ED U CATI O N: Northern Segregation

With cool detachment, Northerners often view school segregation as a disease confined to the distant South. Yet many a Northern city is undergoing a vast Negro influx, a consequent white flight to the suburbs. With the newcomers forced into black-belt housing, de facto segregation prevails in urban public schools throughout the North. So goes the pattern in Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia—a steady proliferation of conditions contrary to the spirit of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

Last week the problem in New York City was attacked on two fronts: an angry report by the American Jewish Congress on de facto segregated schools, an exciting new effort by the city’s board of education to uplift such schools.

“Spotty & Slow.” The problem is notably acute in New York, which prides itself on being the nation’s most tolerant city. Between 1950 and 1957, New York lost to the suburbs a continental white population numbering about 750,000, gained a Negro and Puerto Rican-immigrant population of nearly 650,000. In sore-spot Manhattan, about 70% of public school children are now Negro and Puerto Rican. More than half (455) of the 704 city schools examined are virtually segregated, and the number is apparently increasing.*

The increase riles the American Jewish Congress, which offered solid evidence in its 57-page report that the segregated Negro and Puerto Rican children are as much as three years behind in their studies because of sagging morale and poorly qualified teachers. Equally discouraging is the ironic fact that New York is the only Northern city with a real blueprint for solving de facto segregation.

In 1956, the board of education announced key reforms: building new schools in fringe areas to foster integration, tightening lax transfer policies to stop school desertions by white parents, preventing qualified teachers from taking assignments only in “easy” schools. But progress has been so “spotty and slow,” the A.J.C. reported, that many new schools have been poorly located, become segregated as soon as they open. Worse, the top teachers, so badly needed in segregated schools, are able to ignore them under a tacit policy that still allows the teachers to work where they please.

Princeton & Gielgud. Despite A.J.C.’s pessimism, New York last week launched an impressive “Higher Horizons” program, aimed at the heart of the city’s “unequal facilities” problem. The goal: a sharp rise in the aspirations and achievements of children in “less-favored” neighborhoods. Already New York has good evidence that the goal is reachable.

The idea began three years ago with a quiet pilot project, financed by the College Entrance Examination Board and the National Scholarship Fund for Negro Students, at Manhattan’s Junior High School 43 on the western fringe of Harlem. No school could have been better chosen. Its students (85% Negro and Puerto Rican) ‘rere demoralized and uninterested; de-leatist parents saw little future for their children and took scant notice of their schooling.

But Junior High School 43 also had an able and hopeful principal in balding Daniel Schreiber, 50, who got an especial yearly appropriation of $40,000 to do some dramatic revamping. To the school, he brought guidance counselors and special teachers for remedial reading and mathematics. Parents were persuaded that racial and economic barriers to professional careers for their children are not necessarily permanent, that becoming a doctor some day means getting to work today, that making a girl do homework is just as profitable as making her do housework.

As a reminder, the school displayed photographs of successful Negroes and Puerto Ricans: surgeons at the operating table, scientists in the lab, ministers in the pulpit, professors in the classroom. The students were treated to a tingling “cultural enrichment” look at the bustling world beyond their own drab neighborhoods. Taken to the opera, they first learned the story, heard the score, saw scenes on film strips, later held discussions. They went to Long Island’s Brookhaven atomic laboratories, to Broadway plays where they chatted backstage with such personages as Helen Hayes and John Gielgud. To get a taste of college, they learned strange, new songs and hustled off to Princeton and Amherst for campus tours and football games. Slowly, it became no longer “square” to carry a book at Junior High School 43.

“Unbelievable Riches.” Last week, New York City’s new Superintendent of Schools John J. Theobald announced “startling” results. The IQs of one-third of the youngsters rose by six to seven points. From being retarded in reading by 1½ years, the average student achieved four years’ reading growth in 2½ years. The school’s formerly unruly products have not had a single disciplinary problem in senior high school, and two are at the very top of their 1,200-student graduating class. Says one girl: “I thought college was only for rich people, but the inspiration of people who helped me proved to me that I was just as capable of going to college as the son of a movie star.”

This fall, announced Superintendent Theobald, the same treatment .begins throughout 44 New York schools, under a $500,000 program coordinated by Junior High 43’s Dan Schreiber. It will not erase de facto segregation, and no moral sanction is intended. But it may go far to solve the blight of “unequal facilities.” To that end, astute Dan Schreiber promises every effort: “We want to encourage our children to think of themselves as having the fullest potential to realize their best dreams.” Adds Superintendent Theobald proudly: “I think we’re tapping resources of unbelievable riches.”

* One result: many middle-class New Yorkers (including some of the wealthier Negroes) are hustling to get their children into private schools, which now charge up to $1,450 a year per student; this year some schools turned away nine applicants for every student admitted.