Civilizing the Blackboard Jungle

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He skylarks down the scruffy street, the colored slum kid in the Northern city, headed for the public school. He wears a white shirt with a bow tie, and a good warm windbreaker. His smile is toothy, his epithets vile. He is eight, and can't read much. His teacher, a man with a heart of case-hardened gold, sometimes thinks of him as a "little bastard," but the boy has good intelligence and intentions. Such, in many variations, is the "disadvantaged" child, and he and his like now comprise one-third of all pupils in the nation's 14 largest cities.

They are the rural dispossessed--Southern Negroes, Appalachian whites, Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans--who fill the urban void left by middle-class migration to the suburbs. They share the American dream of salvation by education and go to the public school that everyone says will save them. Why is it that just the opposite happens so often in city schools across the country?

Different Immigrant. The focal point of this question is New York City, where the nation's biggest school system has just acquired a highly skilled school superintendent who may have some of the answers. At 44, Calvin Edward Gross is a man with more than a million children, almost half of them Negro or Puerto Rican. Seven months in office, he feels ready to cope with the hardest school job in the country. "We are now enjoying the best fall beginning we've had for a long time," Gross peppily wrote his teachers not long ago. "Let's take it from here."

How far anyone can take New York City depends on reconciling the disparity between the nature of the children and the nature of the school system. New York City has long specialized in educating immigrants, but these children--being Americans to begin with--are different. They are shorn of the drive that spurred their predecessors, weirdly cut off from the middle-class culture that teachers abide by.

"I don't want to grow up to be any dumb guy," said one Manhattan slum kid recently. Such children know adults who cannot even read the want ads, and sense the despair of unskilled teen-agers loitering on streets where drink, dope or death is the only exit. Yet as other Americans reach new heights of affluence and aspiration, slum kids are made to feel all the more worthless by their poverty and the color of their skin. Often, dinner is a hamburger served in a paper bag; books are nonexistent; home is a rooming house so transient that in a recent year 50% of all Manhattan pupils switched schools, making a mockery of sustained education."

"Try the Post Office." IQ tests use middle-class references that the slum child does not understand; his low score then plunks him into the slow group. He is repelled from reading by fatuous primers about "nice" children who seem laughable even in the suburbs, let alone in Harlem. Harried principals stand ready to expel him; guidance counselors are reluctant to encourage him too much. "Be realistic," they say. "Do what you can do. Try the post office."

"The battle for better education will be won or lost in the big cities," says Calvin Gross. It is the big cities that school most of the people: the U.S. is now 70% urban. There is no intrinsic reason why urban schools cannot join or lead the academic reform going on in suburbia. The secret, Gross believes, is to humanize and decentralize city school administration--freeing teachers to reach individual children.

The measure of this job in New York City is the number of individual children: 1,047,800. They outnumber soldiers in the U.S. Army. To meet all his 42,000 teachers in one group, Superintendent Gross would need two Madison Square Gardens. If he tried to visit one classroom a day throughout the school year, he would not finish until the year 2184. Just to visit all of his 841 schools at the rate of one a day would take more than four school years. Gross frets: "The basic thing I've got to lick here is communication."

New York still has pockets of unmatched excellence. Talented youngsters, including 7,000 with IQs above 150, can study anything from college math through Chinese or Russian to conservatory-level art and music. Bronx Science, one of four academic high schools with stringent entrance exams, is a famed gateway to M.I.T. and Harvard. Performing Arts supplies Broadway, television and the ballet with recruits. New York City public schools, with 2% of all U.S. schoolchildren, have for 20 years averaged a remarkable 20% of all Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners. Of the 21,000 U.S. students taking Advanced Placement exams for college credit last year, almost 3,000 were New York City youngsters.

An able New York child rides an escalator to top colleges. In the fourth to sixth grade, he joins an I.G.C. (Intellectually Gifted Children) class that gets extra money and attention. Junior high puts him in an S.P. (Special Progress) class that skips a year or gets "enriched" work; he goes on to a specialized high school or Advanced Placement classes in a regular school. All the while, he sharpens his brains competing with some of the most aggressively bright kids in the country.

To Get a Bronx Accent? When a California woman moved to Manhattan two years ago, she plunked her two daughters in private school at $1,000 per pretty head. This fall, divorced and shy of cash, she nervously switched the girls to what is supposed to be a "blackboard jungle" junior high school on the upper West Side. Both girls are thriving in S.P. classes, and the one with a talent for art has never had better teaching. "Private schools are living on their waiting lists," says their mother. Calvin Gross, who has two children in Riverdale's P.S. 81, promises to "give private schools a little competition in this town. They've had their way too long."

But casting a child adrift in New York's schools, perhaps to find excellence and perhaps only to acquire a Bronx accent, is not to the taste of most white parents affluent enough to afford any alternative. New York is losing four students to the suburbs for every one it gets back. The city's total public school enrollment is up 20,000 this year. But nonpublic enrollment is rising faster; 25,000 youngsters are in private schools and 400,000 in parochial (chiefly Roman Catholic) schools. Negroes and Puerto Ricans last year comprised 40.5% of the city's total enrollment and 76.5% of all elementary pupils in Manhattan.

In a variety of pioneering ways, New York has tried to fight its problems. George Washington High School's three-year Demonstration Guidance Project freed teachers for intense work with slum kids, and turned many of the pupils into honors graduates and earnest collegians. The famed Higher Horizons program, a strong dose of culture and counseling, offers a measure of hope and confidence to 65,000 children in 76 schools. The city has poured extra cash and supplies into 274 schools that have a concentration of problems. It has brought in hundreds of bilingual Puerto Rican teachers to ease Puerto Rican kids into New York life. And it has established 28 "600" schools that drain the worst delinquents away from the rest of the system while trying to handle them toughly but constructively.

All of this is far from enough. One out of three New York pupils is, as the latest educanto puts it, "culturally different"--a stranger to middle-class values. One out of three junior high students is at least two years retarded in reading--constituting the city's No. 1 academic deficiency. All too often those same youngsters are shunted into outmoded vocational schools or diluted "general" academic courses that lead nowhere. Roughly half of all New York high school students drop out before graduation.

Dumber & Dumber. In short, the schools are still failing those who need them most. School officials blame "cultural deprivation," the slum kid's lack of drive and books at home. As he falls behind in reading, he gets "dumber and dumber" in school. At Manhattan's High School of Commerce, for example, only one-fifth of this fall's entering tenth-graders read at ninth-grade level or above. "We do our best for our students," says Principal Murray Cohn, "but they just can't keep up."

Negroes react to this sort of charge the way all parents do when their kids are criticized. In central Harlem, where some children are a year behind in third grade and most are three years behind in eighth grade, civil righters say that "the schools are manufacturing retarded kids" and blame white teachers who give up too easily (only 8.3% of all New York teachers are Negro). In the typical view of the Rev. Milton Galamison, the problem is "low expectancy on the part of middle-class teachers whose concept of a human being is not met by these children."

Militant, organized Negroes argue that the only solution is to import white students to Negro schools on the bitter theory that this will guarantee adequate teaching. Superintendent Gross has ruled that out. He backs every integration step "short of the compulsory interchange of Negro and white students between distant communities." Gross relies heavily on upgrading mostly Negro schools, but to mitigate the hurts of de facto segregation he intends to amplify the city's "open enrollment" plan by permitting children of all races "free choice" to enter underused schools throughout the city.

Overburden. Getting money is a big problem, but not the biggest, for Gross. The city's board of education has no taxing power--probably an advantage, since it would otherwise have to persuade a presumably reluctant electorate to vote for higher taxes and bond issues. This means that the board must appeal for cash to the city's Democratic administration, which in turn depends on the state's Republican legislature for about one-third of its school funds, but New York does manage to scrape up more per pupil (an average of $625 last year) than any other major city.

Yet, by one estimate, it should be spending at least one-third more to restore the schools' position of 20 years ago. The key barrier is "municipal overburden"--the expense of such extra city services as subsidized subways. Only 21% of the city budget goes to education, compared with as much as 70% in small communities.

Rush-Hour Education. New building is years behind--the city needs at least 20 new high schools. The 57 academic high schools it has now are so loaded that last year Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High had 6,886 students, or 2,000 more than capacity. George Washington High has five overlapping daily sessions; students waiting for empty classrooms jam the auditorium like commuters in Grand Central. Last year 57,459 New York children got less than a full day's schooling, in effect cutting their school year by as much as two months.

Such obstacles, in part, led 1,018 teachers last year to give up New York's classroom battle--many quitting for the suburbs. Those who remain are willing but not always able. The greenest college graduate can get a substitute teaching job; a third of all New York teachers are substitutes, too many of them thrown into the difficult schools that veterans are allowed to avoid. Yet to get a regular teaching license in New York City requires not only a state certificate but also a special city exam given by the powerful board of examiners, a fusty fief run by nine old-minded men. "An Einstein who was also a Professor of Educational Methods at Harvard University could not get a regular position as a teacher of science in New York City without taking the examination," wrote Cleveland's former School Superintendent Mark Schinnerer in a 1961 appraisal of New York's schools.

Banished Board. The manufacturer of red tape in New York is "Livingston Street," or board of education headquarters in Brooklyn. Prolific with ideas for curriculum reform, it seems incapable of getting them into the schools. Years of big talk and tiny testing go into "pilot" studies and "demonstration" projects as generations of children pass by. For example, HQ has spent 17 years "developing" a new elementary math curriculum that is still not finished.

As petty as it is provincial, Livingston Street has long required teachers to punch time clocks, toil at trivial paper work and use rigid "lesson plans" that often ignore student needs. Many vital problems never reach HQ. To rouse the place on the telephone can take 40 rings. A commercial high school wired for DC gets new electric typewriters wired for AC. Just to get one home economics room equipped at George Washington High School took Principal Henry Hillson nine years. The rapid rise of the city's teachers' union is due almost entirely to the frustration they experience trying to squawk into Livingston Street's tin ear.

The court of last resort--when things get bad enough--is the New York State board of regents, who enforce the state's three dense tomes of education law. In 1961, Livingston Street got all three volumes thrown at it. Aghast at school construction scandals, the state ousted the entire New York City board of education. Out went Superintendent John J. Theobald, under fire for using a vocational school to build him a pleasure boat in someone else's name. In came a new, lively, politically sanitized board charged with invigorating the schools, dealing increasingly with the militant teachers' union and finding the best superintendent in the U.S.

$$ for A's. After four months of scouring 56 major cities, the searchers, led by Dean Francis Keppel of Harvard's Graduate School of Education (now U.S. Commissioner of Education), solidly recommended Calvin Gross of Pittsburgh.

Gross was something unheard of at Livingston Street: a superintendent from outside the city. But he did have a New York tie. His father Harry, the son of an immigrant Jewish tailor, was born in Queens, went through New York public schools and graduated from C.C.N.Y. With his wife, whose maiden name was Calvin, Father Gross migrated to Los Angeles in 1916 in a Model T Ford. A math teacher and engineer, he soon became the no-nonsense principal of San Fernando High School.

Son Calvin learned early that learning pays--at least sometimes. At the age of four, his father promised him a dime "if you can tell me what three fours are." "Twelve," piped the boy. Surprised, his father asked how he knew and was told: "Well, two threes are six, so four threes must be twelve." Harry promised his son a dollar for each A on his report card, but chickened out when his son got more A's than a barrel of aardvarks.

Skipping three grades, Cal Gross at ten became one of his father's junior high students and manfully suffered the gibes of being "Old Man Gross's son." Skinny and underage, he survived by earning respect as one of the school's least likely football lettermen.

Keep This Man. With a quick mind of the math-and-music kind, Gross won honors in math at U.C.L.A. ('40) and picked up a Phi Beta Kappa key. R.O.T.C. led him to a lieutenancy in the Army, and as part of a wartime antiaircraft unit he followed the sweep from Normandy to Germany. He went home to meet a girl who had written to him in the Army as a fellow member of the city's high school honor society. She was bright, modest Bernice Hayman, daughter of a Los Angeles fire captain, and Gross promptly married her. Gross had attended Presbyterian Sunday school as a kid; he and Bernice worked in the Baptist church; now both are Unitarians.

While earning his master's degree at U.S.C., Gross became a math-science teacher in Los Angeles, went on to become chairman of the math department at Jefferson High School, a job held by his father 22 years before. Jefferson students were by then nearly all Negroes; the job gave Gross a closeup experience with the climate of a de facto segregated school. Gross's personnel record at the L.A. board of education glows with such encomiums as "Outstanding" and "Don't let this man go." But he went, in 1950, to take a one-year fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, under Dean Keppel.

In 1951 Gross slid into his first superintendency in Weston, a Boston suburb with one-thousandth as many students as he now has. His main dress rehearsal for New York came a few years later in Pittsburgh. That system is far smaller (114 schools, 77,500 students), but it had plenty of big-city problems when Gross took over. Aggressively recruiting in 18 states, Gross raised salaries 25% for beginners, offered a 10% merit bonus for master teachers. He brought in Andover's Dean Alan R. Blackmer to start a full menu of courses for gifted students, hired "lay reader" housewives to grade English compositions. Experiment-minded foundations gave Gross $1,500,000, and as one result Pittsburgh has the nation's biggest team-teaching effort--teams of subject-specialists teaching 8,500 pupils in mainly Negro neighborhoods.

Locked Doors. Gross is "a three-R man," and he interprets the goal of the R's as high intellectual attainment. He abhors "extraneous subjects," labels driver education "a good example of a certified, gold-plated frill," refuses to let schools "hang out shingles as baby sitters." Scornful of common-denominator teaching, he aims to concentrate on "children who are either very bright or fairly dull, or who seem dull because their intellectual potential is masked by the ravages of slum life."

For exceptionally bright pupils, he proposes two years of college work in high school--thus spurring lesser students to greater effort. For the dull, Gross has an equally sweeping prescription: absolute insistence on mastery of reading before a child is allowed to go on. When a child slips in reading, says Gross, "put him in a class that's half as big and double the time he spends on reading. If he continues to slip, cut the class size and increase the time once again, because he has to learn to read! If he can't read well, he'll find locked doors for the rest of his life."

To carry out this basic strategy, New York's new superintendent aims to use all the new tools of suburbia's academic reform. He welcomes the school curriculum ideas now coming out of universities. To free the bright and the dull from lock-step schooling, he wants all the new liberating procedures--non-graded classes, programmed learning, team teaching, flexible walls for flexible grouping. But no one man can decree this next Monday in New York's monolithic system, nor does Gross intend to. He has other methods.

One of his principles is that the top boss of a vast organization, be it New York schools, G.M. or the U.S. Army, can deal effectively with only about five subexecutives. Another is that dictatorship by the boss is ineffectual; shrilling orders only freezes minds and breeds bureaucracy. Instead, a leader should spur incentive and competition among hundreds of groups and individuals.

Small-Town Spirit. Ideally, perhaps, Livingston Street should be all but abolished, its garrison troops sent off to the trenches. That day is far distant. But going for Gross meanwhile is a happy heritage of the 1961 school scandal.

To put the people closer to the schools, the new board of education revived the spirit of decentralization. It appointed 25 local school boards to work with the city's 25 field superintendents, and they have generally proved to be composed of citizens avid to upgrade local schools. These boards are being consulted on such vital matters as building and integration, and Gross sees a chance to produce "something that makes sense--a small-town atmosphere that is totally unknown in big-city school systems."

Almost certainly the local boards will play a role in one of Gross's pet plans. Using foundation "startup money," he hopes to flood a few districts (notably in slum areas) with all the new academic reforms, thus attracting more money and setting new standards for all districts to match. This is an end run around Livingston Street's all-or-nothing inertia. "Systemwide reform brings in too much brass," says Gross. "It kills the teachers' spirit. We ought to let a few areas get out ahead, and then ask if the rest of the folks can catch up. What we need is real community participation and intramural competition."

l-Can-Do-lt. Everything Gross plans is aimed at giving teachers real freedom to use their abilities, "to try out a new idea, to make an original plan, to deviate for the sake of an individual pupil from a citywide norm or a prescribed routine. I want to see the shots being called as far down the line as possible." Nothing appalls Gross more than the bureaucratic arrogance that feeds what he calls the system's "I-can't-do-it neurosis." He abhors time clocks and lesson plans as "abominations" and says that "no one should have to stand around waiting for a civil answer--or be forced to shout to get one."

It is too early to measure Gross's success, but he has certainly set a new tone in New York City. He started off facing a double crisis that threatened to collapse the school system on opening day in September: civil righters were set to boycott schools in protest against de facto segregation, and the militant teachers' union was hellbent for a massive strike. Won over by Gross's tough minded sincerity, Negroes put off their boycott; softened by his ability to com promise, the teachers accepted a face-saving settlement.

Better yet, the union settlement produced something unheard of--what Gross is pleased to call "a sort of alliance between teachers and administrators." For the first time in its hoary history, the board of examiners has consented to hold exams outside the city; in the drive for more Negro teachers, it is setting up shop this month in Washington, D.C. Beginning teachers with a master's degree will get $6,425 a year--the nation's top lure for career teachers.

For the first time in 50 years, half of the city's first-graders are getting a full school day; elementary schools are team-teaching 7,500 pupils; 10,000 slow readers are launched on programmed-learning books. Starting next month, reading will be tackled at after-school study centers, and a new "sequential" system is aimed at forcing pupils to master specific reading steps before drifting upward. Gross has submitted a record one-year building budget of $223.8 million that calls for 37 new schools by 1965. And by 1970, he hopes to overhaul the entire school plant to the tune of $1.17 billion.

Unburied Bodies. Even the scandals have taken a different tone--now they crop up because Gross & Co. are deliberately unburying the bodies. To the shock of shoddy contractors, the city's able new school building boss, Eugene E. Hult, recently ordered a half-built $2,500,000 Queens school to be partly dismantled because of weak concrete. Hult also publicized the quaint fact that school custodians, who get lump-sum maintenance funds and are allowed to socket unspent money, have been geting rich in the process. Bushwick High's D. Paul Bishop reportedly got $53,000 ast year, topping Gross's salary by $13,000 and the mayor's by $3,000. The word is that the next overspending to be exposed is on chartered school buses. 'I'm delighted," says Gross. "The system is beginning to use initiative and muscle."

It is indeed, which supports a surging lope among New York's parents that "maybe this Dr. Gross really can save he schools." Gross himself says: "I can't claim I've done a damn thing, really, but I see the potential for getting a lot done. This town is full of great teachers who deserve recognition. It could have a really efficient and powerful school system. What I want is to get things to a point where a parent can't ake his child out blithely. I want him to lave to think mighty hard about what lis child is missing."

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