The college and the city: then and now

Public Interest, Summer, 1998 by Nathan Glazer

What happened? All the easy explanations fail. It is the school bureaucracy, we are told. But the New York City public schools were even more bureaucratic when they were successful. Or, school leadership has declined. But the New York City school superintendents then were gray and colorless men. They had worked their way up the school bureaucracy in anonymity and served until retirement or until they died in office. Today, we scour the country for the most energetic and creative chancellors we can find - and change them every two or three years. Other explanations of big-city school failure are that the schools are too large and that the children do not get the attention they deserve. But the schools were once much larger. Or, we are told, the children come from working-class and poor families. But they came largely from poor families then too. Or, it is said, the schools cannot manage the heavy burden of immigrant and non-English-speaking children. But, as I have reported, many of the most promising students today are from immigrant and non-English-speaking homes. And the failure of the public schools is even greater among native African Americans. It cannot be difficulties in learning English that are the primary cause of our school failures.

One explanation that does makes sense is that the quality of the teachers has declined. During the Depression, being a public school teacher, elementary or high school, was a very good job, and the quality of teachers was undoubtedly higher. Further, teaching was for a long time the favored occupation of able women and often the only professional occupation open to them. That changed as women's attitudes changed and as law and medicine and business opened up to them in the 1960s and 1970s.

There are other popular explanations. One is that the unions have become too powerful and serve the interests of their members rather than the interests of the children. There may be something to that, but staff associations were not that weak when the schools were better. Another explanation, as we know, is that the schools have become politicized, by which is meant that teachers and principals are appointed not on the basis of tested merit but on the basis of political connections. It is true that another major change that took place in 1969 was the decentralization of the public schools into partially self-governing community districts. This has, alas, contributed to the depreciation of professional qualifications and increased the importance of "connections." Many of these school districts developed a well-deserved reputation for corruption. Getting and holding jobs became more important to their leadership than any educational objective.

There is something to that explanation. In the days when New York City public schools were the pride of the city, they were remarkably free of politics. The schools are not even mentioned, for example, in the huge biography of Mayor LaGuardia by Thomas Kessner. The mayor had nothing to do with the selection of the school superintendent, and the superintendent was automatically reappointed until retirement. I will confess not to understand how an institution that provided important jobs and resources then, as it does now, was so well protected from politics and patronage. It would be a mystery to any current political scientist, and should be studied.