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LESSON FROM HARLEM     WILSON

permanent substitutes. In the intermediate school, I.S. 201, there are twice the number of substitute teachers as there are regularly licensed teachers. Within the entire complex there are but ten student teachers.

The inconsistent attitude of the Board of Education toward teachers compounds the problems faced. In the case of one teacher, in one of the schools of the district, this inconsistency breeds considerable strife. After securing permission from the parents, the teacher escorted his class to the Malcolm X Memorial meeting at I.S. 201. The teacher has maintained that he did not receive notice that his class would be denied permission until after his return. After a brief hearing, the teacher lost his substitute teacher's license for six months. Yet the same rigid Board of Education procedures which revoked this individual's license for this offense did not threaten the license of several individuals who are so unfit for substitute work that schools refuse to call them for available substitute jobs. The same Board of Education which revoked this license acknowledges that it has a difficult time dealing with teachers who lack the capacity for service so long as they are not insubordinate, or do not refuse to follow specific directives.

As a result of and partly as a by-product of the long term educational chaos, bureaucratic ineptitude, non-supervision, one school of the Complex is now almost completely immobilized educationally. Torn internally by strife, confronted externally by community hostility, students and teachers struggle through each day with neither plan nor a real hope for a better day. Teachers say they want to teach, students say they want to learn, parents say they want only the best for their children. No group is gaining what it wants, and each group uses the other as a scapegoat. All groups are being literally destroyed by the same decadent system which is incapable of reform from within and resists reform from without. This is not a question of the good teacher/bad teacher mythology, or the disadvantaged-child fiction, but an accurate picture of a self-serving system which is so unworkable that it commits unnumbered murders each and every day under the heading of "public education."

an important choice-decentralization versus community control

Those of us who have lived and struggled within the so-called "decentralized demonstration districts," who have taken those first few steps under so much active harassment, recognize that decentralization alone cannot and will not produce the quality education for 

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