The Teacher Wars (23 page)

He wasn't out of work for long. On Ferguson's recommendation, McCoy hired Campbell to work in Ocean Hill—Brownsville. Campbell became a charismatic and infamous presence at JHS 271, where some of his most committed Black Studies pupils began rejecting their “slave names” and referring to themselves with new names borrowed from black Muslim cultures. (Theresa Jordan, for example, became Karima Jordan, a name she used into adulthood.) Campbell's politics were so extreme that even some black parents in the neighborhood were uncomfortable with his teaching.
One of them was Elaine Rooke, the school's PTA president and a harsh critic of the UFT. She told her son to avoid Campbell, whom she considered a troublemaker. Not every community control supporter was a separatist radical, but the presence of figures like Ferguson and Campbell in Ocean Hill–Brownsville's public schools enraged Al Shanker, and the district kept supplying the union leader with fuel for outrage, with which he was able to build opposition to community control.
The morning after Martin Luther King's assassination, an assembly was called at JHS 271. As Rhody McCoy stood by, cries of “Black Power!” and “Kill whitey!” rang out, and then white teachers were encouraged to leave the room. Campbell delivered a speech to the students that some interpreted as an incitement to riot. “If whitey taps you on the shoulder, send him to the graveyard,” he said.

All in all, the first school year of community control, 1967–1968, was a struggle. McCoy and the community board moved quickly to hire black and Puerto Rican administrators for each of the district's eight schools, and in doing so ousted several popular principals. Teachers were restive. Students still often left class and roamed the hallways. McCoy and his deputies were determined to get the situation under control. Sometime in early May 1968—the exact date is lost, for the school kept few records—a hall monitor named Cecil Bowen observed Richard Douglass's art class at JHS 271. Bowen later reported that when he stepped inside the classroom, he saw students shouting and flinging paint at one another as Douglass stood by helplessly. Bowen broke up the fight. Several days later, McCoy and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville community board dismissed Douglass and eighteen other white teachers and administrators. Some of the shocked teachers were called out of their classrooms to receive the dismissals in the form of a telegram. The dismissals were not terminations—they simply asked the selected teachers to report to city school board headquarters for new assignments. But McCoy clearly intended to send a message—that black parents and administrators deserved veto power over the employment of white teachers. “
Not one of these teachers will be allowed to teach anywhere in this city,” he predicted of the group he dismissed. “The black community will see to that.”

Long before collective bargaining, it had been difficult to oust an experienced teacher. Teacher tenure, after all, had existed in New York since 1917, and in other cities since 1909. Only in rare cases (or during moral panics, like the Red Scare) would districts pursue an expensive and time-consuming trial to terminate the employment of a tenured teacher. This “due process” was the bedrock principle of teacher unionism, the protection that could help prevent teachers from being fired because of their political leanings, gender, race, religious beliefs, pregnancy, or opposition to administrative policies.

But what could be done about teachers who were just plain bad at their jobs? Working around tenure rules, administrators and the UFT had established an informal, backstage process for removing—or, more accurately, juggling—ineffective tenured teachers: A principal would put in a request with the Board of Education
that a teacher be transferred to another school, and as long as the principal removed no more than one or two teachers per year, the union would not typically raise objections. In this way, bad teachers hopped from school to school, often ending up at the schools in the poorest neighborhoods with the least political clout.
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The history of American public education had shown that teachers needed some sort of protection; female, black, gay, and radical teachers had experienced wave after wave of ideologically motivated dismissals, unrelated to professional competence. But by the late 1960s, education reformers feared the pendulum had swung too far in the opposite direction. One of the most cited statistics by supporters of community control was that over a five-year period in the mid-1960s only
12 out of 55,000 teachers in New York City were fired for cause. Everyone, even the union, agreed there were more than 12 bad tenured teachers. Shanker and the UFT argued that the low termination rate obscured the fact that many others were urged to leave the profession through private conversations. In Ocean Hill–Brownsville, McCoy had willfully ignored this tacitly accepted, slow-moving way of doing business, telling the media that time was of the essence. “
We've got to make them learn,” he said of his district's disadvantaged students. “They've been so deprived so long that they've tuned out.”

Could neighborhood schools hire and fire based on community instructional and even political preferences? The union argued they could not, and it sent several of the dismissed Ocean Hill–Brownsville teachers back to work, where they were met by activists, some affiliated with black separatist groups, who physically prevented the teachers from entering school buildings. Two weeks later when 350 UFT teachers walked out of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville schools in solidarity with their dismissed colleagues, the community board attempted to terminate all their contracts, too. Mayor Lindsay hadn't approved McCoy's plans and did not
know how to react. Did a neighborhood community board have the power to terminate teachers en masse?

This seemingly local event triggered not only the most infamous and largest teachers' strike in American history, but also a political and racial crisis of national proportions, which continues to reverberate in almost every debate about contemporary school reform. On one side, community control advocates argued that the education of poor black and brown children was too urgent a matter to bother with labor protections, bureaucratic protocol, or even basic politesse—much the same argument we hear from today's opponents of teacher tenure. On the other side, the United Federation of Teachers worried that allowing parents and non-educator activists to essentially fire teachers they did not approve of would devalue the professionalism of educators and return them to a climate of constant job insecurity. What's more, the unionists feared that a community control movement affiliated with Afrocentrism could potentially turn neighborhood schools into places of political indoctrination. The moderate wing of organized labor had succeeded in vanquishing a strong challenge from radical communists in the old Teachers Union. Now the UFT worried that Black Power, funded by the powerful Ford Foundation, posed a similar threat. A May 22, 1968, union ad in
The New York Times
, responding to the Ocean Hill–Brownsville dismissals, summed up the UFT's fears:

In reality, the Ocean Hill–Brownsville dismissals were as much about competence as about ideology.
Art teacher Richard Douglass, for example, had been transferred to JHS 271 from another middle
school, whose principal had also complained he lacked classroom management skills. Like most teachers in Ocean Hill—Brownsville and low-income schools across the country, Douglass had received no special training in how to work with poor children, children with behavioral problems, or non-native English speakers. In fact, Douglass was an adherent of A. S. Neill, the British education theorist whose 1960 bestseller,
Summerhill
, described the radical “free” pedagogy of the boarding school he had founded in England, which served children from mostly affluent families. Summerhill students lived “free from adult authority,” allowed to play or learn in whatever proportion they saw fit. Children voted on rules and punishments, and parents were encouraged to take a hands-off approach, only getting involved at school with their children's permission. The art room at Summerhill was an unstructured place where students could pursue whatever projects they liked. These practices, though attractive to many liberal educators during the 1960s, were a bad fit in Ocean Hill—Brownsville, a neighborhood where parents had been organizing in favor of a more traditional approach: structured lessons, stricter discipline, and a longer school day. Douglass knew he was in over his head, but he seemed to blame his students more than his own poor training or ill-suited philosophy. Maybe, he told a
New York Post
reporter, the problem was that a liberal arts curriculum was irrelevant to these particular kids. “The children are not motivated to learn,” he complained. Instead of art, the school should “stress reading in the mornings and electives in the afternoon, like inviting an electrician or maybe a plumber, because realistically all the kids wouldn't be going to college.”

Douglass was plainly an ineffective teacher. So were some (though not all) of the other teachers dismissed alongside him, who admitted later that they had trouble managing student behavior. The summer following the dismissals, the city Board of Education conducted hearings to determine the fates of ten of the original thirteen dismissed teachers who wished to return to their jobs in Ocean Hill–Brownsville. (The others had resigned or accepted positions at other schools.) A widely respected African American judge, Francis Rivers, served as trial examiner. He threw out the cases of four of the dismissed teachers, saying they had been targeted not because
of problems in the classroom, but simply because they had voiced skepticism of community control. Of this group, Daniel Goldberg, a UFT rep, was considered an especially gifted social studies teacher. His supposed offense had been sniping about the district's administrative practices to a colleague at a Christmas party. In the cases of Douglass and five other teachers,
Rivers concluded that the district's accusations of classroom management problems, lateness, and even corporal punishment were nearly impossible to substantiate, since McCoy's administration kept no records of observations or other personnel matters. Rivers did not deny adults were remiss in the classrooms of Ocean Hill–Brownsville. But the dismissals seemed arbitrary to him, since testimony indicated that more than a quarter of the teachers in the district were similarly weak. What's more, some of the dismissed teachers had repeatedly asked for instructional help from their supervisors but were ignored.

On August 26, 1968, Rivers ordered McCoy to reinstate all ten teachers, along with the 350 who had struck in solidarity the previous May.
When UFT teachers arrived at JHS 271 on the first day of school that fall, however, it was clear many would not be allowed to work. Administrators “paired” returning union loyalists with teachers considered friendly to community control, and several union-affiliated teachers reported that when they began to teach, their partner teacher either led students out of the classroom or directed children to disrupt the lesson. It was chaos, an all-out factional war. Shanker had to determine how to respond. He believed McCoy and the community control movement were bullying union teachers who were skeptical of Afrocentrism, and that if this behavior was allowed to stand, black teachers could be bullied because of their race, too. At a UFT meeting he advocated a citywide walkout, arguing, “
This is a strike that will protect black teachers against white racists and white teachers against black racists.” The union's delegate assembly voted in favor of the strike, and 93 percent of New York City teachers chose to honor the picket line, compared to just 77 percent during the 1967 strike and 12 percent during the UFT's first walkout in 1960.

The 1968 strikes of sixty thousand teachers, the largest ever, were particularly disruptive because they were staggered in intervals
of several days and weeks between September and November. In total, a fifth of the school year's instructional time was lost, and nearly one million children were affected. Shanker presided over giant City Hall rallies of up to forty thousand union teachers chanting in favor of due process. “
You're a racist, Mr. Shanker!” shouted community control supporters in response. Anti-union demonstrators trailed the UFT leader everywhere he went, even to his family's split-level home in suburban Putnam County, where they issued Shanker a “report card” with a grade of F for “works and plays well with others” and A for “racism.”

In Ocean Hill–Brownsville, 60 percent of students continued to show up at school during the strikes. The district attempted to function with replacement teachers, who were culled from several groups that were critical of union leadership: the African-American Teachers Association, a black separatist group; white liberal supporters of community control, some of them the sons and daughters of communist Teachers Union members; and young New Left activist teachers who judged that the staunchly anticommunist Shanker was insufficiently opposed to the Vietnam War. Teacher interviews were held in a gymnasium, where McCoy, community board members, and parents all questioned the applicants. Dolores Torres remembered that she and other parents sought teachers who were enthusiastic about working with nonwhite children and who were pedagogically flexible. “
What did they feel about coming to work in a neighborhood that was predominantly black and Hispanic? Did they feel that our children could learn as well as anybody else's children, in, say, a white neighborhood, an affluent neighborhood?… A lot of the teachers were agreeable. They felt that if you couldn't teach a child one way, then try something else—but that all children could be taught.”