Truth & Consequences

One of the South's anti-integration schemes is the "private school plan." The idea: to close all the public schools, thus diverting the U.S. Supreme Court's desegregation order. The next step is setting up private schools by giving state tuition grants to all school-age children (though not necessarily Negroes). Already the plan has been made possible by new laws in six states--Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Virginia. Other states are considering it. What few seem to be considering is the consequences.

Last week the first sober study of consequences was published by the hard-headed Southern Regional Council. The authors: Education Professors Donald Ross Green and Warren E. Gauerke of Atlanta's Emory University. In an objective, 40-page pamphlet (If the Schools Are Closed . . .) they dismantle the private school plan completely. What the scheme amounts to, they prove, is something akin to amputating a broken leg and giving the patient a matchstick to hobble on.

Paws in the Till. For Georgia alone, Green and Gauerke report, the dollar costs would be astronomical--at least double or triple present budgets. Georgia now spends only $265 a year per public school pupil (U.S. median: $332). But it still provides all the services typical of a public system--free books and transportation, library supervision, an expanding guidance and testing program, adult and vocational education, special teachers for handicapped children. In contrast to Atlanta's private schools, which spend an average $625 per pupil (and in some cases charge extra for books, food, buses), the public schools cost less because they get federal money ($28 million in 1958), buy supplies on a statewide basis, get cost-cutting help from state experts all down the line.

Under the private school plan, all this would end abruptly--a critical loss of social services throughout Georgia. The private "system" would be strictly on its own, with only tuition grants for support. It could not possibly take over the public system's job. It could not buy enough school buildings from the state, because of reversion clauses specified by the original land donors; it could not begin to pay for new buildings. It could not keep teachers in the state during the changeover, or raise salaries high enough to attract new ones, or curb grafters with paws in the poorly policed tuition-grant till. What Little Rock also proved last year is that new industries shun a community that closes public schools; not a single one set up shop; only six firms (including two moving companies) reported higher earnings.

Crackpots in the Classroom. Money is "only the beginning of the tale." Academic standards would fall. Tuition-grant schools could not hope to offer quality or variety of courses. Example: Little Rock's recently closed private Raney High School (TIME, Aug. 17), which offered less than 25% as many courses to its segregationist students as did the public Central High School, had no music, art, general mathematics or foreign languages. Nor would a wave of fly-by-night tuition-grant schools (most unaccredited) be subject to responsible supervision; fanatics and crackpots could easily control budgets and so set the curriculum, plunging Southern education to new depths.

The real joker--and perhaps hope--is the law. By any legal interpretation, Green and Gauerke believe, the private school plan requires "complete relinquishment of all state support for public education." To be legal, the plan must be free of compulsory attendance laws, state control of how grants are spent, state supervision of facilities, curriculums and personnel, requirements for accreditation, all special services, and state money for textbooks, supplies and equipment. The tuition grant is valid only if it goes directly to a child with no strings attached.

But this hands-off policy stands on shaky legal ground: the U.S. Supreme Court can find many state court precedents for ruling that education is not only a function or service of government, but "actually part of the act of governing." Such a ruling would mean that a state would have to 1) drop the tuition-grant system and 2) possibly see the Federal Government take over its education, or 3) get back to the business of running its own public system again. (The financial, social and educational problems of reopening closed schools are incalculable.) And by no stretch of legal imagination could such reopened schools escape eventual compliance with the integration laws of the land.

Conclude Green and Gauerke: "The facts demonstrate that a system of private schools, in a mixed society such as exists in much of the South, is unworkable, legally, socially and economically . . . No doubletalk can alter what is now clear--that public schools can be maintained in the South as the base of our school system only when there is compliance with federal law."

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