Appendix 2

ARTICLES OF INTEREST

[The Washington Post, July 6, 1971]

MORGAN EXPERIMENT FADES-SCHOOL RETURNS TO

CONVENTIONAL CLASS REGIMEN

By Lawrence Feinberg

After four years of community control by an elected, neighborhood board, Washington's Morgan Elementary School has moved away from the free, noisy, unstructured classes that won it a wide reputation.

After considerable turmoil, the school has returned almost full circle to a conventional regimen of firm discipline and what most of its board members say proudly is "basic education."

The most conspicuous new element remaining is about 30 jobs, paid for by the city and federal governments, for nonprofessional "community people," including last year's board chairman, Mary French. She is being paid about $6,500 a year as a "parent stimulator."

However, despite the extra jobs and money-Morgan gets more per pupil in federal and foundation grants than any school in D.C.-—there has been no clear improvement in average student achievement.

And paradoxically, as the neighborhood board members acknowledge, there has been no substantial broadening of community interests in the school.

Indeed, the Morgan board itself has done most of its important business at private meetings, and in the last board election in May, only 137 neighborhood residents voted out of a potential 10,000 eligible.

After a flurry of interest and concern when the project began in 1967, the number of parents visiting the school has dropped, teachers say, so that now only a few come around, aside from those who are paid to work there.

Enrollment last spring was about 650 students, all but 10 of them black. The brown stucco school at 1773 California St. NW, just a few blocks from the corner of 18th Street and Columbia Road, now is the oldest venture in community-control of schools in a poor big-city neighborhood in the United States.

But the comic books that at first replaced basic readers and the young teachers in sandals who first replaced older staff have both disappeared.

They have been supplanted by more conventional workbooks, which children in most classrooms are expected to fill in quietly, and by conventional teachers, also mostly young, who stress the need for "guidance" instead of the “freedom” that marked the first two years of community control.

Most board members and paid community aides speak scathingly of the "chaos" that came from permitting students to leave classrooms when they please and from disciplining them lightly even for fighting.

To prevent it from happening again, they have promulgated a mimeographed list of rules for student behavior. The first is: "All students are expected to respect all adults in the school and their fellow students."

"They don't say anything about adults having respect for children," one former teacher remarked. "That's the way we started at Morgan."

But some parents and board members reply that letting students "do their own thing" was not a sign of respect for children but of indifference.

"The reason why (educational) things haven't happened at Morgan," said Robert Brown, the board's new chairman, "is that we haven't had a specific program to make sure that kids will learn to read, write and do math problems." He added that most students from low-income families, such as those at Morgan, "don't have the self-discipline that's necessary to go into a free form educational set-up."

"They don't have the incentives. They don't have the examples at home to follow," he continued. "There had to be some discipline imposed upon me before I could develop self-discipline."

Morgan still groups children by "teams" instead of grades, and there are "learning centers" in most classrooms for individual and small-group work. But both were part of the flexible, “open-classroom" program set up by liberal whites before the first Morgan board was elected.

The board has kept its present teachers, have little interest or enthusiasm for it.

The board has kept its contract with the Educational Development Center of Boston for training in informal teaching methods, and there still are two or three well-run open classrooms. But nearly all the teachers who understood and practiced the innovative methods were pushed out by the board last year.

Contrary to these teachers' wishes, the board insisted on report cards with letter grades and an indication of the standard grade-level at which each child was working.

The community board also demanded that children be given homework, and last fall directed the staff to give the standardized achievement tests, which were part of the city-wide Clark reading mobilization plan.

Of the 30 teachers on the staff this past spring, 17 were in their first year at Morgan. Many were hired by the neighborhood board after a recruiting trip through the South, during which one board member said they were looking for "people who can relate to the community."

According to Brown, some of the new teachers as well as the older ones have serious difficulty themselves in speaking and writing correctly.

"These people need help before they can help the kids," he said, after reading through a file of the teachers' letters and applications.

"They have troubles and yet they're teaching," he remarked. "This type of thing just multiplies our problems and passes them on."

D.C. school administrators who have also read the files agree with him. Yet, most of the teachers this past year kept their classes orderly and purposeful. They appeared to be much better liked by the board members than were the more innovative and often better-educated teachers whom the replaced. Fred Thompson, for instance, the teacher whom the staff elected as its representative on the board, rules over his fifth-grade English classes with a strong, traditional hand.

On one of the days a reporter visited last month, he was teaching the parts of a "friendly letter"-heading, greeting, body and closing. Then he passed out copies of a grammar text, put some questions on the blackboard about adjectives, and told the students to write their answers in complete sentences.

When the class stirred, Thompson shouted, "Quiet, quiet. There's too much talking in here."

One girl came up to him with a question. Thompson replied with a reprimand: "I think your problem is that you don't want to do what you know you have to do . Don't look at me and frown. You know we've had this material before." After about 20 restless minutes, the papers were collected. Thompson found most of them unsatisfactory.

He issued a warning as the period ended:

"All those who passed in material that's wrong, you study it tonight, and tomorrow we'll do the same thing over. If you don't know it then, be prepared to stay from 3 to 4 (after school), and we'll learn it."

Down the hall, Mohammed El-helu, an African, was teaching the chemical elements and their abbreviations to another class of fifth-graders. Some had trouble sounding out and reading the words-sodium, bromine, fluorine, copper. But when he wrote the abbreviations on the blackboard and the class had to chant what they stood for in chorus, the whole group joined in enthusiastically. Morgan has four African teachers, in addition to 20 American Negroes and six whites. The Africans usually teach by conventional methods. Almost always they dress in Western clothes, including jackets and ties on hot afternoons.

Several weeks ago, Morgan's sixth-graders dressed in dashikis and African robes for their graduation. But aside from the clothing, the ceremony was traditional. It ended with Thompson selling yearbooks, and a chorus of "Pomp and Circumstance." The graduates marched down the center aisle in cadence, as some of the parents remarked how well everyone kept in step.

When Morgan became a community-controlled school in 1967, the interests of the different groups involved were not nearly so unified. The black parents at the

school had complained about it bitterly, but mostly about the overcrowding, the classes in the auditorium and the dilapidated state of the Morgan building and its annex-now both over 70 years old. There was almost no interest in the curriculum or in who would control it.

Yet, these were the main interests of the group of liberal whites who also livea in the neighborhood and participated with the blacks in the schools committee of the Adams-Morgan Community Council.

Among them were Christopher Jencks, now at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the two co-directors of the Institute for Policy Studies, Marcus Raskin and Arthur Waskow, and their wives.

They were the chief authors of Morgans new program and, mainly through Raskin, they arranged for Antioch College to sponsor the project.

The school's first principal, Kenneth W. Haskins, was picked by Antioch and the community council before the first Morgan board of 11 black and 4 whites was elected.

Haskins believed strongly in the loose structure and innovations that had already been set in motion. He also had the personal appeal and strength to stick with them despite an undercurrent of objections from parents, classroom aides and board members. But Haskins left the school in June, 1969, to take a fellowship at Harvard.

A few months later, Bishop Marie Reed, head of a storefront church and the Morgan board's first president, died.

Without Haskins and Bishop Reed, feuding and politicking on the board increased. Objections to the informal methods and compliants that children were not learning to read became more insistent. In less than a year, one city school official explained, "The black mamas triumphed, and the reformers fled."

The board elected in May, 1970, after a bitter campaign, was all-black. Among the defeated members of a "progressive" slate was the wife of George Wiley, leader of the National Welfare Rights Organization.

Bruce L. Smith, a political science professor at Columbia University says all this is "very much part of the pattern" of many community-controlled projects he has studied around the country.

In Washington, the Anacostia decentralization project has been from the start nearly all-black and aside from also hiring classroom aides, conventional in its educational program. The Adams School, near Morgan and also communitycontrolled, still has an active group of liberal whites' and is pressing ahead with innovations.

During 1967-68, the first year of community control at Morgan, about 20 white children, including Raskins', were enrolled in the school. Nearly all of them left a year later, most for private schools.

Barbara Raskin, who served on the first Morgan board, describes her involvement with the school as being “like a bad love affair, a very passionate relationship which just didn't work out." She said there were "bad vibes for the white kids" after the riots of April, 1968.

Morgan's current board chairman Brown, is more caustic. “These people (the white reformers) say a black community they could perform an experiment on,” he said. "And when it was not working out, they withdrew and left the whole thing to people who didn't know what it was supposed to do."

Actually, the number of Negro students at Morgan dropped by over 100 in the first year of community control as some parents put their children in regular schools nearby. The flash enrollment has continued to decrease since.

For those who stayed, though, there have been quite definite improvements as extra staff and money were added to Morgan and the drop in enrollment ended overcrowding.

Average class size, for example, was 23 this past year, two less than the citywide average.

Before community control, per pupil spending at Morgan from the regular city budget was much below the citywide average. This past year, Morgan ranked in the top fifth among all city elementary schools in spending from the regular budget.

It also had the city's highest expenditure per pupil from federal government grants and private foundations.

Since 1968, when U.S. Education Commissioner Harold Howe singled out Morgan for praise, the school has received over $550,000 from the federal government, mostly in direct payments, bypassing the D.C. school board, for an elaborate Follow-Through program for kindergarten, first- and second-grades who earlier

had been in the preschool Head Start. For the coming year, the Follow-Through grant is another $231,000.

In addition Morgan has received about $100,000 from foundations. The biggest donation was $60,000 from the Ford Foundation, also a major backer of the nowdisbanded community-control projects in New York City.

Exactly how all the money has been spent is unclear because Morgan's financial records are sketchy.

A substantial amount has gone for educational games and other equipment, and for trips-sightseeing for students; conferences and workshops here and out-of-town for teachers, aides and board members.

The bulk of Morgan's extra money has gone to neighborhood residents, mostly women, who work as classroom aides. For most of the past year, there were 28 of them, and they play important roles in both Morgan's politics and educational program.

The aides were part of Antioch's original plan for the school, and at Morgan they are called "interns" because they help with teaching and are not concerned with just clerical and child-watching chores. Indeed, when teachers are absent, interns take charge of the classes. In some cases, they have been in command for several months. The Morgan school uses no substitutes.

Training for the aides has been sporadic and their effectiveness is mixed-some are very competent, others are rather tough disciplinarians or stoic monitors, maintaining the peace while children fill in workbooks, and sometimes clashing with classroom teachers.

The aides' jobs, which now pay about $5,500 a year, are an important part of the patronage system that undergirds the politics of the local school board. At least four of the posts have been filled by former community board members, others and their relatives of members and their friends. In the 1970 election, the aides and the principal, Anthony, were active campaigners for the winning slate.

Another vehicle for patronage is the policy advisory committee, set up at the insistence of the federal government, as part of follow-through.

Under federal regulations, the committee is supposed to be elected by parents of Follow-Through children (kindergarten through second grade). At Morgan, however, no election has been held. The committee is made up of a close-knit group of volunteers-about 10 parents and a smaller number of teachers, aides and board members, including Mrs. French.

Since it was formed last October, its four officers have been paid salaries to help give achievement tests. Three of them now are employed-at $60 a week-in the school's summer program.

Mrs. French said she was chosen by the advisory committee for her $6,500 post as "parent stimulator." The salary is paid, from a federal grant, by a Harlembased group of consultants called Afram Associates, whose vice president is Morgan's former principal, Haskins.

As chairman of the Morgan board, Mrs. French sent a letter to Afram last Oct. 21, hiring them to "help strengthen parent involvement."

A few weeks later, she in turn was hired by Afram as the "parent stimulator," although her salary did not become generally known until mid-winter. Other board members and a small group of parents then quietly forced her to step down as board chairman, but she remained on the board and kept her job as "stimulator."

"Sixy-five hundred dollars is hardly living money," she explained last week, leaning heavily on a cane, "especially if you're sick and have to buy medicine to keep yourself going."

This summer, Mrs. French is also being paid over $100 a week as a neighborhood director of the mayor's summer youth program.

At Christmastime, operating somewhat like an old ward politician, she gives out turkeys to the poor in the school neighborhood. The turkeys are paid for by the Junior League, but Mrs. French decides who gets them.

The D.C. school system has also been generous to Morgan. With the agreement of the system's special projects office, the seven teachers who have been designated chairmen or "leaders" of their grades at Morgan, are each paid $90 a month extra from the regular school budget. The money comes from a budget account for night school for adults even though none of these teachers holds classes at night.

According to payroll records, principal Anthony drew $282.24 extra for the last half of May, and similar amounts before then, as principal of the night school.