We ignore this problem at our peril. The "social dynamite" in our cities referred to by James Conant several years ago is still there. The only difference is that the fuse is now shorter. Thank you. Senator MONDALE. Thank you, Dr. McAndrew. Our final witness is Dr. Marilyn Gittell, professor of political science, Queens College, New York. STATEMENT OF DR. MARILYN GITTELL, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, QUEENS COLLEGE, N.Y. Dr. GITTELL. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before the committee. I will try to shorten my statement since it is already in the record. Senator MONDALE. We will place it in the record* as though read. Dr. GITTELL. From 1967 to date the urban school reform movement has been concentrated on greater community control of the schools. Let me just add here parenthetically, that was an outgrowth of the failure of integration in most of the urban North. The community control movement was the same movement as the integration movement; that is, the very same people in most of the large cities who fought for school integration for some 10 years in their frustration turned to the concept of community control. The extent of local power sought for neighborhood school boards varies according to the plan and approach. In fact, however, the rhetoric far exceeds the action and we have few models of community control. Senator MONDALE. Could you list for us some examples of real community control? TRUE COMMUNITY CONTROL Dr. GITTELL. Well, I was going to go into that. I had a development which I am prepared to abandon, but in my own opinion, the only example that we have historically of community control were the three demonstration districts in New York City which were abolished by the 1969 decentralization act. I say that because my definition of community control is the delegation of power to local community boards which would include control over personnel to a very great degree, control of the school budget, and control over pupil policy and curriculum; and by my standards, some of the plans which have been advertised around the country really have nothing to do with community control. Senator MONDALE. Why can you not look at small school districts, rural school districts, as examples of real community control? They are still small enough. Dr. GITTELL. Well, there is no question that some of the rural and, in some cases but very few, suburban school districts do have community control in the sense they elect a local school board and that local school board raises the tax money, determines the priori *See prepared statement, p. 5536. ties in terms of the expenditure of the budget, determines general school policy. However, I would say that the overriding factor has been the development of school professionals and the accumulation of power to the professionals so that they have in a sense closed off public participation and accountability; so the mere act of electing a local school board does not necessarily mean that you have public participation or public accountability. In too many cases-and this is particularly true of the suburban areas the superintendent gets a 6-year contract and the board walks away from the review of the school situation. I think this is historical development. I think several factors have fed into it. INSULATION OF SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION a First of all, the insulation of schools in American society traditionally. The prestige of education in our democratic development has been useful for the professionals to say any kind of public review is really political interference. So for at least 30 years now we have had this kind of attitude that the schools should be insulated from any kind of political responsibility and turned around as a kind of negative when various superintendents around the country suggest that any political leader who wants to know what is happening in the schools is interfering politically with what is going on. It has happened to many mayors of large cities. I think we have not seen clearly enough that what has happened is that we have turned the schools over to the professionals and they have failed to do the job and that the recent activity around the country and concern about participation really relates to that issue, that those who have had the job up until now have really failed, and we had better get the injection of new sources of energy and some responsiveness to very immediate needs if we hope to change the school system. I think what you see happening in the community control movement is part of the same pattern. At least seven or eight large cities just this last year have proclaimed decentralization, just as boards of education 10 years ago announced policies of integration. When you turn around and look at those plans and see what they entail for the most part what they are is administrative decentralization where the district superintendent is appointed for a regional area in the city, but the community has no role in what is going on. There is on balance in the professional interest with public interest or parent interest or consumer interest. All you are really experiencing is an administrative technique, in my opinion, for quailing the demand on the part of the public for a participatory role. So that in every one of these large cities-I was going to give you several exceptions-those plans are really not along the lines of community participation or community control or even decentralization beyond administrative tactic. In New York City and Detroit we did get what were considered to be the broadest decentralization plans citywide under State legislation. In both cases, the school professionals battered down the plans enough so that there were really almost no concessions or minimal concessions to the role of communities in the schools. They assured that nothing would happen by the size of the districts, by the way in which the elections were conducted, and I have some of the statistics that we have run down on the New York City and the Detroit elections. MAKEUP OF SCHOOL BOARDS In a recent study we did, the board members elected in New York, the typical board member, was a white male Catholic, professionally trained with two children, living in his district for about 9 years with his children in parochial schools. This was a plan that was intended to increase the representation of black and Puerto Rican parents on local school boards. Our study showed that 63.8 percent of these board members are middle class professionals. Over 50 percent are Catholic and 36 percent Jewish. And, most importantly, 53.2 percent of these board members have children in parochial and not public schools. This in a school system that is 57.2 percent black and Puerto Rican, many of whom are children of a client poor. The systematic exclusion of minority groups from these boards was ruthless. Of 279 members elected, only 47 were black at 16.8 percent and 30 are Puerto Rican or 10.8 percent. Of 12 districts with 85 percent of their pupils black or Puerto Rican, only six boards with a majority of black and Puerto Rican pupils. And it is on these six boards that 44 of 87 citywide minority members sit. So, in effect, the representation on these local boards in New York City far less represents the minority groups than had the previous citywide board. The same results occurred in Detroit. Although Detroit created only eight regional boards instead of New York's 31, only 30 percent are black in a city whose school population is 63 percent black. 61.3 percent of the local board members are middle class professionals. Now, perhaps I could go back to what I suggested earlier when you asked me about decentralization and community control. At the end of my statement I have prepared a table in which I compared the Detroit election, the New York City election, and demonstration districts, those three districts in New York, in terms of the membership. If you look at that table you will see that the nonwhite membership of the boards in the demonstration districts was 61 percent as compared to 30 percent in Detroit and 17 percent in New York under the citywide decentralization plan. If you look at table I you will see the distribution in terms of the members of the boards, that in the demonstration districts only 16 percent were professionals. By the way, I stress this because all of our studies of school boards show that middle class white professionals, usually in business, monopolize local school boards regardless of the character of the population of the district. The whole purpose of the local school board is to make it responsive to the needs of the students in that community. There should be some indication. of representativeness in terms of the population. Certainly in terms of decentralization that is the intention. STUDY OF NEW YORK COMMUNITY CONTROL DEMONSTRATIONS What I am suggesting to you is that as a matter of fact the two plans that we have citywide were distorted enough so that did not happen, but we do have a model where we were able to accomplish the kind of representation that was more suggestive and reflective of the community itself, and that was in those three districts in New York City which caused such a furor. By the way, in terms of accomplishment, we are just completing a study of those three demonstration boards in New York City which will be published shortly. Now that the flack has died down and the newspaper coverage is minimal, we hope people will take it seriously. But we have concluded in that study that those districts really accomplished a great deal in terms of community control. Of course, they were very shortlived in a time of political upheaval, but let me read to you some of the results that we have come up with. For one thing, the three districts enlisted new participants, board members who were black or Puerto Rican, many poor, who were dedicated to school reform. The typical school board member was a poor black, female with some poverty program experience with children in the public school. More than 25 percent of the normally apathetic community people voted in these elections compared to the average 10 percent voting in the decentralization election of 1970. Senator MONDALE. What percentage in the citywide decentralization? Dr. GITTELL. 25 percent voted in these elections compared to 10 percent in our citywide decentralization, which indicates that there is some difference in response according to how people perceive what it is they are engaged in. Most of these board members with children in the schools had felt that public schools had failed and that something had to be done to improve the schools. They were reform minded rather than the middle class professionals on the boards in suburban areas more interested in preserving the status quo and thus involved with housekeeping matters. These members affected personnel policy. They brought in more minority supervisors, the first black, Puerto Rican and Chinese principals the first Chinese principal in the country by the waythe first black community superintendents. They enlisted more energetic and dedicated teachers in the slums and they created a highly motivated educational climate. Their schools were no longer fortress schools, but open to all in the community. Our studies show in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, for example, that the alienation between parents and urban schools was being reduced. Thirty-six percent of those sampled belonged to a parent association and an overwhelming 86 percent of the parents visited a school. We did a survey, by the way, with the National Opinion Research Center on 200 parents in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, and over 80 percent of the parents visited the school. Comparable studies of black and other communities in New York City shows the figures somewhere around 5 to 10 percent. This was 86 percent. Four-fifths of the parents believed that they had more influence in the running of the schools and three-fifths felt their schools were better or the same. Although they felt they had some influence they wanted more. There were more experimental programs adopted by these boards composed of the urban poor than the most affluent educational districts in the country. Ocean Hill had many programs, including a British Open Integrated Day, the teaching of reading first in Spanish, then in English, a Montessori school, a Bereiter-Englemann school and on and on. The sheer variety of programs attested to the educational principle that each child is different and learns at different paces and in different methods. ACADEMIC SUCCESS In IS 201 our study shows the pupils did better academically than the rest of the city in percentage terms; they improved at a time when the rest of the city pupils declined because of the long strike. In one school where a new experimental method was employed, the Caleb Gattegno method, the results were dramatic. The 1970 test score results produced at least a 1 year advance in reading scores. Senator MONDALE. What is that? Dr. GITTELL. The Caleb Gattegno method? Senator MONDALE. Yes. Dr. GITTELL. It is a coloring norm method. I am not well-versed in it. By the way, I should state here that Caleb Gattegno had tried to get that method instituted in the New York City schools so he could experiment with it and was unable to do it until the 201 district was established and he went to them and requested that he be able to do it there. We questioned the principal of the school who allowed him to come in, and asked him if under the citywide system that could have been done, and she said she would have never done it; but under the community-control system she felt this was a possibility because there was this feeling of looking for solutions. Our study links that academic success with feelings of efficacy and self-control that these Harlem pupils experienced in a true locally controlled urban school district. By the way, we ran a selfidentity efficacy test of the students in Intermediate School 201 and the results show that they felt more efficacious, more strongly about their own ability to deal with problems, than comparable groups that the tests were given to in other districts-not in New York City with the same background. One of the questions I wanted to raise about some of the results. that Dr. McAndrew talked about was whether or not the same tests were used. That kind of concerns me a little. Senator MONDALE. Why don't you respond to that now? Dr. MCANDREW. These are the same tests. Dr. GITTELL. As the tests given previously? Dr. McANDREW. Right. Dr. GITTELL. It was too early to definitely appraise the long-range educational effects of the program-I am talking now about the community controlled districts-most important, these besieged districts were under constant attack from professional school interests. Nevertheless, we have sufficient indication to grasp the educational promise of a truly decentralized school system. I want to |