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BOOK REVIEW     FIELDS

In his analysis of the failures of the Board of Education, the author describes the neighborhood school movement in all of its complexities as well as the difficulty encountered in getting civil rights organizations, white liberals and moderates to work unitedly with purpose toward the elimination of the ills and the reframing of the educational fabric. These participants in educational reform are invariably pitted against each other as they deal with the bureaucracy.

Mr. Rogers points out what some of us who have struggled with the structure of the Board of Education already know. The Board, with its limited power to affect line personnel on the professional level, is as much the victim of its own bureaucracy as are its clients. One policy statement after another has been produced by the Board purporting to effect change in the system. The professional staff has either ignored or made impossible effective implementation; e.g., the Open Enrollment fiasco. This is one of the significant reasons for the clamor for decentralization. It has also affected the priority of civil rights groups and liberal whites as to the needs of minority children. Integration as a prime focus of attention is passe. Concerned people in ghetto communities understand only too clearly that without a better way for them to deal responsibly and effectively with the inner workings of the system - and that means the line personnel - there is no hope for effective desegregation and certainly no hope for effective education for their children.

The problem becomes one which involves city officials and citizens of the private sector in an all-out attempt to recreate ways by which education can respond to the needs of communities. Decentralization, as it is now envisioned, may not be as effective as we would like as a mechanism for providing this quality of education, but it certainly has to be one of the first steps in order to bring under better control and into a better perspective those things that need to be done in order to improve the educational process.

The whole method of decision making, the administrative styles, the philosophy of crisis management, the interaction of the Board of Education with facets of New York City government, its ineffective attempts to deal responsibly with community relations and change are all depicted in depth by Mr. Rogers, as he slices through the red tape that surrounds the educational institution and slashes away at the incumbrances that make it difficult for people to deal with the educational establishment. In describing this situation Mr. Rogers has used the examples of civil rights, liberal white, conservative and even reactionary groups who have tried to affect the educational

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