School Decentralization in the Context of Community Control: Some Neglected Considerations

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THE DEMAND for community control of schools is usually understood as a demand by blacks and other racial or quasi-racial minorities for greater control over the institutions within their inner-city ghettos.' In fact, it is, in one form or another, a well-nigh universal demand in the United States today, one that transcends the immediate interests of innercity residents, important as those interests are. Indeed, the demand for community control is a new demand but simply a restatement of one as American as mother's proverbial apple pie.2 It has been brought back into the public eye by the militancy of blacks, Puerto Ricans and Chinese in the country's great central cities in their search for a right common to most Americans but which they have never been able to exercise. The demand for decentralization of big city school systems, which includes the demand for control over the personnel responsible for the schools within them, is the most widely recognized element in the quest for community control but is the only aspect of that quest. The desires of suburban residents to maintain relatively small independent school districts is of the same order except that because the suburban school systems were constituted in that way from the first, their demand does involve a militant campaign for the attainment of the objective. Still, suburbanites must wage more subdued campaigns to maintain their version of community control. Their situation generally goes unrecognized for what it is and, worse than that, is usually attacked for what it is not. One additional dimension has now been added to the suburban interest in community control. It was in the suburbs that the notion that education was somehow not political reached its peak. With the erosion of that idea, one finds growing demands in the suburbs for moderating the control of professional educators over the schools and injecting greater citizen participation at least in the shaping of educational policy. This, too, is part of the demand for community control, one that is no different in its essentials from that of the inner-city minorities.3 Finally, the demand for community control of schools still flickers in the peripheral areas of the United States, in those small town and rural communities which have borne the brunt of the consolidation movement of the past generation and were the first to lose control at the immediate