Education: THE FACTS OF DE FACTO

IN 1960 most of the 77,000 citizens of New Rochelle, N.Y., viewed school segregation as a disease confined to the distant likes of Little Rock, Ark. The town’s ethnic mix—14% Negro, 30% Jewish, 45% Irish and Italian Catholic —was so faithfully reflected in the high school that the Voice of America once touted it as a shining example of integrated education. Only a year later, New Rochelle became the “Little Rock of the North,” convicted in a federal court of gerrymandering to promote segregation. Case in point: Lincoln Elementary School, 94% Negro.

More in hurt than anger, New Rochelle defended Lincoln as a typical “neighborhood school” that, like Topsy, just grew that way. The trial told a different story. Back in 1930, the school board redrew lines to make the Lincoln district match the Negro area. It also allowed whites to transfer out —and they did. By 1949 the school was 100% Negro.

The board tried to bring resident whites back to the school by revoking transfers. Instead, whites switched to private and parochial schools or moved away, making the district more Negro than ever. By 1960 Lincoln’s pupils in general were academically behind every other elementary school in town. The board, nobly it thought, got a city-wide vote to build a fine new Lincoln on the same spot. Negro parents countered with a federal suit on then-novel grounds: it is just as unconstitutional to compel Negroes to attend a de facto segregated school in the North as a de jure segregated school in the South.

Federal Judge Irving R. Kaufman did not decide that question (nor has any other federal court so far). He ruled only that gerrymandering had violated equal protection under the 14th Amendment. The outcome jogged white minds all over the North. Given free access to other schools, Lincoln’s pupils on the whole did better, except for some who landed in a white school that overwhelmed them. Because two-fifths of Lincoln’s pupils chose to remain, New Rochelle is now closing the 65-year-old building, assigning the children to balanced schools, and launching an extensive bus service to help keep the entire city desegregated.

On the Attack. The experience of New Rochelle is a case history in a development that is spreading across the Northern U.S.: a movement against de facto segregation of schools. Victory in New Rochelle spurred the N.A.A.C.P. to a successful attack on de facto school segregation last year in a dozen Northern communities, from Coatesville, Pa., to Eloy, Ariz. This summer it is “mobilizing direct action” in 70 cities throughout 18 Northern and Western states. School boards are responding, and many a change will have been made by September. All kinds of tools are being tried. Samples:

— OPEN ENROLLMENT. The most widely used method so far, it modifies the neighborhood-school concept enough to let students of mostly Negro schools transfer to mostly white schools that have sufficient room. Open enrollment was pioneered in New York City, is used or will be starting in some form next September in Baltimore, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, San Francisco and many smaller cities. Usually only a fraction of the eligible Negro students take advantage of it.

— REZONING—which is often the same as ungerrymandering. In San Francisco, mostly white Grant School lies near mostly Negro Emerson School in a rectangular area cut by a horizontal attendance line; made vertical, the line would integrate both schools. New York City’s school zoning boss, Assistant Superintendent Francis A. Turner, a Negro, is such a skilled mixmaster that balanced schools are rapidly increasing.

— THE PRINCETON PLAN, SO Called for the New Jersey town that devised it. Formerly segregated schools are rematched, so that one school accommodates all children of perhaps three grades, a second school the next three, and so on. This works well in small communities, might do in big cities by clustering each grade group in several nearby schools to avoid long bus trips.

— RECOMBINATION. An example: A Negro elementary school can be turned into a junior high school serving a wider area, or into a school for gifted or retarded children, while the original pupils are sent to other schools.

— SCHOOL SPOTTING. New schools are built only in areas of integrated housing. For fast-changing big cities, the latest idea is “educational parks,” putting all new schools in one or several central clusters. Last week a New York City board of education member suggested a perfect site: the World’s Fair grounds, where after 1965 an education center could accommodate 15 public schools and a teachers’ college, enrolling a total of 31,000 students.

Fears & Illusions. All these changes stir deep fears and emotions. Negroes, demanding more than token integration, have lately attacked de facto segregation by street-marching protests in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, “study-ins” at the white schools of Englewood, N.J., sit-ins at the boards of education of New York and Chicago. Whites envision their neighborhood schools being flooded with poorly prepared Negro pupils, or their own children being forced to “integrate” Negro slum schools. A feeling of “discrimination against the majority” has sparked reactions like that of white parents in Montclair, N.J., who filed a federal suit under the 14th Amendment, claiming that Negro children were allowed free transfers while theirs were not. The long-honored concept of the neighborhood school—a homey place that children can walk to, a living symbol of local pride and progress—seems in danger.

Yet behind the stresses and strains is a consensus, by many school authorities, some courts and most Negroes, that de facto segregation must go. The problem is to break the low-income Negro’s vicious circle of slum birth to slum school to bad education to low-paid job and parenthood of more slum children. The widely accepted premise is that the circle can and must be broken at the school stage. Equally important is that segregated neighborhood schools refute the original aim of Horace Mann’s “common school,” strengthening democracy by serving all races, creeds and classes. Integrationists believe that schools can help to heal U.S. race relations by returning to Mann’s ideal.

Segregated Equals Bad. Nothing in theory prevents the hundreds of predominantly Negro schools in the North (see map) from excelling, but in practice a school that becomes 30% to 50% Negro is in for trouble. Whites pull out and it “tips” toward 100%. Gone are the “motivated” bright white children who might have been models for slum kids to copy and compete with. Good teachers become hard to get (although the “spirit of the Peace Corps” is diminishing this problem, according to Cleveland’s School Superintendent William B. Levenson). “Once we become concentrated, we become ignored,” says a Boston Negro leader. Most of Los Angeles’ 53 Negro schools are on double sessions. Chicago’s Urban League calculates that in operating expenses Negro schools get only two-thirds as much per pupil as white schools.

The result is unsurprising. In Boston, where special high schools require entrance exams, one Negro boy typically complains: “I never saw that kind of math before I went for the exam.” In his recent civil rights speech, President

Kennedy said: “The Negro baby born in America today has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby, born in the same place, on the same day; one-third as much chance of completing college; one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man; twice as much chance of becoming unemployed.”

Big-City Problems. While small Northern cities may attack the situation in the manner of New Rochelle, big cities, with miles of Negro ghettoes, have problems that range up to hopeless. Washington, where even the most civil-righteous New Frontiersmen are prone to send their children to private schools, can hardly give classes a desegregated look when 85% of public school students are Negro. Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia are marking time. A measure of New York’s quandary is that some integration crusaders have proposed mass transfer of whites into Harlem schools, although few officials see it as a workable solution.

Nonetheless, the nation’s biggest city school system is also the most enterprising. New York is trying to make slum schools so good that Negroes can rise more easily into an integrated society. It devised the famed Higher Horizons program, heavy on culture and counseling, which now involves 64,000 students in 76 schools. At state level, New York’s Commissioner of Education James E. Allen Jr. recently requested school boards to report by September on what steps they intend to take to balance schools with more than 50% Negro enrollment.

“In the minds of Negro pupils and parents,” says New Jersey’s State Commissioner of Education Frederick M. Raubinger, “a stigma is attached to attending a school whose enrollment is completely or exclusively Negro, and this sense of sting and resulting feeling of inferiority has an undesirable effect on attitudes related to successful training.” Raubinger has issued orders to end de facto segregation in three New Jersey communities. In the same vein, a former foe of “social engineering via bussing,” Dr. John Fischer, president of Columbia’s Teachers College, warns that schools must “take positive action to bring Negro children into the mainstream of American cultural activity.” And in California, the state supreme court in June came close to outlawing de facto segregation. Where it exists, ruled the court, “it is not enough for a school board to refrain from affirmative discriminatory conduct.” No exact racial ratio is required, but schools must take “corrective measures.”

The ideal integration situation, says Psychiatrist Robert Coles, after studying Southern schools, is apparently a middle-class school with diverse ethnic groups and high teaching standards. In a forthcoming report, sponsored by the Southern Regional Council and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Coles adds that young children mix naturally, ignoring adult tensions. Teen-agers take longer, but in the course of a year begin to see “them” as individuals to be judged on personal merit. As for standards, both races generally work as hard as ever. Says Coles: “We have yet to hear a Southern teacher complain of any drop in intellectual or moral climate in a desegregated room or school.”

While the pressures for integration bring a troublesome measure of controversy, reaction and disillusionment, it is a fact that every sensible effort to desegregate schools—alarmists to the contrary—is likely to improve the general level of U.S. education.