Common-Sense Compromise

PUBLIC SCHOOLS

If endowed by Providence with the right to perform one solitary, spectacular miracle, most school boards in Northern U.S. cities would use it to solves the deadlocked problems of de facto segregation. The Gary, Ind., board for example, concluded that it would not take any responsibility for desegregating its schools, and made its decision stick in the courts; the U.S. Supreme Court a fortnight ago turned down a chacne to hear the case. Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia are bogged down for reasons that range from white backlash to a school-board inertia. New York City's Board of Education hesitantly advanced and then igmoniniously cut back a proposal for big-scale pairing of mostly white and mostly Negro schools, which implied bussing many children back and forth.

Groping for another way out, the New York City board asked help from State Education Commissioner James E. Allen Jr., who turned to a committee* that seemed to have no better chance of finding a solution than the board itself. Instead, last week, after a two-month study, the committee made proposals that struck almost everyone with their common-sense compromise originality and insistenceon excellence. Essence of the plan was a drastic revamping of the existing school system, dividing a child's twelve years of basic education into three four-year segments.

>Primary schools would be neighborhood schools and thus segregated to the degree that the surrounding housing is segregated. But they would be better schools in ways that would particularly help culturally deficient slum children. Ungraded classes would let youngsters proceed at their own pace, aided by team teaching "and the imaginative use of space, materials and teaching devices." And primary education should be preceded by two or even three years of nursery and kindergarten to give slum kids the basic tools of learning.

> Middle schools would start the integration process by drawing from districts designed to contain both white and Negro primary feeder schools, which would require some bussing.

> High schools offering both academic and vocational courses would be open to any student in the city and thus provide the highest possible measure of integration.

>Off in the future, the committee envisioned giant "educational parks" where as many as 15,000 kids from 10 to 13 would troop each day.

The committee accused the Board of Education not only of failing to "stimulate even slight progress toward desegregation" but of letting segregation get worse in recent years. Whether Allen's advisers will accomplish anything more is mostly a matter of money and time. The state plan would cost an extra $250 million a year (current school budget: $840 million), and it could easily take a decade to fulfill.

* John H. Fischer, president of Columbia University's Teachers College; Kenneth Clark, City College psychology professor and Negro leader; Rabbi Judah Cahn of the Metropolitan Synagogue.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.