Wasted Talent

"Anger and urgency assail me," snaps Harvard College's Dean John Monro about a problem that roils educators across the country. It is the sad fact--and the underside of U.S. education--that hundreds of thousands of talented and sometimes brilliant youngsters not only lack the means to go to college but do not even aspire to go. Many among them are what sociologists gingerly call the "culturally deprived"--Negroes, Puerto Ricans, poor whites--who do not know that they are bright. Others are slum and farm kids ignored by crowded colleges because they go to "wrong" schools. (Of the nation's 26,500 high schools, a mere 5,000 produce 82% of all college students.) In a "rich and fat" country, says Harvard Dean Monro, "we just cannot sit cheerfully any more and watch good young minds by the thousands shrivel away."

The nation's prodigal waste of talent is no myth. About 20% of those in the upper quarter of their class do not stay on through high school; about half of the top 10% of high school seniors do not go to college; 40% of all college students fail to graduate. In sum: each year 400,000 talented U.S. youngsters quit school and college.

Poor but Rich. The key to the waste is environment. Comparing opposite ends of the social scale, Dean Horace Mann Bond of Atlanta University reports that "culturally disadvantaged" families produce only one talented youngster for every 235 from "culturally advantaged" families. In affluent suburbs, 25% of all youngsters score 125 or above on IQ tests. In poor neighborhoods, only 6% do so. The reason is partly that IQ tests, though aimed at measuring intelligence rather than learning, necessarily reflect "normal" exposure to books, conversation and even material gadgets. Without such riches, the bright slum kid seems to get dumber as he grows older. Schools treat him accordingly. With a dwindling sense of worth, he accepts the verdict and quits school.

By Dean Bond's reckoning, the U.S. talent pool would increase fivefold if every child in the land had the same cultural opportunities as those in the wealthier classes. Pending this millennium, educators are tackling three key problems:

P: Discovering poor children with rich minds as early as the third grade.

P: Persuading them and their parents that college is possible and desirable.

P: Financing scholarships for them.

Biggest Government effort is the $1 billion National Defense Education Act of 1958, which has nearly doubled the number of guidance counselors in U.S. high schools. It is still not enough. Last year high schools had only 18,500 full-time counselors for 10 million students, and they argue the need for at least twice as many. The education act does not apply to elementary school guidance which is a further weakness. And while the bill lent $57 million to 115,000 college students last year, the really needy could well use federal scholarships (promised in both political platforms).

Jordan's Jumpers. On a small but effective scale is the tireless prodding of Isaac H. McClelland Jr. Negro principal of 90% Negro David Starr Jordan High School in a slum section of Los Angeles. McClelland jars his charges with the indisputable fact that interracial colleges clamor to hand scholarships to Negroes--if they can get qualified ones. "Just think," says he, "you can make yourself $10,000 just by sitting here and working with your brain." When he puts it that way, "they usually jump."

The jumpers have landed in some of the West Coast's top colleges. Phillip Peoples, 21, one of ten Negro children supported solely by their mother, is a boy who never dreamed of going to college. But he tested in Jordan's top 10%, and the school pushed him. Scraping up $9 to pay for college board tests, he did so well that California's rigorous Claremont Men's College gave him a scholarship. He was the first Negro ever accepted at Claremont--but Phil had no clothes to go ("and I mean no clothes--just what he had on," says Principal McClelland). Teachers anted up the cash, and at Claremont, where he has had enough to eat for the first time in his life, Math Major Peoples has averaged better than B for three years. He will go on for an engineering degree at Stanford. Whenever Phil runs out of cash, McClelland & Co. pass the hat again: "No use putting them into college unless you work to keep them there."

Help from Nessfeness. Other eager talent scouts include such famed prep schools as Massachusetts' Phillips Exeter, which annually ferrets out 80 "disadvantaged" boys from all over the U.S., gives most of them full scholarships. One such is Nathaniel LaMar, son of a widowed schoolteacher, who wound up as Exeter's senior class poet, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, won a fellowship to Cambridge University, has since had short stories published in the Atlantic. Exeter also plucked Robert D. Storey from a Negro slum in Cleveland. His father was a drinker; his brother had been in reform school. After Exeter young Storey became a marshal in his 1958 class at Harvard and a friend of John Rockefeller IV, married a Radcliffe girl and is now a Marine first lieutenant.

In hundreds of such cases, the go-between is the pioneering National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students, which began in 1948, when Negroes accounted for only one-tenth of 1% of the students in interracial colleges, v. 1% now. NSSFNS (pronounced Ness-fe-ness) is run by New Yorker Richard Plaut, 57, who sold his "boring" lighting-equipment business in the 1930s and turned social worker. He has since lighted up dark places all over the country.

Supported largely by foundations, Plaut's Nessfeness has scoured the South especially, counseled promising Negroes in big-city schools, and raised $2,500,000 to send 7,000 Negroes to 350 interracial colleges. It has sent another 252 students to 45 Northern prep schools from Kent to Andover. Along the way, it has generated one of the most productive ideas in the whole scouting business.

The idea first took shape in 1956 at New York's now-famed Junior High School 43 (TIME, Oct. 12, 1959), where only 40% of the predominantly Negro and Puerto Rican students went on to graduate from senior high school. They came from families of six people living in one room, where dinner was likely to be one hamburger per child, served from a paper bag. Could such youngsters be college material?

With money from Nessfeness, able Principal Daniel Schreiber brought in one guidance counselor for every 100 students, special teachers for remedial reading and math. He persuaded defeatist parents that their children could become doctors and lawyers, got them to make room for homework. He ushered children to the opera, the theater, atomic laboratories and college campuses. The result--soaring aspirations--was so dramatic that IQs leaped and retarded readers outstripped national norms. This year Junior High 43's proud products are at Amherst, Columbia, Franklin & Marshall, Union and the University of Michigan.

Higher Horizons. With Dan Schreiber in charge, New York has since launched a "Higher Horizons" program for 32,000 children in 13 junior high and 52 elementary schools. Using Schreiber as consultant, the Ford Foundation recently gave $1,000,000 to start similar programs in Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. Stirred by Nessfeness, other cities are well launched, notably Washington, where a project at Macfarland Junior High School makes one official gloat that "we may be actually discovering a new dimension in education." Last week, answering queries from Hawaii to Germany, Dan Schreiber said: "We want to recognize the diamond in the rough and start polishing it."

As one of the talent hunt's loudest cheerleaders, Harvard's Dean Monro calls the progress "extraordinary." But he is deeply concerned that colleges are not doing their part. He wants them to "stop making scholarship awards, for embellishment purposes, to well-off students." He also thinks that professors should haunt "submerged" schools with the same tenacity as football coaches. "Why should 300 college representatives visit New Trier High School each year and hardly any, except coaches, visit the big downtown Chicago high school, only 20 miles away?"

The big need, says Monro, is coordination of all the talent hunters. Plaut of Nessfeness agrees. Last month he urged a coast-to-coast Higher Horizons program, costing up to $100 million, to be run by an agency patterned after the National Science Foundation. In Washington last week, top officials of the prestigious American Council on Education mulled ways to get Plaut's scheme started. As one of them put it: "Unlike gold, human talent is perishable. We can't let it lie in the hills until we get ready to mine it."

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