Back-to-School Blues

After busing--bankruptcy and strikes

There was picketing over school integration in Chicago's blue-collar Marquette Park area. In Louisville, a group of ingenious parents attempted, without success, to have their children reclassified as American Indians, because in Kentucky all nonblack minorities are exempt from forced busing. And in several cities, including Cleveland, racial calm existed because busing has still to be tried.

Even so, for the first time in years, rage and threatened riot over busing did not noticeably disrupt the opening of school. Instead there were a rash of teachers' strikes, prospects of bankruptcy and fretting over budgets. At week's end, with teachers in New Orleans, Cleveland and Seattle among those out, something like 675,000 students were without regular teachers or any instruction at all.

School districts everywhere were haunted by California's Proposition 13. Exactly a week before school was scheduled to start, for example, the Houston system learned that it would have to shave $6 million off the current budget: the city had just rolled property taxes back to the 1977 value. Irate taxpayers all over the country were set to slash property taxes, traditionally the source of educational funds, and they were grimly disposed to get more educational mileage for less money. In New Jersey, a new regulation this year requires that even tenured teachers be evaluated on the basis of demonstrated "pupil progress."

With all the difficulties there were signs of progress, notably in New York and Boston. A city-by-city sampling:

CLEVELAND. The school system is not only broke but existing on a $20.8 million startup loan from the state. Getting through the year will require a fiscal miracle. Taxpayers voted down an increase in the school levy last April and June; they oppose the major busing plan that the courts have ordered for the city. (The plan was postponed until next February since there was no money to buy extra buses.) To make matters worse, nearly all of Cleveland's 5,000 teachers, who often worked without pay during last winter's near bankruptcy, are now bitter and out on strike. They demand a 20% pay increase, which would add $24 million to the deficit. Even worse, the city stands to lose $29 million in federal aid if it does not institute a mandatory bilingual program, which is also beyond its means.

NEW ORLEANS. The hour before students turned up for the first day of school, New Orleans' 5,300 teachers voted to go on strike. After a week, only 27% of them are reporting to work. Attendance has dropped to a third of the city's 90,000 students. With salaries among the lowest in the nation (teachers with B.A.s start at $10,100; maximum pay after 11 years is only $13,900), teachers are demanding $5 million in salary increases and benefits. The school board says it will hold firm against the increase, and is paying substitutes double wages and keeping the schools open.

LOS ANGELES. No one is sure what is happening in Los Angeles schools this fall, least of all the local board of education. After working on desegregation plans since 1963, the city was all set to begin a vast program for busing 60,000 students across the sprawling 710-sq.-mi. district. Two weeks ago, a court of appeals suddenly judged that the plan needed more work and scrapped it. Antibusing parents were elated, but then the state supreme court overruled the earlier decision. It now appears that the program, involving 800 additional buses, will go into effect this week. But nobody knows exactly how. Sighed one school board aide: "It is just one shock after another."

NEW YORK CITY. Partly as a result of white flight to the suburbs, the school population, just short of a million students, is now 70% black and Hispanic. But with an education budget of $2.8 billion, the city can spend over $2,500 a pupil, as much as many expensive private schools. More than half of the 15,000 teachers laid off during New York's worst financial crisis have been rehired. Two months before the fall term, teachers negotiated a two-year contract calling for a 4% annual raise. The city also has an optimistic new administrator, Frank Macchiarola. Among his first attempts: with part of $22 million reallocated from administrative funds, he hired enough first grade teachers to reduce class size from 32 to 25.

BOSTON. For years racial antagonism and resistance to busing forced educational progress into a back seat. There has been notable white flight from Boston. But 25 new magnet schools have taken some of the sting out of forced integration by drawing a multiracial student body, which attends voluntarily and comes from all over the city to get high-grade training.

Three years after the worst antibusing acrimony, South Boston High School, now 41% black, opened peacefully. Suspensions have dropped from 1,800 in 1976 to 275 last year. An intensive school-within-a-school system helps coach slow learners. But achievement scores are still way down, and critics complain that teacher are mainly "peacemakers and babysitters." Says Mary Ellen Smith of the City-wide Education Coalition, a probusing group: "The issue in Boston is no longer where kids go to school or the race o their classmates, but whether the public schools can offer a quality education.' That issue confronts not only Boston bu most of the nation's schools as well. .

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