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FREEDOMWAYS     
FOURTH QUARTER 1968

the entrenched bureaucrats are free to react and carry out that policy in a way that best suits them. One of the prime objectives of this entrenched bureaucracy is to protect the system against structural reform and this the coalition has done in the face of repeated threats. 
Faced with growing hostility from the black and Puerto Rican parents, the NYC Board of Education has initiated a number of policy reforms but the dominant educational coalition has worked just as hard to defeat those same policies. Shielded from political interference by their civil service status and tenure laws, the bureaucracy has been free to torpedo plans for busing to relieve overcrowding, mass removal for integration, organization and reorganization of local School Boards. 
Yet the repeated failure of these token efforts at reform has not dismayed the system's insistent enemies-the people. Step by step these enemies of bureaucratic totalitarianism have unmasked the various gambits and ploys of the system and now demand community control:
1. control of budget and budget process
2. control of the process and practice of construction and major repair
3. control of personnel practices  
4. control of the right to purchase or participate in the purchase of books and supplies
5. control of the right to curriculum reform 
6. maintenance of physical integrity of the demonstration districts themselves to insure a fair demonstration project.
The demands have grown out of the experience of the people of the community with the Board of Education and its staff. For the past 10 years the people of the 201 community have been engaged in a running battle with the Educational Establishment and like most struggles, the struggle at 201 has not always gone smoothly.
At times the Board's strategy of ambiguity and vagueness has placed the local community at a disadvantage in the press. At times the racism of the current order has pushed the community's response toward paranoia. At other times the sensation-seeking press has exploited the errors of the local groups. At times individuals of the community have not been able to control the rising rage or harness the self-seeking impulses or avoid the self deprecation of their fellows. These practices tend to lower the group's morale. But change is seldom according to plan-seldom going according to Robert's Rules of Order. 

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