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Tragedy that brought police to city schools inspired 1958 series

Some city principals would like to see schools reduce their police presence.

But in 1958, principals couldn’t even get the police to swing by — a policy that might have driven one school leader to suicide.

That’s the story behind a series that appeared that year in the New York World Telegram & Sun. Masquerading as a teacher-hopeful, reporter George Allen landed a job at John Marshall Junior High School in Brooklyn, where violence among students the previous spring had driven Principal George Goldfarb to request a police presence.

Mayor Robert Wagner had for the previous year been resisting placing police around schools — there were 819 at the time — because of the unsavory images of armed officials who had tried to keep black students out of schools that were being integrated, according to the New York Daily News.

According to the Daily News,

George Goldfarb was 55 years old, 33 years in the system, and he was suffering the displeasure of his superiors. Personally, he very much wanted police in his school, where, among other things, a 13-year-old blind girl had recently been assaulted in a stairwell, and he had gone before the grand jury and said so out loud. This was, of course, directly contrary to stated Board of Ed policy, and he had been spoken to. At 10 a.m. Jan. 28, he was due before the jury again. Instead, he wearily climbed to the roof of his six-story Eastern Parkway apartment building and jumped. …

Abruptly, the Board of Education agreed. Cops at once began patrolling several dozen of the city’s most troubled schools “If the board had done the day before Mr. Goldfarb died what they did the day after he died,” snapped jury foreman A. George Golden, “he still would be alive” and Wagner announced a plan to segregate chronically unruly students into special schools of their own.

When Allen arrived the following fall for a two-month teaching stint, he found little outright violence. More common, he reported, were defiant students and students who were ill-prepared for their classes, teachers who did not always try to reach struggling students, and copy machines that did not work.

John Marshall Junior High School became P.S./M.S. 394 in 1990. That school continues to operate and now shares space with Explore Empower Charter School.

Allen’s 15-part account of his teaching experience is newly available online as the result of an effort to collect important pieces of investigative reporting at a single database. In 1960, an expanded version of the series was released as a book titled “Undercover Teacher.”

  • Clay

    The more things change the more they stay the same. Teachers still do not get the help they need with difficult students, a lot of Admin and Tweed turn a blind eye and leave classroom teachers to their own devices. Sure it’s vile that a teacher might face daily harassment from an unruly student(s) but the bigger crime is when that student constantly interrupts the class and prevents other children from learning.

  • Mr. Flerporillo

    Re “but the bigger crime is when that student constantly interrupts the class and prevents other children from learning”

    How could this be stopped?

  • Anonymous

    Excellent question, with no easy answer.

    In a zero tolerance world, it’s not a problem unless large factions of a class / student body are doing this.

    In a world where the guidance counselor is overwhelmed or not on staff, parent coordinator — ditto, AP’s, Principal and Dean overwhelmed and the policy is don’t reach out to admin or security unless there is an immediate physical threat, the only thing to do is create a paper trail. If the parent is unhelpful and/or beyond wit’s end, not much will happen. Highly recalcitrant students are often gradually counseled out to other schools or programs, very gradually. Along the way they will sometimes see a social worker, have free pizza with the Principal or AP, on occasion get suspended depending on the intensity of their behavior and disposition of the Principal. It’s usually an unconscionably slow process for everyone. Often, due to space and staff limitations there is no SAVE (suspension / detention) room either. Frankly, these shortcomings are against Ed law, they deprive other students of their right to an education, clearly.

  • Mr. Flerporillo

    On the other hand, the civil liberties groups say that zero tolerance policies and suspensions violate Ed law because they have a disparate impact on minority students and students with learning disabilities.  According to them, we’re already in a zero tolerance world.  That can’t be a helpful dynamic for teachers in the situation Clay’s talking about. 

  • Anonymous

    Right. Ed law cuts both ways on this, so it’s a real rock-and-a-hard-place issue, even legally.

  • Anonymous

    Other remedies:
    Super strong advisory; peer influence to battle peer effect

    Specialists brought in: Motivators, Special Counselors, Empowerment Programs for only those few problem students who can be reached

    Close schools: blame schools and teachers

    Decimate ranks of teachers any way possible like Bloomberg in NYC, John White in Louisiana, formerly N.O. And NYC

    Create astoundingly engaging lessons / curricula that are profoundly scaffolded, differentiated, student-centered and appeal to all of the intelligences, hit everything in Bloom’s Taxonomy, or fire teachers for failing to do so, depose principals for failing to implement said practices, play interminable shell games with personnel and small schools.

    One-to-one tutoring for all

    Online classes for all

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