transition to achieve a new standard of educational excellence?

If these sound like "loaded" questions, then they befit the explosive nature of this panel's topic. All of us who care deeply about public education, of course, hope that the institution will respond positively to the times and come out of this difficult period stronger than ever before. Yet we also know of many communities, North and South, where the current response of education to the Negro American revolution is, to put it mildly, quite negative. The reasons for such reactions and the problems inherent in the central issue of school desegregation and racial balance are varied and complex. To open the panel's discussion on these concerns, this background paper briefly sketches out the problem and then raises five focal issues which often arise when school districts grapple with racial change.

II. The Problem

Without tracing the history of "Negro education," suffice it to say that the very need for the phrase "Negro education"-signifies the long-term failure of American education to include the Negro American on fully equal terms. Even today, public education for Negroes, when compared with that for whites, remains in general "less available, less accessible, and especially less adequate.' "1 In 1960, Negro college attendance was proportionately only about half that of whites; the percentage of adult Negroes who had completed college was considerably less than half that of whites; and the percentage who had completed high school was precisely half that of whites.3

Worse, in some sectors of Negro America these nonwhite to white differences are actually widening. This is particularly the case with farm Negroes in the rural South- —a segment that still comprises, despite heavy out-migration, over one-fifth of all Negroes in the United States. Thus, between 1950 and 1960, rural farm nonwhite to white differences in the completion of twelve or more years of formal education by the critical 25-to-29-year-old group widened in every one of the thirteen reporting southern states.

Simply enumerating racial differences in years of schooling, of course, only begins to suggest the enormity of the educational hiatus now existing between Negro and white Americans. Sadly, the blunt truth is that "Negro education" is generally grossly inferior to "white education" in both the North and South; it typically involves less expenditure per child, less trained and experienced teachers, and less adequate facilities; and it often prepares Negro youth through both its explicit and implicit curricula to assume only low-skilled employment befitting "the Negro's place" as decreed by white supremacists. We can all think, of course, of notable exceptions to these harsh generalizations. But they spring to our minds because they are precisely that-notable exceptions. The most marked exceptions are found in truly integrated schools, where the concept of "Negro education" finally loses its meaning.

This situation would be alarming in any period of American history; but, it can only be described as desperate at this particular point in our national history. Apart from Negro American protests, automation and its attendant effects on the composition of the American labor force leave us no time for careful and deliberate solutions. Though there is considerable controversy as to whether automation does in fact decrease the size of the total labor force, there is complete agreement that it demands major occupational upgrading. The employment shifts are familiar: unskilled and even semi-skilled jobs are swiftly disappearing, while professional and technical jobs are rapidly expanding. Their serious educational deficiencies, together with employment discrimination, render Negro Americans especially vulnerable to

twice those of adult whites, and Negro youth rates of unemployment are almost twice those of white youth.

Nevertheless, Negro employment has been upgraded in recent years, though the pace of this progress has hardly been breath-taking. Thus, at the rate of nonwhite gains from 1950 to 1960, nonwhites would not attain equal proportional represen tation in the nation among clerical workers until 1992, among skilled workers until 2005, among professionals until 2017, among sales workers until 2114, and among business managers and proprietors until 2730-eight centuries from now!5

Obviously, massive Negro educational advances are required for the equally massive Negro employment upgrading that must be accomplished in the next two decades. Indeed, the Negro American finds himself on a fast-paced treadmill. Significant educational gains will be necessary just for the Negro to keep up occupationally-much less progress-in this automated age. And there are indications that education may prove to be a major bottleneck to the Negro's needed gains in employment. Hence, major corporations, motivated by the equal employment imperatives of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, are already seeking many more technically-skilled Negro college graduates than are currently being produced by our educational system.

To be sure, public education can hardly be held solely responsible for the restricted numbers and quality of trained Negro Americans. Limited educational opportunities are only a part-though a critical part-of the complexly interwoven. "vicious circle" that narrows the Negro's life chances at every turn-low income, high unemployment, poor health care, inadequate housing, ghetto living, broken family life, etc.

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This point is relevant to two related claims that obscure the real issues undergirding educational considerations of race. Ignoring the Negro's typically lean environment, racists have made a recent resurgence with their claims of innate Negro inferiority. Thirty years of solid evidence, however, make it possible to state that these claims certainly have no scientific validity. A related claim also attempts to relieve the public schools of all responsibility for lowered Negro performance. It maintains that formal instruction is simply powerless to overcome the enormous deficits which many Negro children bring to the school situation-lowered motivation, poor speech patterns, broken family life, etc. This claim, too, is called into serious question as soon as one inspects the astonishing improvements in Negro performance made by truly imaginative school systems.

To say this is not to deny or minimize the real deficits from which many Negro children of impoverished backgrounds do in fact suffer. The job is difficult for any school system, and most of the problems are certainly not the making of the schools. But American public education has often been called on to tackle difficult problems that were not of its making. And it appears that, when approached with good faith, rich imagination, and full willingness to rise innovatively to the challenge, the nation's schools can meet this vital educational problem successfully.

The first order of business is the elimination of the de jure segregation of southern and border schools. The first eleven years after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling against de jure segregation of public schools have witnessed slow, but fundamental, alterations. By the fall of 1964, 43 per cent of biracial southern school districts had begun at least token desegregation programs that placed one out of every nine Negro southern school children in schools with white Southerners."

A disproportionate share of this progress, however, has occurred in the border South. While 93 per cent of biracial school districts in the border South had de

three out of every five border state Negro children attended biracial schools, only one in 47 did so in the ex-Confederate South. Yet there are unmistakable signs that this pace is quickening. The average annual number of newly-desegregated school districts in the South has recently increased three-fold, with the threatened cut-off of federal educational funds under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act proving to be an effective stimulant. Thus, if the first decade after the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation ruling can be described as a slow-paced era of judicial orders, then the second decade after the ruling promises to be a somewhat faster-paced Civil Rights Act era. 8

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Ironically, however, as de jure segregation of schools slowly recedes, de facto segregation is rapidly increasing. In literally every standard metropolitan area in the United States racial segregation of housing increased from 1940 to 1960.9 Consequently, the ever-growing Negro ghettoes combine with the neighborhood school principle to establish an increasingly entrenched pattern of racially-separate education throughout the urban North and South. The de facto segregation problem is particularly serious at the locally-based elementary level. Even in Boston, where the nonwhite population in 1960 constituted only nine per cent, there are seventeen elementary and two junior high schools with 90 per cent or more Negro pupils. 10 If anything, the shift from de jure to de facto school segregation complicates the issue further-though at least the shift frees the school system from virtually a legal mandate to discriminate. The judicial and legislative status of de facto segregated education is only now taking shape. Moreover, many southern cities are presently openly striving to emulate the northern de facto segregation pattern. Indeed, the normal processes of urban development-continuing in-migration of Negroes to the central city and out-migration of whites to the suburbs-lead to much the same situation without conscious planning for such racially separate patterns. In short, the de facto school segregation controversy now raging in the North and West will soon erupt in the nominally "desegregated" cities of the South. . . . In summary, the problem involves the need for a swift and massive expansion of educational opportunities for Negro Americans. The fact is, unless such an expansion occurs soon throughout the nation, educational deficiencies will seriously impair the Negro American's ability to keep up with, much less gain on, the employment upgrading required by automation. Not all of this problem can be attributed to public education; much of it is a result of poverty, poor health, broken homes, and all the other special marks of oppression borne by Negro Americans. But much of the problem is attributable to separate and inferior schools in the North as well as the South. And the problem of racially separate schools is growing more, not less, complex as it evolves from de jure to de facto segregation. Within this problem context, five focal issues worthy of panel attention can be identified.

III. Five Focal Issues

(1) Political pressures. The desegregating school system, and especially the school board, typically becomes the target of at least three distinct sets of political pressures: integrationist demands of committed Negro and white liberals; the fears of the less-committed, generally upper-status whites (who often mislabel themselves as "moderates" 12); and the resistant demands of committed segregationists (who, depending upon regional euphemisms, may call themselves anything from the Citizens' Council to Parents and Taxpayers). Thus, the basic question here becomes: how does a school system utilize these conflicting pressures to achieve racial desegregation and educational excellence?

The precise answer to this query will vary, naturally, according to the particular

cable principles in this session's discussion. Toward that end, a number of relevant considerations can be proffered.

First, integrationist pressures are not likely to recede. In fact, it is highly probable that the Negro American revolution will expand further-in terms of size, intensity, and the scope of its demands. 13 This process has already posed a dilemma for school officials. On the one hand, refusal to deal with Negro demands for integrated education usually leads to community crisis. On the other hand, changes made in direct response to sharp Negro protest often act to encourage further Negro pressure and to intensify white fears and resistance. The not-so-easy-to-accomplish ideal is to stay ahead of the issue, thereby averting crisis and the necessity to meet eyeball-toeyeball demands.

Second, white opinions on school desegregation have undergone extremely significant alterations throughout the country in recent years-far greater alterations than commonly recognized. Table 1 provides relevant data. Note the sharp shifts in both the North and South from 1942 to 1963, and the remarkable reversal in opinion toward token desegregation in the South from 1963 to 1965.

TABLE 1

CHANGING WHITE ATTITUDES TOWARD SCHOOL DESEGREGATION "Do you think white students and Negro students should go to the same schools or to separate schools?"*

White Northerners

White Southerners

Total Whites

Percentage Answering "Same Schools"

"Would you, yourself, have any objection to sending your children to a school

where a few of the children are colored?"**

*Studies conducted by National Opinion Research Center and reported in: H. H. Hyman and P. B. Sheatsley, "Attitudes toward Desegregation," Scientific American, July 1964, 211, Pp. 16-23.

**Studies conducted by the American Institute of Public Opinion and reported in: G. Gallup's press release of May 22, 1965.

Finally, we should not overlook the vital "off-the-hook" functions that federal desegregation pressures often provide for local school systems. Federal court orders and threatened withdrawal of federal monies furnish many embattled school boards, North and South, with the publicly-announced rationale they needed to desegregate. Indeed, one large northern city has allowed a de facto segregation school suit to

purpose of utilizing the suit as an "off-the-hook" excuse to carry forward its program of desegregation and educational upgrading. . . .

(2) The focus of responsibility. Mention of the effects of forces external to the local community introduces the next major question: where precisely is the focus of responsibility for expanding educational opportunities for Negro Americans? This, too, is a difficult query, for it immediately involves us in such thorny issues as the limits of local school control, urban annexation, and the needed suburban contribution to inner city education.

The greatest strength of American public education-local school district autonomy and control-is also often its greatest weakness. Racial desegregation and massive compensatory educational programs are examples of efforts that often need external support-political as well as economic. Recent federal legislation has certainly recognized this fact. Yet large outside aid complicates further an already complex and delicate relationship between federal, state, metropolitan area, and local district responsibility.

The focus of responsibility for racial issues, as with other educational issues, necessarily, then, becomes more involved. One point, however, is becoming increasingly clear: that is, urban desegregation and educational upgrading cannot long remain the sole responsibility of inner city school systems, even when bolstered by federal and state subsidies. In some cases, the central city is beginning to run out of white children in its public schools—as seen now in Washington, D.C. Central city enlargement through annexation, even when politically possible (as in Nashville, Tennessee and Richmond, Virginia), presents Negro leadership with a perplexing dilemma; for the same annexation process that brings white children into the school system dilutes Negro political power. Educators need not be surprised, then, if Negro leadership in their communities proves ambivalent at best in its attitudes toward annexation.

Suburban cooperation with central city desegregation and upgrading programs provides a more promising possibility than annexation. The so-called "white noose around the Negro's neck" must become a more positive force in racial change. But there are serious political and economic problems raised by such schemes, too; the urgent need for suburban involvement in inner city desegregation plans, however, commends this issue for special attention by the panel.

(3) Problems of how to do it. Much of the debate surrounding school desegregation has revolved around the practical nuts-and-bolts question: how can racially balanced education actually be implemented?

Again the precise answer must vary greatly with the particular community. But there is now a wide variety of devices from which a combination plan can be customstyled for each school system. These devices include: (1) the district-wide redrawing of school lines to maximize racial balance (positive gerrymandering); (2) the pairing of predominantly white and Negro schools along the borders of the Negro ghetto (the Princeton Plan); (3) the alteration of "feeder" arrangements from elementary grades to junior highs and from junior highs to senior highs in order to maximize racial balance (the balanced feeder plan); (4) a priority for and careful placement of new and typically larger schools near but not within the ghetto (the rebuilding plan); (5) the conversion of more schools into district-wide specialized institutions (the differentiation of teaching functions); (6) the establishment of broad educational centers covering many levels and programs (campus parks); and (7) the subsidized transportation of students (bussing). Considerable controversy has resulted from the use of this final device; indeed, much of the public seems unaware