Word: allen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When English Teacher George N. Allen quit his job at Brooklyn's slum-sick John Marshall Junior High School and unmasked himself as a crusading New York World Telegram & Sun reporter (TIME, Nov. 24), he sweetened his exposé with the promise that the $490 he had earned teaching would be turned over to a teachers' retirement fund. But the New York City Board of Education refused to act like a grateful teacher. Last week, while Allen continued to churn out his lively eyewitnesser under such headlines as "HEY, TEACH . . ." is SIGNAL FOR BEDLAM and SLOW PUPILS CHEATED...
Obvious Threat. Unanimously the board resolved that Allen's series "seriously violates the moral and ethical standards of the teaching profession." The horrified educators deplored: "The effect upon children of learning that [Allen] was in fact a spy prying upon their privacy and using the special privilege of the position of teacher as a vehicle for sensationalism; the effect upon teachers when they learned that the exchange of confidence between educators . . . can no longer be safely indulged in; the effect upon a community of the realization that the teachers with whom their children sit may be consciously concerned...
Board Chairman Charles Silver advised at first that members forget about feuding with the Telegram, pointed out that there was much truth in Allen's series. But Board Member Francis Adams, former New York City police commissioner, was fighting mad, and smooth-talking Baptist Pastor Gardner Taylor, the board's only Negro member, smelled a race issue in Allen's statement that a 15-year-old John Marshall girl often played truant, spent her days as a Harlem prostitute. The board voted to investigate the affair, including, as Adams said pointedly, "the manner in which Allen...
Softened Impact? Board Member Adams and John Marshall Principal Mrs. Florence Hornung charged that much of Allen's series was untrue, but refused to point out any specifics. Reporter Allen, a Briton whose application for U.S. citizenship is pending, stuck to his guns, defended the truth of his series and the propriety of his espionage. The Telegram stood by what it had printed. Said one editor: "We studied every article carefully and toned down all of them. Conditions are much worse than what we said." Superintendent John Theobald complained, but the Telegram planned to let Allen's expos...
...windup editorial, the Telegram backed up Allen, added a cold-water cure of its own: for extremely hard cases, custodial schools or modifications of the old C.C.C. camps, with classes, sports, physical labor...