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Welcome to another edition of black man in America presented by your city station in cooperation with the city's commission on human rights these programs are broadcast on Tuesday afternoon that five hundred eighty one live C F M ninety three point nine make a cycle Also on to the evenings at nine o'clock as well on W N Y C eight thirty kind of cycles here now to introduce today's guest is Ryan that Cathy public relations director for the City Commission on Human Rights Mr Metcalf Good evening this is Roy Metcalf and I'm here to bring you another in the series the black man in America devoted as this title states to examining the history in life of Afro Americans and the contributions they have made in our making to the material cultural and spiritual wealth of this country this includes all of living not simply the civil rights issues we see in the headlines the New York teachers' strike of one thousand nine hundred sixty eight seems to me the worst disaster my native city has experienced in my lifetime these are the opening lines for the introduction of Martin mayor's book The teacher strike New York one thousand nine hundred sixty eight published in February of this year by Harper and Row underlying Mr Mayor reported his belief that what happened was not inevitable and could have been avoided. It is my pleasure to have as my guest this evening Mr MARTIN Mayor Mr Mayor is uniquely qualified to write this report he was for five years chairman of one of the city school boards and in one thousand nine hundred eighty two published one of the first articles making the case for the centralization is the author of nine books including the school's report on American education based on visits to cover over one hundred schools in the United States and of where when and why a report on the teaching of social studies in American schools made to the American Council of learned societies one hundred sixty two one hundred sixty six he was a member of the panel on education research and development in the executive office of the president Mr Mayer is a highly successful freelance writer whose numerous numerous articles on education business television music law and other subjects have appeared in Esquire Harper's fortune life the New York Times Magazine and commentary among others Mr Mayer's book appeared in condensed form in the New York Times Magazine a short time ago it was was incidentally the longest article ever published by that magazine the teachers strike New York nine hundred sixty eight a comprehensive report result of painstaking research Mr Mayor spent the past two years interviewing virtually everyone who became involved in the school crisis including members of the New York Board of Education the ocean or Brownsville governing board ready McCaughey the United Ministre to Albert Shanker head of the United Federation of Teachers and many others a total of sixty people in all and additionally study material barely touched by other reporters including the minutes of the Governing Board of Education Mr Mayor for that one clear answer the question let's it's nice to have you on our program a black man American life could be here and to be so highly flawed Let's start at the beginning what's the genesis of the ocean Hill Brownsville experiment. It comes out of out of tune out of two developments that wound up moving and parallel one of them being of a people board of education movement which Melton Glamis and was a major later on in late sixty six early sixty seven. And a year teacher's union project in that area had been run by my Sandra Feldman who was Mrs Sandra Feldman who was a teacher and had been one of the leaders of East River Corps and they were both trying to do something about an area which was invited trouble. Educationally and they began to work to will gather and it was in fact Mrs Feldman and the union which first went to the Ford Foundation and said if you're really looking for an area to get some sort of community involvement in school administration going you ought to go to ocean Hill. What happened after that how much money did the Ford Foundation put into the projects and were there any guidelines set down by the Board of Education or the Ford Foundation Oh no this was but it was not well thought out really by anybody. I've blamed for it most because what has time to think I didn't still doesn't much for as I can say. There was a first grade of forty four thousand dollars to get a governing board set up. The people who were out in the district decided to move very very fast faster than I and anybody thought that they would they hired somebody to be an administrator of the planning group Mr McCaughey very early on in July or within about a week or ten days after the Grant came through. And they decided to have elections actually they decided to have them late in July they actually held them very early an organist. They were doing this on their own the person who was supposed to be liaison with the district only Board of Education was on vacation in July and the Ford Foundation was kept informed sort of remotely. What people live in the city in the summer. Rich or people don't feel that those are those people who were. In position to give guidance were many of them not available those who were available with a lot of thinking about their vacations anyway. There was a stroke of bad luck in the early involvement of Mr Herman Ferguson who was particularly violent species and militant Now as you know appealing a conviction for conspiracy to murder Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young and he had been a teacher and a school which I believe was in the parish where Father Power a slow one of the leaders of the ocean health board was located I'm not sure that so but they did know each other coming in and he was an early influence on the project and probably not in fact that unfortunate an influence but his name and reputation and the way he likes to talk in public certainly scared a lot of people doing that for some was the summer before the sixty seven strike yes this was this list all got started. And the late spring and early summer of one thousand nine hundred. One of the origins of the sixty seven strike you say there were technical Arjun's for the strike and then the unions on their lying were real reasons. The sixty seven strike was one of the very peculiar situations which have come up. Because of amateurishness and city administration. The expiring contract of the teachers' union was regarded at City Hall as a way to begin a new way of handling labor relations problems in the city which was really appointment of an outside fact finding board which would bring in a resolution of the dispute which the mayor would then impose on his own agency which he could do fairly easily and also on the union which might know what he thinks were thought about of men a little more trouble. This was brought in about a week before school was to resume it was a very generous award to the union but all unions experience with this sort of board is that something is kept back as a sweetener to be given at the last moment because the union is pushing on your situation and that's what the union is doing for its members for reasons which I've never been able to figure out the mayor's office announced the full extent of the. Fact finding panel's recommendation got the Board of Education to accept it and left nothing back to give over that last weekend when the union by all the history of labor this is viewed thought it was going to get something and before this got straightened out everybody was on strike. My feeling was at the time very strongly and with some inside information that if they had held back a few dollars of the of the package announced earlier in the week and given that on Sunday the package would have been acceptable and there would have been no strike but it began to look to the union which was very suspicious of my lindsay anyway like kind of conspiracy to say to the union members the union can't do anything for you it's the matter of fact finding board that does things for you and before anybody could talk rationally about these problems suddenly we had a strike it was a catastrophic strike it. What the union had to strike for because of the generosity of the offer was in fact educational improvement and reform in the neighborhood. But the neighborhoods were not that eager to support it because they wanted the kids in school and they were right everybody was operating at cross purposes and nobody understood what it was about everybody disliked everybody else in particular an area like ocean Hill starting a new experiment the thing was very unpleasant. Then what happened I remember that back in February of sixty eight the Human Rights Commission held hearings on the three experimental school districts and published a report on those hearings subsequently major conclusion of this report was that the responsibilities of the governing boards and indeed of the. Experimental districts in general had never really been defined and therefore decentralization was not being tested fairly by these three districts how did this thing seem to develop into the building picture of the strike Well there were there were three different districts with three different sets of problems. The two bridges area which is a very mixed area of Puerto Rican and Chinese a large number of immigrant children from Hong Kong. White Negro. Managed to hire on administrators early on but never got its board really and functioning order. The administrators found that he had to make out applications and septuplets it to go to the bathroom which is typical Board of Education procedure got very tired of it found also that the highly progressive educational philosophy which he brought from Leicestershire in England with which I personally have a good deal of sympathy was not in fact what the parents of the children in that district want in fact there is this this very peculiar. Once in many of these efforts which is that while the newspapers give people the notion that these communities with a capital C are very radical and revolutionary in fact they're very conservative mostly they want their children disciplined they want their children to behave they want the school to do what the home hasn't been doing for when they want reading writing and really want reading writing and arithmetic and the gentleman who was the minister eight of a I found himself caught in conflicting pressures and he finally quit. The two zero one situation as you may recall was a was a thorough massive fight. In the neighborhood as to who should be on the board everybody trying to scream loud and everybody else they were unable to hire on them in a straight they were unable to agree on anything I want to do an article in February and March sixty eight on ocean Hill for the Times magazine because that was the one which appeared to be functioning best. And I spent a fair amount of time out there visited four of the schools spend some time with most of the core sat in on a few of the governing board meetings talked to as many people as I could find given the given the frame of reference of eighty five thousand six that I was around seven thousand word article finally. And. They had difficulties I thought that there was a tendency as there always is to blame the difficulties on the remote us R.D. who won't let you do things there was also a very considerable problem in relations of Mr McCauley on his governing board at that point because in fact and this happens almost inevitably Mr McCoy was running the district pretty much single hand but he was consulting with that with the board but he was listening and doing pretty much what he wanted to do all of the principals who had been hired up to that point were the only people he had brought to the Board for approval he had never given them a budget of what he was doing with the Ford money or anybody else's money and they had the feeling it was supposed to be community control but really they were doing what most a Macor i thought they ought to do. Are my sympathies in this war with Mr McCaw he was the guy was going to have to be held responsible at the at and I feel that part of the problem we are in is that the administrators going to run the schools nobody else can he's a guy who's there and if you're talking about an administrators are running the schools you can't meaningfully at the same time talk about community control you can talk about responsiveness and you can talk about accountability but the minute an administrator can blame his board for something then you no longer have accountability and you have much the same situation as you have an I a year centralized system where everybody can blame one time living history anyway they had very serious troubles at junior high school to seventy one. And in general the quality of teaching that I saw I was not terribly pleased with either was Mr McCloy He was very troubled and he said to me that every other job he'd ever had he'd had a success experience that he could show after six months he didn't have it there and that he didn't know what he was going to do next but that a great deal had to be done. And when I first heard about the actions the governing board took and dismissing teachers from the district I was pretty sympathetic because I'd seen some. I thought ought to go to and it's very complicated to get rid of people and I had assumed that they'd been trying to get rid of these people and been unable to do so and it finally just an anger and frustration about individuals and they wanted out of the schools moved by themselves and I when I saw the list of people I was very surprised because a number of the people who were on it people whose names have not been mentioned to me. They were not the people that I fifty five would been accused of high crimes and misdemeanors they were not the people I had seen what I thought were under really punitive toward the children and too interested in questions of order they were four of them were part of the union leadership and there seemed no this seemed to be no charges against them and one of them that women had in fact. Just organized all of the teachers at two seventy one to write a letter to the Board of Education in support of the governing board principals and I was surprised to see him as an anime of the district are nevertheless what I still assumed until December that this was a case where they had gone to the Board of Education and asked to have people moved and had been turned down and had then moved on their own for that reason and I suppose let the moshav King thing I found something that most shocked people reading the article was that in fact they had studiously avoided going to the Board of Education for the transfer out of leave but they could have got it probably could even have gotten one certainly could have got most of the other because it was decided by a small group that this was a time to make a theatrical confrontation and make a lot of noise. And this was a very unfortunate decision it was a decision which was certainly concurred in by Marilyn get tell of Queens College he was going to administer the No four Grant and I think it might have been concurred in by people that before the foundation I did not think so when I wrote the book I thought they were merely negligent and investigating what happened but I now believe on the basis of conversations with some people over there that they were two of the great parties to the confrontation What about the American Civil Liberties Union view was simply a. Attempt to accomplish a routine transfer of teachers and that there was a union that blew it up the vast proportions because of their particular stance against decentralization the state legislature Well if you publicly announce that teachers are enemies of your children and all ruining their chances at education and must leave your district and that you are ordering them out of the district the notion that this is a routine transfer out. Are particularly if you have not previously tried to transfer them out of the whole thing is the Africa least I would like to believe that the Civil Liberties Union was simply poorly informed. I will say that for now and it was this was no routine front for this was a theatrical event and it was staged as such and part of our problem is that people like the Civil Liberties Union and emotionally committed to something not interested in the facts willing to go pick up anything written anywhere come rushing to the defense of an action which everything in lay charter of the Civil Liberties Union should oppose you know in a funny way Ron a program called the black man and I'm American I'm not blocking you're not black and the black man winds up again with people who are white talking about his problems let me say that I'm a substitute murderer difficulties of the kind that are usual moderator is a black man right but. We have a situation here where frankly the Civil Liberties Union reaction is racist that if anybody if if any white boy had done anything of the sort to Negro teachers the Civil Liberties Union would have gone right through the roof and this is quite obvious in your situation. My feeling is that the only hope in. The world is that we are going to apply the same standards to people regardless of their skin color and that when when people insist on defending anything that Negroes do because they are negroes I think that is a that that's a racist attitude if I think a man is a son of a gun if I think a man of behave badly I reserve my right to say so regardless of the color of his skin and I cannot see how one can pretend. Not to be racist if one takes any other at it but don't you think that's a rather you know simple and ideal position social economic factors determine a lot of our contemporary realities a question of what you want to do after you may well have a case about education of course it has a case about education question of what you want to do after you make your your rigid about somebody is action have to be enormously influenced by. How they got there and if a white ad the minister on a white governing board had done this to Negro teachers I would have said balance I'm out on that can this this being a years situation of a very frustrated group reasonably frustrated angry about a lot of things reasonably angry that I think that what one should have done it would have been relatively easy to do was to say OK boys can't do this and I have to arbitrate it. And you're really going to have to arbitrate a because you really can't do it but I don't think that that that any any severe action was dictated by or as I I would have thought so the other way I still think that if that. You can't handle these these situations at all if you are going to excuse his actions if they were done by whites would be wrong simply on the grounds of the color of the skin of people who do. What would you say were the main forces involved in the school strike in the school strike crisis in general for instance you say there were no real issues in the strikes just slogans Could you elaborate. Well there are there are real issues in the school picture but they strike was not on real issues because really in the end nobody denies the right of a teacher to be secure in a job and to have grievance procedures and some kind of arbitration procedures before a job can be taken away nobody really asserts really honest engine and arbitrary power on somebody's spot to throw teachers a rock this seemed to get asserted by the ocean Hill board for a while but it was called to their attention all timidly that you can't live that way and I don't think that that that this was really sustained over a great period though unfortunately they got into a position where that's what they seem to be saying at the same time the union I don't believe so here again one can one can one can have arguments as one can on the other. Has no great affection for. The central bureaucracy and never had and certainly has never had any great affection for the school principal they got pushed into each other's lives and one of the saddest parts of the whole story is that an alliance was formed between the teachers' union and the supervisors have been at odds with each other over the years. And the union is perfectly conscious of the fact that the current rules are protecting incompetent bombs and also that parents have had no chance to be heard on legitimate complaints against teach it in fact shortly before this came up the union proposed that the members of the Civilian Review Board which the mayor tried to put into place that you asian should become a teacher review board who would hear parent complaints. Now this is not this is easy to say it would not have been so easy to do there would have been problems but on the basic issues of. Arbitrariness and of over protraction of incompetent teachers certainly some sort of compromise could have been right on the issue of whether there should be more Negro school to ministers I don't think there's a there's any argument of course that should be. And of course the existing test which rewards a kind of federal mediocrity are or to go. On the issue of control of the money. Yes there are issues there but those were those were not the issues related to the use strike what we had was an artificial slogan called community control which is which is not a meaningful concept because the administrators are going to run the school. And we had another set of slogans relating to due process which were equally unreal because in fact the kind of process that the school system now insists upon is not defensible about the anti semitism issues that seem to spring out of the strike and still cause such a terrible. Yeah up. There was some there was some prior to the strike I've myself never taken it all out seriously I don't think anti-semitism anywhere near a serious problem in this city has bigotry against Negroes never it never has been and never will be. There is a problem when things that people say to each other in their own groups. Which may be unpleasant but everybody knows that it's sort of a joke get out into the outside world there was also a degree of willingness I think to accept this as an inevitable situation. In quarters where they should have realised what its impact was going to be on the general public less a kind of fashionable academic system that is got into government in this setting. And in in which one sort of ad MIT's. Things to be true which whether they're true or not one what to say in public aren't true simply because you have to manage a year's situation. I personally don't care a great deal what goes on in a man's heart I do care a great deal about it behavior I don't think that you can run government unless you keep your eye on people's behavior and forget about what they may believe deep inside we got into something we got into with into a psychologizing atmosphere toward the end of the strike in which government became impossible because we were worrying about what people thought rather than about what people did you know as a reader your book sort of has the structure almost of a Greek tragedy and they won the fight would criticize I would say things to sort of present this tragedy and where do we go from here do you think it's possible now New York City and what should we do to create an atmosphere where basically children can learn and teachers can teach. And people can work on on on the very severe problem of education and they said yes I think there can be a meaningful decentralization What do you think of the current plans up in Albany backed by the mayor the Board of Education regions. Are the original Board of Education Plan which retained curriculum control and budget control a percent I thought was unfortunate are just as I have since early sixty seven felt that concentration of the day centralization issue on personnel was going to make a lot of trouble and do very little good. I think that we need. To concentrate on questions of program on questions of budget control are on questions of curriculum change and we have to get these out on a word in a decentralized basis of the people can try things and their own neighborhoods other than the things that are now being tried. And I think that the that the proposals now pending of course I don't know when you're going to broadcast this and we may be after the fact on some of it I think it is possible to construct meaningful decentralization without getting into the terrible hassles that you get into the minute you concentrate on the personality or the factors of there is no one Norm a score of brilliant teachers waiting to come into the school to do better than the people we now think we what we really need are more school teachers a lot so we need better leadership we need better leadership on the principals level to get better work out of the teachers we have and we need better leadership on the On Live areas superintendency levels and we have to free them from the both both from the rigidity of control of the central office which we've had and now from the politicization that is going on all around them. Our experience with politicizing schools in this country is perfectly terrible and if the the idea that it will get better if you put a racial component into it is just beyond me I can't see why anybody thinks so frankly except the face and sort of studying their navels rather than than studying the reality of schools or the history of education do you think we've learned anything from your experience. Or I'd hate to believe we haven't you know I really would. I would hope that we've learned from the failure of many to many children I hope that we learn from the end adequacy of the preparation the teachers are commander was hope we have learned from the from from the way the tests that currently select principals work out I hope we would have learned from the teachers unions over exercise of its muscle I hope we would have learned from the effort of people who didn't have any model out notion held to try to show that they did. I hope we we would have learned also that that there's a kind of responsibility the children and the parents and the city as a whole let the people in my a put on the board of education during the course of the four by and large don't have that one of your main criticisms of the Board of Education lacked any organic contact with the life of New York City Well it did and and it still does it's hard it's it's it's it's a hard problem the the civic administration schools but you can say fairly confidently the people who are out on the street shouting slogans are not going to do terribly well when they get to face the problems of people rather than the problems of Mr Mayor I see that our time is up I want to thank you very much for being with us on black man in America this is Roy Macare saying please be of with us again next week when we'll have another distinguished guest and thank you all and good night we welcome your comments on this program send them to Black man in America New York one hundred seven and join us again next Tuesday afternoon at five o'clock on the body when wives see Ethen on Tuesday evenings at nine o'clock on W. When wise am black man in America has a feature presentation of your city station broadcast in collaboration with The New York City Commission on Human Rights.