Why the Government Is Threatening to Sue Chicago

LIKE youngsters in many large American cities, Chicago's schoolchildren learn--or fail--in an environment of apartheid. Blacks go to school with blacks, whites with whites. Worse, as far as the Department is concerned, white children study under white teachers, black children under blacks. Last week the Department warned the city that unless it takes steps to break up its "segregated pattern of faculty assignments" within two weeks, it will ask the courts to impose an integrated system.

Of Chicago's 3,585,000 population, 1,136,000 are Negroes. Although blacks constitute 34% of the city's 23,000 teachers, they are heavily concentrated in its 255 predominantly Negro schools. Of the more than 600 public schools, only 240 have integrated faculties, 214 have no black teachers at all, 12 have only black teachers. In Chicago's white working-class District 1, where black students make up 9.2% of the high school enrollment, black teachers account for only 1.4% of the faculty. In the Austin section, District 4, where Poles and Irish are gradually being replaced by blacks--who account for 26% of the high-school enrollment--there is only one Negro teacher among more than 100 whites. But in District 13, in the South Side ghetto, 99.9% of high-school students and 80% of their teachers are black.

The city's segregated schools are the result of ghetto housing patterns and fierce white resistance to school bussing. Faculty segregation is perpetuated by a powerful teachers' union and the ever-present threat of a strike if its resistance to mixed faculties is flouted. The union contract allows "regularly certified" teachers, who are generally also more experienced, great latitude in choosing the schools in which they will teach. Most senior teachers, who are mainly white, exercise this contractual right to seek transfers to schools in white areas, which means that less experienced and black teachers are assigned to pre dominantly Negro districts. It also means long waiting lists for assignment to desirable white schools. The waiting list for transfer to the 31-teacher Mount Greenwood School, in the white southwestern section of-Chicago, is 107 names long; some names have been on the list for seven years.

No one in Chicago has worked harder to break the city's pattern of segregation than General Schools Superintendent James Redmond. He has appointed a black deputy superintendent, Manford Byrd Jr., whom he is grooming as his successor, and recently named a black district superintendent and a black principal to serve in nearly all-white areas. But most of Redmond's more ambitious plans have run into solid opposition from white parents and teachers alike. His attempts to promote pupil integration by bussing were beaten down by a coalition of militant Polish and Irish voters. Efforts to achieve greater faculty integration by changing the teacher-assignment system ran into strong opposition from the teachers themselves, many of whom are frankly terrified at the prospect of working in violence-plagued ghetto schools. Redmond's policy collapsed when Mayor Richard Daley--who in 1965 thawed the HEW-imposed freeze on federal funds to Chicago schools with a call to Lyndon Johnson--threw his support behind the teachers' union.

Despite Redmond's patent good will, there seems to be no chance that the threatened lawsuit can be averted. Redmond is already faced with the prospect of cutting faculty strength by 7,000 teachers and reducing services because of the city's inability to meet the cost of a Daley-dictated contract. Now he must also contend with an obdurate union, whose president, John Desmond, has custom, state law and the public on his side and has vowed to defend the seniority system in court.

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