both the decentralization program and the Brooklyn College action again demonstrate that trying to use the schools to gain political solutions for America’s race problems will fail and fail miserably. It is almost as though some superracist is manipulating the American liberal with such ease and grace as to be invisible.

False analogy

The New York City decentralization program has been so widely reported as a result of the teachers’ strike that there is little need to describe it here. The gist of it is that the city would be divided into thirty-three districts, and that each of these districts would have its local school board. These district boards would engage teachers from a central city roster of qualified and certified teachers. If the teachers were not satisfactory to the local board, they would be returned to the roster to be picked up by one of the other districts.

The first experimental district — the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn — has already produced the city’s longest teachers’ strike and bared the issues of teachers’ rights and the local board’s powers. The teachers were back, then out again. Like an underground fire, the trouble would not die out.

It might be instructive to look at the general theory of decentralization. The theory is based upon a false analogy, that the thirty-three proposed school districts in the city of New York are roughly analogous with thirty-three cities that have populations of around 250,000. Cities of this size stretch across the country and appear not to have such large bureaucracies that things get immobilized. They also appear to have responsive school officials who understand the dreams and aspirations of the citizens. Such city systems appear to be large enough to be efficient and small enough to be close to the community.

After all, the city of New York is nothing more than a collection of about 8 million people in a small area. The geography is not important; the number of cubic feet each citizen occupies is a useless statistic. Rather, what is important is to count the number of people. Once 250,000 or so warm bodies are identified in one area, a line is drawn around it on a map and there is a school district.

What is a community?

It is obvious that this does not produce a cross section of population in a city such as New York, or in any other large city for that matter. Cities are a collection of ethnic, religious, and economic communities. When these communities reach certain sizes and have their own school boards, they can then have their boards reflect the aims of the various communities. The “community” is not, of course, the heterogeneous mixture of talent, wealth, poverty, educational level, religious heritage, racial stock, and so on of a normal town of 250,000. In all probability, it is far more homogeneous than heterogeneous.

One of the purposes of the American public school system is to weld people of diverse backgrounds into a nation with common goals, common ideals, and common aspirations. The glory of public education in America is that it was able to take the children of immigrant parents and teach them not only a common language but also to forget the historic hatreds of the bloody battlegrounds of the world. The school boards that helped to accomplish the miracle of making this nation were filled with diversity and heterogeneity. Out of their debates, their clashes of thought and ideals, and their hopes for their children came the programs and attitudes that made America.

If the Negro or Puerto Rican areas of New York are given their own school boards, they will not necessarily bring their young more rapidly into the center of American life. Such a move is far more likely to impede their progress. The schools can easily be turned into local pressure-group battlefields, with teachers and students finding themselves unpleasantly and blatantly cheated. It seems patently obvious that you do not tell the disadvantaged that they are being helped by being allowed to light out their differences among themselves with no firm direction as to how to use the schools for their advantage.

The kind of thinking that treats the Negro as a fresh immigrant group, as were the Jews, the Irish, the Poles, and all the rest, leads to some of these peculiarly unproductive proposals. The Negroes are Americans in every way. The fact that the majority white Americans have mistreated them has no bearing on the fact that they are as American as anyone else. The white majority has given them inferior educations, inferior jobs, inferior houses, inferior incomes, but none of these massive discriminatory sins can shake the fact that the Negroes in America are Americans.

The problem is how to redress an enormous historic wrong. If the white community is really serious about wanting to bring Negro Americans into all levels of production and consumption of the goods and services of this society, it is clear that a special case must be made of them and special things must be done for them by the people who have the means to do them.

When it became clear that the farmers of America needed help in modernizing their farms in order to become more productive, to increase their incomes and the food supply, this nation did not say to them, set up your own schools and teach yourselves. On the contrary, there was a clear understanding that special institutions had to be built for them and that highly trained county agents had to be provided to show them how to use machinery and fertilizer and how to use and reuse soil scientifically. Special roads were built for them, subsidized electrification programs were established, and very expensive systems of water conservation were constructed. This was a group of Americans who wanted to become more productive and they knew that they needed help, and the help was provided in a meaningful fashion. Some farmers rioted, spilled milk on the highways, and withheld produce from the markets, but the job was done.

It is now that the Negroes need special help. They do not need to be told to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. And they do not need to be told that if the whites put them in schools that are predominantly white, they will be able to achieve their desires. This will not work with the Negroes any more than it would have worked with the farmers.

Educational nonsense

It is strange that liberal white guilt assuages itself by devising programs that say white people and black people start as equals if they start school together. They do not start as equals. By custom and design Negroes have been excluded from building up the body of skills and attitudes which the whites have built for themselves. Without the tradition the Negroes cannot effectively compete with those who have the tradition. The only rapid way of giving Negro Americans this tradition is to design an educational program just for them that will attack the fundamental problem. A decentralized school system and simplistic desegregation are political palliatives and educational nonsense.

The New York City schools will be in a shambles until the citizens of this largest city in the nation finally understand the nature of the problem. Not only is the Negro not to be helped by decentralization, but the job security and morale of the teaching force are placed in serious jeopardy. Like it or not, the teachers of the city are in a union. The union knows full well that thirtythree district boards around the city with the power to engage and dismiss teachers from their schools will produce revolving doors for all kinds of nonacademic reasons. Ethnic considerations that have nothing to do with instructional effectiveness will be introduced by local ethnic politicians, and a teacher’s defense against them will be weak indeed. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville situation makes it clear that, justified or not, the teachers are both frightened and worried.

Nothing that has been said here in any way defends the almost immovable bureaucracy of the centralized Board of Education of the city. It is incapable of dealing with the problem of New York City schools, and this fact has been demonstrated time after time. Back in 1961 it was thought that the difficulties could be corrected if the Board of Education were removed and a new one appointed. Governor Rockefeller called a special legislative session and had the board removed. A distinguished group of citizens were empowered to give Mayor Wagner a list of names from which the new board was to be appointed. The mayor appointed an outstanding group. And nothingimproved, and the problems of ghetto education continued to worsen. Removing the old board and installing a new board of the city’s finest citizens certainly proved that the fault does not lie with the quality of the citizens.

It probably does lie in the encrusted and archaic bureaucratic administrative structure, much of which was developed when the school system was breaking away from political manipulation. The Depression years added their contribution in the form of excessive and intricate formulations of jobsecurity regulations. And it is probably true that a good deal of the unresponsive central bureaucratic power would be broken by decentralization. The only trouble is that decentralization will produce equally bad horrors, perhaps worse.

Local desires vs. local needs

The simple fact is that a school must be responsive to the desires of a local community and to its needs. These two are not the same. The needs of a community are seen in preparing students for further academic work and for places in the productive life of the nation. Most local communities in large cities, or indeed elsewhere, know very little of the literature projecting the nation’s work force and professional needs. It is folly to think that the average nonprofessional citizen would have either the time or the inclination to keep up with the mountain of reports, articles, and books that come out on these subjects each year. Here lay boards must trust professionals, and the school system will meet community needs in exact proportion to the skill and effectiveness of the professional and his freedom from local community pressures.

Meeting the desires of a community raises other questions. Sometimes parents want their children taught the same prejudices they hold and insist that the school reinforce the ideas and values they cherish. If mother and father do not believe in evolution, then the child should not be told that Mr. Darwin thought that this idea helped explain a great number of the facts of biological existence. Sometimes parents want racial and religious groups ranked in accordance with their notions of “truth” and acceptability. And so it goes.

There is no question that teachers must often make compromises with their own convictions in order to keep peace in a community. The closer teachers get to attempting to be totally responsive to the local desires the more they must compromise if they are themselves well educated.

The cliché, therefore, that runs through the argument for decentralization — that the board becomes “more responsive to the local community” — is dangerous and requires serious examination in the light of just what people want their schools to do for them and their children. Often, to be responsive is to kill the true function of education.

It is time for this nation to stop being romantic about education. Education is not a mode of salvation; it is an activity of high utility that places people in the production and consumption game and gives them a sufficiently common sense of the values of life so that they can live together in peace and with mutual respect. Ideally, students should not compete against each other in gaining knowledge and skills; they should instead be trying to overcome their own ignorance. Unfortunately, in these United States competition among students for grades and recognition is a greater motivation than the disembodied search for truth and knowledge.

Any educational strategy for helping the disadvantaged must begin with this recognition before it can even start to find workable solutions. Beyond this must come the recognition that school programs should only be constructed to give students the best possible chance in a dangerous and tough world. Without these recognitions schools are misused for political and all kinds of noneducational ends. Simplistic desegregation and decentralization seem to refuse both recognitions.

(This discussion will continue in future issues.)