Community Control of Public Schools

Report Outline
New York School Crisis and the Nation
Sources of Drive for Community Control
Moves to Increase Local Participation

New York School Crisis and the Nation

Wide Interest in the New York Controversy

Turmoil in New York City over decentralization of the public school system stands as a warning—possibly a preview—of what may happen in other cities subject to the same pressures for decentralization and containing the same volatile elements for conflict. The nation's largest metropolis has been beset for more than a year by teacher strikes, school lockouts, parents' boycotts, confrontations at school doorways, arrests of administrators, teacher defiance of Board of Education orders, pupil rebellions, and touches of violence here and there. The levels of tension and acrimony have been high, and there has been a deepening of the gulf between the ghetto community and the so-called education establishment.

Nearly all of these troubles have stemmed from conflicts of authority in the experimental operation of three school districts in predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods. The basic dispute is not over decentralization itself. Except for a few dissenters, virtually everyone involved in public education appears to favor decentralization—education theorists, study commissions, administrators, teachers, union leaders, parents, the U. S. Commissioner of Education, the president of the National Education Association, the chief education officer of the State of New York, and the Superintendent of Schools of New York City.

The question is, rather, how far decentralization should go toward allowing community control of the local school—in short, how much power a local community should have, independent of the central authority, in running its own schools. This is the tinderbox question, the one that lies at the core of the crisis in New York City and the one which must be dealt with in other cities where pressures for decentralization are growing.