gat

But when he saw my load of wreckage he exploded. "What are you trying to pull?" he said. "We
don’t have time to repair these things!" Official ladders of referral did in fact assign the repair
function to BAVI; if not them, then who? Because I was there, the equipment was accepted, but
shortly afterwards I heard on the grapevine it had been thrown out and my principal upbraided for
her lack of decorum in trying to have it repaired. Broken machinery is a signal to buy new and
may be reckoned among the lifeblood factors of school’s partnership with the larger economy.
As long as I’m reminiscing, I remember also an earlier time when a different principal wanted to
"make space" in the audio-visual vault. Some years earlier a one-time foundation windfall had
been expended on thirty-nine overhead projectors even though the school already had ten, and
nobody but administrators and gym teachers used them anyway because they bored the life out of
kids. "Could you help me out, John, and pitch those things somewhere after school when nobody
is around to see? I’ll owe you one." The reason I was asked, I think, besides the fact I always
drove an old station wagon and had no reluctance about using it for school matters, was that I
always insisted on talking as an equal to school people whatever their title or status. I saw them as
colleagues, engaged in the same joint enterprise I was enrolled in myself.
This disrespect for the chain of command sometimes bred a kind of easy familiarity with
administrators, denied more conventional teachers with an "us" and "them" outlook. In any case, I
drove some of the junk to the dumpster at the entrance to the trail to Lake Rutherford in High
Point State Park, in New Jersey, the rest to a dump near my farm in Norwich, New York, where
$10,000 or so in equipment was duly buried by the bulldozer. Incidentally, I recall being expressly
forbidden to give these projectors away, because they might be "traced" back to Community
School District 3.
Community School District 3, Manhattan, is the source of most of my school memories, the spot
where I spent much of my adult working life. I remember a summer program there in 1971 where
the administrator in charge ran frantically from room to room in the last week of the term asking
that teachers "help him out" by spending some large amount of money ($30,000 is the figure that
comes to mind) that he had squirreled away on the books. When we protested the school term
was over, he explained he was fearful of being evaluated poorly on money management and that
might cost him a chance to become a principal. Getting rid of money at the end of the term so it
didn’t have to be returned was a major recurring theme during my years in District 3.
Another District 3 story I’ll not soon forget is the time the school board approved funds for the
purchase of five thousand Harbrace College Handbooks at $11 each after it had been brought to
their attention by my wife that the identical book was being remaindered in job lots at Barnes &
Noble’s main store on 17th Street for $1 a copy. Not on the list of approved vendors, I might
have been told, though it’s too long ago to recall.
Why do these things happen? Any reasonable person might ask that question. And the answer is at
one and the same time easy and not so easy to give. When we talk about politics in schooling we
draw together as one what in reality are two quite different matters. It will clarify the discussion
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