Who's in Charge?

Hallowed tradition gives American parents enormous influence on their schools -- and on the people hired to run them. Swallowing hard, most school superintendents would say that by and large this state of affairs works to the general satisfaction of both. But there are some glaring exceptions, where the violence of dispute between school board and school boss has split communities, demoralized teachers and distracted students.

Cleveland School Superintendent William Levenson recently resigned in anger after the school-board president took a policy squabble to the newspapers. Chicago's strong-minded Benjamin Willis quit when the city board insisted on a broader, faster student-transfer plan than he wanted, returned to the job only after he got his own way. For months, New York City's able Calvin Gross has been forced to conduct a running battle with his board.

"Atheistic Unitarians." Nowhere is the struggle more bitter than in the swollen Magnolia School District of Anaheim, Calif., where the population has soared from 10,000 to 115,000 in a decade. In an atmosphere of raging partisan politics that has pitted Birchites and conservatives against anti-Birchites and liberals, the five-member school board has become an ideological football kicked back and forth by all sides.

Last week the district held its third recall election in three years to decide which faction had the majority to hire a superintendent it would find congenial.

The latest phase of the battle began in April, 1963 when three conservatives elected to the school board hired Charles Wilson to administer eight elementary schools with 6,400 pupils. Wilson soon offended many citizens, whom he called "atheistic Unitarians," by distributing monthly patriotic and religious messages to kids in his schools. When Wilson imposed a purely phonetic system of reading, seven school principals resigned, and anti-Wilson teachers, joined by a newly formed citizens' group, agitated for a recall election to oust the trio that had backed the superintendent. In last week's voting, 60% of the district's 10,000 registered voters streamed to the polls and by a surprisingly comfortable margin purged the three conservatives.

Popular Principal. If educational aims were obscured in Anaheim by public interference with the delicate relationship between school boards and superintendents, they have been virtually obliterated in an acrid fog of controversy that has settled on the isolated Massachusetts is land of Nantucket.

Trouble there began brewing among the 3,500 year-round residents in 1955 when a Harvard-based team of outside educators surveyed the island's three schools, recommended some mild reforms. To some Nantucketers, who are suspicious in principle of off-islanders, the whole idea smacked of progressive education--and higher school costs. When Off-Islander Charles H. Minnich, who has been resident superintendent of schools only since 1962, proposed similar ideas this year, the already restive opposition went out for his scalp. Rallying around the popular local high school principal, Mrs. Mary P. Walker, who is satisfied with the status quo, conservatives won a three-member majority on the five-member school board. By a 3-2 vote at their first meeting in March, the board canceled Minnich's contract.

Now Minnich is suing the three-member majority for breach of contract. At the same time, the Massachusetts Teachers Association is weighing an investigation of the Nantucket school system, which could result in a boycott of the island by teachers throughout the state.

Clear Warning. Whether the current argument between school boards and administrators is over politics and phonics as in Anaheim, over de facto segregation as in Cleveland, Chicago and, to some extent, New York, or over curriculum reforms and fierce local pride as in Nantucket, the rash of conflicts has confirmed the urgent need to define the roles and responsibilities of the public and the public servant in U.S. education. In Chicago, peace of a sort was reinforced when Willis and his board formally spelled out their separate jurisdictions on paper. The need to define roles and responsibilities came up time and again at last week's convention of the National School Boards Association in Houston. Unless each side knows its place, "chaos results," said Mrs. Fred A. Radke, a Port Angeles, Wash., housewife and outgoing N.S.B.A. president. So far, however, neither school boards nor administrators seem certain of their limits. "The frequency and intensity of the local battles," said Mrs. Radke, "warn us clearly to get at the root of the trouble before we have a full-scale war."

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