The Survey,
Volume 30, Number 7,
May 17, 1913
THE COMMON WELFARE
THE PITTSBURGH
SCHOOL STRIKE
Pittsburgh school affairs are under a cloud but the outside world should understand certain facts, notably that the cloud itself is stirred up, to some extent at least, by interests using it as a cloak for their operations. These interests are two-fold: the first, political, embracing the faction opposed to Senator Oliver; the second, partly political and partly personal, embracing the men from whose hands the school affairs of Pittsburgh were wrested by the Legislature two years ago. Under the old system school buildings and maintenance were in control of petty ward boards; in some districts the schools were excellent but in others waste, mismanagement and graft were rampant. Under the new system many of the old directors secured election as ward school visitors and, shorn of their spoils, have been bitterly opposed to the control of the small, centralized executive board appointed by the judges of the Allegheny county courts.
Charges brought against Supt. S. L. Heeter by a housemaid gave politicians and ousted directors their chance to start an agitation for a return to conditions under which they throve. These charges were given publicity by Coronor Jamison, president of the old central board. Superintendent Heeter demanded a court trial and was acquitted. Afterward a committee of citizens, including the president of the chamber of commerce and two clergymen, was appointed to investigate the superintendent’s fitness to remain in office. This committee has not yet reported.
Whether Superintendent Heeter is retained in office or not is aside from the main issue—the revolution in the conduct of the Pittsburgh schools in the past year and a half. The new board has been obliged to spend $150,000 in transforming indescribably dirty old fire-traps, with poor light, worse ventilation and unspeakable toilets, into schools that could be used with decency.
The great mass of Pittsburgh’s good citizens refuse to get excited. Not all the scare heads of the interested newspapers, the Leader and the Press, or mass-meetings and parades of children arranged by still more interested individuals, have befogged the recognition by Pittsburgh people of the improvement in school affairs since 1911. The exaggeration of the children’s strike in the press of the country, however, has been broadcast. Collier’s Weekly, for example, that usually accurate publication, prints a picture with the explanation that “a strike of 50,000 school pupils paralyzed the Pittsburgh school system.” There was marching of children; but when an effort was made to discover the identity of the men who the children reported were urging them on, the agitators quickly dropped out of sight. For a few days attendance dropped off in certain sections, but many parents had kept their children at home for fear of their becoming involved.
The situation has been tense, but social workers in Pittsburgh do not anticipate that the Legislature will respond to the manufactured agitation and put the schools back in the hands of the ward boards whose long regime left conditions that can not be remedied in years. A bill introduced this week would make the central board elective. Theoretically there are arguments in support of the election-at-large of members of the centralized board, but the appointive board was regarded as a necessary measure if the schools were to be freed from the domination of the old boards.
Efficiency has been the new board’s watch-word. Janitors and teachers are not appointed on the basis of political “pull.” Already the high school attendance has increased over 60 per cent. Manual training, cooking and sewing classes are now found not only in wealthy districts, but also in sections where boys and girls need such training most.
The one point in which the new board has been weak was the failure to establish sympathetic relations with the public in the reforms it is putting forward and to utilize publicity as a constructive force in the securing of them. This indifference to public opinion, although only apparent, has been mistaken in many quarters as contempt, especially because of the autocratic personalties of two members of the board. It is perhaps unfortunate that the board’s president, David Oliver, is a brother of Senator Oliver, thus giving a decided political turn to newspaper discussion. He was the logical man for the place, a leading member of the state school commission which drafted the new code. As president of the old board in Allegheny, now the north side, he had helped to make the schools of that section far superior to those of the old city; this, in spite of the fact that civic conditions in Allegheny were even worse than in Pittsburgh.