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LESSON FROM HARLEM     WILSON

speaking people. Even less frequently are these systems able to educate. The systems as they are, are largely irrelevant to or have a negative influence on the learning habits of those whom they seek to teach. More often than not the systems and the people who man them are so insensitive to the fact of their own failure that they are quick to shift the blame for their failure onto the parents. or the neighborhood, or "outside troublemakers." This shift of blame obscures the fact that urban school systems themselves are deteriorating at an accelerated pace. Teachers and administrators seem generally oblivious to the educational disaster about them. Teachers, by unusual self deception or self hypnosis, are convinced that they are doing a fine job. It is the children who are uneducable. School bureaucracies resist innovation and, to compound the problem in the areas of the so-called disadvantaged, the systems are without the capacity for regeneration. Teachers and administrators, to a great degree, are both tuned out and turned off in order that they might go on with their meaningless routines. They do worry about discipline, however, because they are supposed to "keep the natives quiet." 

This is not just a picture for New York City, but more and more often the current pattern of urban school systems. In New York City however, this system has come to be dominated by a professional bureaucracy with the aid of some powerful cohorts. Together they have forged a formidable coalition which has been largely successful in protecting the status quo and in preserving the system against any serious reform of its antiquated structure. 

The coalition which has performed so adequately is comprised of management (represented by the CSA-Council of Supervisory Associations) and labor (the UFT-United Federation of Teachers, which concerns itself with teacher salaries, benefits, and privileges); civic groups concerned with schools (the PEA-Public Education Association and the UPA-United Parents Association) who tend to work within the structure, and an only mildly critical press-all the news that fits the print-which cleverly labels and mislabels all serious critics of the status quo as "extremists" and thereby preserves the system. When the whole host of contractors, book publishers, and salesmen who are dependent on the system for a living are added to the coalition, it is then complete and quite formidable. 
This dominant ruling coalition has for the most part been preserved from disturbance because the citizens have been focusing their fury on the lay Board of Education which ostensibly sets school policy and on the Superintendent of Schools. The coalition and in particular 

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