Brass Tacks

Deafened by the salve of political artillery that precedes each election, Cambridge voters are liable to enter the polls this November with ringing ears and empty heads. The battle for six seats on Cambridge's School Committee seems in danger of being deflected along religious and partisan lines; while the true issue, the City's backward school system, remains skillfully camouflaged. With mournful cries of political domination by a clique of "Tory Rowers," certain bureaucrats hope to divert attention from their incompetence and, by injecting bigotry in the place of analysis, securely fasten themselves to the gravy train. But no amount of rabid oration or pretended martyrdom can totally obscure the indictment against a school program that places education on a political basis and stumbles along in a thirty-year-old rut.

The Cambridge School Committee has been effectively gutted by politics in recent years. Split into two warring camps with reformers holding a powerless four to three edge, the seven man board has been unable to push through needed reforms. The great majority of projects recommended to the School Superintendent's attention have stalled through the concerted efforts of Superintendent Tobin and three Committee members. Although a four to three majority can propose an improvement, the investigation and ultimate operation of the plan rests with the school administration and Mr. Tobin. If this administration fails in its duties, the School Committee cannot effect a change in personnel without a five to two vote. A law-given tenure attached to the position of Superintendent is the stalemate preventing any real improvement of the school system. An irate majority on the Committee screams for Mr. Tobin's head, but with three of his supporting east on the board, every pre-election attempt at decapitation has been efficiently throttled.

An impartial survey of nine professors and seven school superintendents declared the schools and administration to be "tolerable verging on poor." Teacher appointments were based on political drag rather than merit, instructors had little incentive and virtually no leadership, and student guidance programs were unknown. Equally important, but less fundamental points concerned antiquated teaching methods, obsolete texts, the lack of adequate vocational training, hazardous, airless buildings, foul sanitary systems, poor medical facilities, and a short twenty-minute lunch period designed to develop a race of jack rabbits with east iron stomachs.

Political "pork barreling" on the Committee has resulted in an inadequate educational system dominated by unqualified and uninterested men. Politics and education are ill suited to each other, and when they mix, education most certainly suffers. Since it is traditionally impossible to appoint educators to the Cambridge School Committee, the Cambridge Civic Association has endorsed only those candidates who seem eminently qualified and who have little interest in setting up a soft touch for a political erony.