Education: Preparation in St. Louis

Without fuss or bitterness, the segregated public schools of St. Louis were smoothly integrated four years ago. Children were ordered to attend schools in their own neighborhoods, and no transfers were allowed. But that effective formula (also followed in Washington, D.C.) re-emphasized a sad, subtle U.S. segregation of another kind. In 14 major cities, from Boston to Los Angeles, it blights 25% to 35% of 3,200,000 children in public schools. Worried schoolmen call it “the problem of the culturally handicapped.” They mean the mental ghettos in which thousands of dispirited Negro children live because no one—teachers or parents—can stir them to care.

With poignant force, the problem hit St. Louis’ energetic, earnest Dr. Samuel Shepard Jr. two years ago. A Negro, he had risen from abject poverty in Kansas City. Mo., put himself through the University of Michigan by scullery work. He climbed steadily in the St. Louis public-school system, first as teacher and athletic coach, later as principal. To his white colleagues, it was no surprise. “Sam Shepard is willing to work three times harder than anyone else,” one of them says. “He stays with a problem like a dog on a bone, until he gets the job done.” By 1952 Sam Shepard, a district director of education, headed 22 of the city’s 130 still segregated grade schools. His charges: 13,000 students (only 1,000 of them whites) who live in the squalid middle of the city’s sleaziest neighborhoods.

No Excuses. Shepard knew perfectly well what their surroundings meant to his students’ morale, and tests given to all the city’s students two years after integration confirmed his worst fears. All his eighth-grade children proved at least a year behind the median norm in reading, language, arithmetic—and only 7% of those about to enter high school were eligible for “top-track” work.

Shepard’s teachers pleaded crowded classrooms and the children’s poverty. But Shepard was tired of excuses. Drive, desire and ambition, he snapped, are as much a part of school success as native ability. He called parents together in meeting after meeting prescribed homework and more homework, sparked them to want to boost their children’s grades. If parents were too uneducated to help with studies, he said frankly, they could at least buy dictionaries and give children a place to work. “Integration didn’t put us in too good a light,” he told the parents over and over. “School is important business. We have been low man on the totem pole, and too satisfied with our lot.”

Look to Tomorrow. Last week, stirred and cajoled by Sam Shepard for 19 months, the children had a report card to cheer. New tests of Sam Shepard’s eighth-graders showed twice as many (14.8%) ready for top-track high school work next fall. At one school, where only 28% of first-and second-graders were reading at the national norm last June, the rate had soared to 57.2% by January.

Sam Shepard is hardly satisfied yet, this summer will deluge parents with letters urging them to keep children studying on their own for a head start next fall. “Why should a boy strive to overcome all obstacles and get a college degree and then have to run an elevator?” he asks. “Because we simply cannot base our possibilities on present limitations. They might be swept away tomorrow by the president of the company, and then it would be too late for preparation.”