A familiar question, whether the decentralization of New York City's public schools has been worth the trouble and expense, is being asked once again by public officials. Some of the answers they are getting have not been encouraging, though no major reforms are likely for now.
The latest cause for discontent was the almost embarrassingly low turnout for the recent elections to the 32 local school boards that for the last eight years have run the city's 700 elementary, intermediate, and junior high schools. (The Central Board of Education can override local decisions and it still runs the senior high schools.) There were 3 million eligible voters; only 200,000, or 7 percent, did vote, and the percentage has been declining steadily since the first elections in 1970.
The implications were clear. An important purpose of dispersing authority in the schools among local districts was to involve parents more intimately in the education of their children: Based on numbers alone, it has not worked, and the lesson is not lost on other cities, including New Haven, Conn, and Newark, N.J., which regard New York as a laboratory for possible reforms of their own.
The poor turnout might have been more palatable if there was evidence that decentralization nonetheless has improved the quality of education. The evidence isn't there, except in several districts in the Bronx and Queens where academic achievement was high when the schools were run by the central board. Overall, reading and mathematics scores have gone down since 1970, though they showed slight improvements this year.
But to dismiss the system as an apparent failure might be a mistake. Decentralization has accomplished some of its basic goals. For one thing, it has eliminated much of the red tape that made innovations, or even the delivery of equipment, difficult. “In the old days, if I wanted to order an audiometer from the Board of Education, it might have taken years to get the thing," says Dr. Harvey Bien, who coordinates the health services curriculum for District 10 in the Bronx.
"Now that I only have to go to the district, I can get it in a few weeks." Decentralization also, in some cases, has given parents more of a say in school operations, election turnouts notwithstanding. The sense, if not always the fact, of involvement has been especially important in black and Hispanic communities, where frustration with the schools has been acute.
Racial considerations were important in bringing about decentralization in a system where two-thirds of the pupils are minority-group members and most of the teachers and administrators are white, In 1968, a year before decentralization went into effect, racial antagonism burst forth when teachers went on strike after parents in a predominantly experimental school district in Brooklyn tried to replace white teachers with blacks. (The local boards do not have that sort of power now).
Much of the tension has since sub-sided, and voter turnouts for school board elections have increased in many black and Hispanic districts despite the citywide decline. As often as not, school board meetings draw large, boisterous crowds of parents ready to make recommendations.
One difficulty, defenders of decentralization feel, is that the system's potential has not had a chance to develop. In the first few years, many local boards were too busy battling the central Board of Education over citywide policy to spend much time on educational innovations. Misuse, and even theft, of funds, distracted other districts. Some were bogged down by internal disorders, such as District 1 in lower Manhattan, where board members, supported variously by Puerto Rican parents and the teachers' union, fought over the dismissal of the district superintendent, Luis Fuentes.
For the last two years, the city's money troubles have caused new strains; 22,000 teachers and other school workers have been dismissed, and many academic and extracurricular programs have been dropped. Instead of having the opportunity to decide what improvements to make, the local boards, with budgets ranging from $15 million to $25 million each, were left with the prerogative of deciding where to cut. Supporters of the system believe that if racial animosity and money problems ease, the boards will be better able to prove their worth.
One advantage of decentralization for city officials is easy to assess: the political impact, particularly during a period of fiscal austerity. Parents who once might have taken their grievances straight to City Hall or the Board of Education are more likely to go to their local. board members and superintendents.
"Obviously, we've taken a lot of heat off City Hall," says Philip Kaplan, president of the New York School Boards Association and chairman of District 18 in Brooklyn. Without the school boards in the middle helping parents let off steam during the budget cuts there would have been war in the streets."
If only for that reason, the local boards will probably continue, no matter how the central board may be restructured. Mayor Beame wants to replace the board with a commissioner appointed by the Mayor. But neither he nor anyone else is talking about taking away policy-making powers from the local districts.