Public Schools Call for Co-operation Between School, School Board, Public; But Such Harmony Breeds Many Dangers

"It is your job," a primary school principal said to a visiting mother one day, "to feed and clothe him; we shall educate him."

It is very doubtful that this principal--head of one of the best schools in educationally-praised Westchester County, N.Y., really believed in this dichotomy of upbringing; certainly in her own school, which, many parents believed, was run by the PTA, she did not practice it. But her remark indicates a separatist view of the parent-school relationship which many educators, in their quiet, undisturbed hours, visualize as an ideal one: the school free from parental interference, at liberty to introduce the subjects it wishes and the textbooks it chooses, without the twitching nose of the community pressing against the window pane. It is this way with the best private universities; wouldn't it be delightful if it could be so with secondary schools?

A "Life-centered" Approach

No, unfortunately. For the inadequacies of present-day education, where uninspired, underpaid teachers and administrators are willing to go along with any convenient, easy, well-tried program, demand that some sort of watchdog eye be placed on the schools, to insure that the best possible education can be achieved. Education in this part of the twentieth century has become an all-out community affair, with the isolationism of the academic school of the nineteenth century gone forever. The new--as one authors calls the "life-centered"--approach to education demands the interaction of the student with the community, effected through school field trips and parental visits and interest in the school. In community, after community, parents have had to take a stand where schools themselves have failed to provide some facet of educational experience that the intelligent portion of a locality strongly felt was worthwhile.

Can Cause Weakness

Obviously, this interdependence has many weaknesses, and many hazards. If the community is a relatively poor one, a halt-leading-the-blind relationship may occur, with mistake following ludicrous mistake down the trail of ignominy. In Cambridge, for example, the School Committee, the elected body of parents responsible for supervising the schools, tried to "improve" its school facilities by making a series of unnecessary appointments and promoting unqualified men to responsible jobs in the school system. In this case, the irresponsible action of one group of parents was rectified by another group of parents, who organized petitions and referenda and court actions, until finally the action was overruled.

In Virgina, parents have set out to improve the school systems, on the verge of adulteration by the Supreme Court, by urging upon the state legislatures bills abolishing integrated public schools. This fall, these parents will sit placidly by while all the public schools in the state become private and, until some sort of reverse legislation takes place, their children will remain at home, unschooled.

Other Example Shown

These are, of course, extreme examples. But this interdependence easily fosters such unhappy incidents, and a constant vigil on the part of both school authorities and the intelligent portion of the parental community is necessary to keep public education on a sane and salutary keel. Parents in Syosset, New York, an idyllic little community on Long Island, discovered that the glee club director of one school was teaching his singers patriotic songs of the United States, England, France, and Russia--the last a song written nine years before by a Soviet composer. They accused him of being unpatrioic, and it took an investigation by the school board and an admission of "an error in judgment" by the director to clear the air once more.

Newton H. S.

At the opposite extreme is the school system in Newton, reorganized across the nation as a superior educational plant. Here, the school board is composed of representative figures in education, industry, finance, and domesticity who argue disputes at an intellectual level, and are interested solely in the welfare of the school system. They are possessed of an implicit trust in the professional staffs of the schools, and to a great extent rely on them for suggestions for improving the curriculum. Detailed proposals made to the board by a member of a faculty have been rejected only because of financial limitations, when the School Committee would greet the proposal with a wistful no.

An interesting comparison presents itself between the Newton and the Cambridge School Committees. The Newton board is composed of specimens of the highest intelligence in the city; the Cambridge board--with a few notable exceptions is representative of the less intelligent portion of the city. Both these groups are quasi-cliques; but the Newton committee has the full support of the community while the Cambridge board generally manages to create a rift with each important move it makes: the educated, PTA-supporting citizens on one side; the less well educated, anti-PTA citizens on the other.

Method at Newton

In an explanation of this difference lies another facet of parent-school interdependence. The Newton board takes great care to send out to all parents in the community extensive reports of each of its meetings, and encourages parents to talk with teachers, principals, board members, and the Superintendent. "Anybody in this city can walk in the door and speak his peace," Harold Gores, Newton Superintendent of Schools, maintains. This encouraging of intimate, individual parent-school contact prevents a community from looking upon the school committee as a power structure that must be beaten down in order to have one's say. In Cambridge, where so much of the recent appointments scandal was carried on in "executive session," from which visitors were barred, such a structure has been built up, at least in the minds of the citizenry. To succeed in running an effective school system, then, the school board must unite the community behind it, and in so doing it will absorb and affect the ideas of the citizens who feel that they have a significant role to play in the education of their own children. This is being done--though far too infrequently--by the means of these reports, and by the appointing of citizens' committees, groups of adults in the community who possess a special interest or knowledge in a problem to be tackled by the school system, whether it be construction of a new building or preparing of a new course of study.

Two Examples at Westchester

The worth of such attempts of communication with the public can be illustrated by a comparison of two neighboring school districts in, again, Westchester County, N.Y. (Westchester, fabled to possess in all its towns and cities the best of all possible school systems, actually runs the gamut from outstanding to abominable, and is thus a suitable area for illustration and internal comparison.) The Board of Education of Mamaroneck decided several years ago that it was time to build an addition to the high school, held meetings and forums, convinced the daily paper to carry stories on the building, and with no difficulty, managed to have the bond issue passed. When it was discovered that the original figure was too low, the Board by these same methods garnered an even higher percentage of votes in the second bond issue referendum.

About six miles away, however, the city of Mount Vernon has been trying for seven years to swing a referendum to build one large, or two smaller high schools. Within this period, the school board has held four referenda, each of which has been voted down, following an active campaign on the part of a non-parent citizens group claiming that the structure cost too much (and as each year passes the costs rise). In the last referendum in December, the organization also cried that the referendum, was scheduled during the week preceeding Christmas purposely to garner a small, and winning, vote for the school board. "The Shame Of It!" huge ads in the local paper screamed in black type. The School Board tried to reply with feeble statements from faculty members urging the new schools, but every statement they made served only to strengthen the split in city beliefs. Opposition cries that the Board was trying to push measures through without telling the townspeople what they were doing probably held more than a grain of truth. Until the Board tries to gain general consent from the community before it proposes a plan--and incorporates in it the intelligent suggestions of the non-Board members--there will never be a new high school built in Mount Vernon.

Open Discussion Needed

If Boards of Education and faculties and parents in all groups in the community can co-operate through frequent open discussion and continual publizing of all moves and intended moves, the school system can run adequately and smoothly, and the ideas of both professional staff members and laymen can have the full chance of fruition, and the school system stands its best chance of fulfillment.

But, as with most apparent panaceas, there is a great danger in this one. In the universal search in a community for harmony and co-operation with everyone, everyone must compromise, and frequently the wrong things are compromised. Most high school newspaper editors, for example, have known the frustration of desiring to print a piece of perfectly legitimate news which the faculty adviser bans on the grounds that it will "make the school look bad." Frequently, principals insist upon reading copy for the paper after the adviser has done so, making sure that it contains nothing that could be possibly be construed as offensive to anyone.

Parents' Role Discussed

The feeling of school administrators that they must cater to parents can also lead to parents playing an excessive role in running a community's schools. In Lakewood, Ohio, when the school did not offer enough language and science courses, parents stepped in and taught them themselves; in Scarsdale, N. Y., a group of citizens organized several years ago, the now-defunct Committee of Ten to investigate Communism in the school system, and censor the books in the school libraries. In one community in Texas, a group of parents got together and demanded that European History no longer be taught in the public schools; their demand was heeded. The Lakewood experience worked for good, the others worked for ill; but nonetheless they are all of the same fabric: the overstepping of parental bounds into the professional academic field. Even in Newton, parental groups have been able to convince the School Committee into providing Driver Education courses in the high school: a simple, reasonable request, but in a less-educated community, a school board could be similarly convinced to initiate, or cancel, other, and more significant projects out of desire to please parents.

PTA Powerful

A further consequence of this thorough community co-operation is frequently the assumption of a powerful role by the Parent-Teacher Associations associated with the school system. Principals have been known to cower in fear of the ladies who exert influence through cake sales and bridge parties, and in schools with wealthy PTA's, a great many school functions, frequently including academic ones, become complacently dependent upon these women.

Yet another problem in the unification of the community is the role of the non-parent, the citizen who asks, "Why should I pay school taxes? I have no kids in school"; and smiles happily when groups form which seek to keep school construction and taxes at a low rate. Administrators in Newton are now actively seeking a way to interest the non-parent in the schools and keep him from causing trouble.

Fuller Staffs Needed

It would be nice, of course, if public schools were well enough staffed so that they could operate responsibly on their own with about as much parental interference as the Overseers exert at Harvard. But they are not, and, since parents are their sole support, they do have a right to take a strong interest in the way in which they are being run. The belief in equality of and for all held so strongly by so many in the United States, increases the interest of parents in schools: "I know as much about my child's needs as you do; I have a right to supervise the education you are giving him." The school no longer holds for the parent the respect that it did in the last century, and the school can no longer afford to keep aloof from the community.

Thus some parental influence is unavoidable; and in some communities it is the only factor which preserves any sort of decent education. But if parental interests do not co-operate with school and public interests, little progress is possible; and if they co-operate in the wrong way, a stultifying and authoritarian atmosphere may result.

Layman is Important

The layman thus assumes an immensely significant role in the specialized profession of public education. In these days of thoughtful second looks at American education, one may hope that parents will realize their role with greater seriousness, and that the schools, which so desperately rely for their survival on the good will of the community, learn how to co-operate with parents and sacrifice nothing from their students' educational experience. When this is achieved in a significant number of American public schools, an immense step will have been made toward the goals which the separate portions of the community desire for their children, but cannot yet achieve.