Education: To Improve Slum Schools

His sherry cabinet in Harvard Yard long since turned over to another president, his diplomat’s striped pants put into mothballs, the quiet New Englander embarked on a new career—unofficial Inspector General of U.S. Education. Dr. James Bryant Conant toured high schools, investigated curriculums and teachers, and in 1959 mildly concluded that the U.S. high school could be improved “with no radical change.” But then Conant got around to taking a look at slum education. His report, Slums and Suburbs (McGraw-Hill; $3.95), published last week, shows how incensed a former Harvard president can get.

In the typical Negro slum, Conant found, one-third of all children come from families in which there is neither father nor stepfather. Almost all their homes lack books and newspapers. Young girls say that their “biggest problem” is to get home without being molested by men. Teachers struggle “tenaciously and bravely” against the adversities of home and street, but bow before the realities. They assign no homework because it is an impossibility in filthy, noisy tenements. They teach no foreign languages in junior high school because half of their pupils hardly know English—they read at sixth-grade level or below. Their immediate task is to prod sleeping children who have been kept awake all night by battling parents. And they struggle steadily to keep their charges from quitting school, to keep them from joining the unemployed floaters on the street.

Within these limitations, slum teachers score remarkable successes. They do manage to bring some order to otherwise chaotic lives. Says Conant: “The outward manifestations of discipline, order and formal dress are found to a greater degree in the well-run slum schools of a city than in the wealthier sections of the same city.” Yet in most big-city slums, more than half of the students drop out of school when they reach the legal age, usually 16. Two-thirds of the dropouts fail to find jobs; even among those who get high school diplomas, roughly half cannot get work. The massive idleness of slum-dwelling men aged 16 to 21 is the sharpest problem Conant found.

To improve slum schools, Conant asks:

>More money. “The contrast in money spent per pupil in wealthy suburban and slum schools challenges the concept of equality of opportunity in American public education. The expenditure per pupil in the wealthy suburban school is as high as $1,000 per year. The expenditure in a big-city school is less than half that amount.”

> Upgraded vocational education so that students leaving school would have at least one marketable skill. New schools, copying the pattern of Chicago’s Dunbar Vocational High School, should be located in large metropolitan areas to teach such trades as bricklaying, carpentry and auto repairing. Otherwise vocational programs should be distributed among the general high schools, as is being done in Detroit. Slow learners might even be prepared for service occupations, such as bellboys, messengers and laundry drivers.

>Schools should be given the responsibility for educational and vocational guidance of youths after they leave school, until the age of 21.

> Employment opportunities should be on a nondiscriminatory basis. ”It is far more difficult in many communities to obtain admission to an apprentice program which involves union approval than to get into the most selective medical school in the nation.”

With Southern schools slowly getting integrated, attention is increasingly turning toward school segregation in large Northern cities, which results from segregated housing. Conant believes the situation cannot be rectified by simply mixing Negro with white children throughout a city. ”The real issue,” he says, “is not racial integration but socioeconomic integration. To my mind, the city school superintendent is right who said he was in the education business and should not become involved in attempts to correct the consequences of voluntary segregated housing. It would be far better for those who are agitating for the deliberate mixing of children to accept de facto segregated schools as a consequence of a present housing situation and to work for the improvement of slum schools whether Negro or white.”

Warns Conant, in sum: ”The building up of a mass of unemployed and frustrated Negro youth in congested areas of a city is a social phenomenon that may be compared to the piling up of inflammable material in an empty building in a city block. Potentialities for trouble—indeed possibilities of disaster—are surely there.”