THE NEW SEGREGATION

...As the following table shows, the most common situation was one in which minority suspensions were far in excess of minority enrollment...

...At a 60 percent white high school in South Carolina, for example, 20 of 34 English classes were 80 percent white or black, and of these 20 classes 13 were 90 percent of one race...

...These figures and the even grimmer on-the-scene re-ports of desegregation attempts in such Northern cities as Boston do not, however, change the fact that the struggle for racial justice in the public schools is now taking on a new focus...

...Will the new segregation in the schools prove as difficult to remedy as the old...

...Indefinite suspension isn't the only way of forcing blacks out of the regular school system, however...

...The Goss v. Lopez case, in which the Supreme Court ruled only this January that a student may not be suspended from school without due process, originated in Columbus, Ohio, and grew out of a series of confrontations between white and black students that saw numerous black students suspended without notice or, hearing...

...The jewel of the city's secondary school system remains its elite academic high schools, which admit students on the basis of competitive exams and provide them with a college-preparatory education...

...pains of court-ordered desegregation, the pattern of discriminatory suspensions has been especially apparent: A case in point is the Gulf County School District of Northern Florida, which was ordered by the Fifth Circuit Court to establish clear standards of discipline and to end racially prejudiced suspension procedures...

...The tracking pattern reflected by New York City's elite high schools is not atypical, however...

...Not only were the two most prestigious gills' groups, the Twirlers and Cheerleaders basically segregated (only two of the 14 girls in them were black), but so was the newspaper (which chose its editors from the junior honors English class), and so was the yearbook...

...For the North, however, no such legal framework exists, and it is there that some of the worst tracking exists...

...The Gulf County example is not a rare exception, however...

...Lifting admission barriers to school clubs is an easy first step, and so is setting aside a period in the middle of the school day in which students can come together for an activity of their choosjng...

...The question is realty whether school officials are prepared to start taking such steps...

...In 1972 investigators com-piling the desegregation report, It's Not Over in the South, found one-race classrooms throughout the cities of the Old Confederacy...

...Yet the process by which school officials manage to keep non-white student out of "white" activities should not be overlooked, it is instrumental in preventing students of both groups, from knowing each other...

...At this point no accurate prediction is possible...

...The battle over these three tools of the new segre-gation promises to be as difficult as die battle for jobs and housing that followed the civil rights movement, but for the moment there is at least one bright spot...

...Students "indefinitely suspended" have thus been kept out of class for long periods of time, if not discouraged from ever returning...

...In the first year of desegregation, for example, the 276 black students at Port St...

...Even in New York City, where state and Board of Education laws protecting students from arbitrary suspension are among the best in the country, suspension has been used in a discriminatory and high-handed manner...

...As in most cities, the lower tanks in New York's schools are essentially custodial opera tions, and the vocational tracks provide little help with jobs...

...This article was done under the sponsorship of the Urban, and Minorities Center at Teachers College in New York...

...Old Confederacy...

...The same Supreme Court that, for all practical purposes, stopped most Northern desegregation by ruling in the Detroit school-bus case that the suburbs may exempt themselves from the racial problems of the inner city has shown itself willing to act against the new segregation...

...As Porter observed, where education is concerned, James Madison High "is not one school but actually two...

...A 1972 survey...

...Percent . Percent City Minority Enrollment Minority Suspensions New York 64.4% 85.9% Howton 46.4% 71.0% Cleveland 59.9% 70.8% Memphis 58.0% 70.2% Dallas 49.4% 68.5% In the South, particularly in school districts undergoing the...

...Politically "liberal" New York City, with,a school population of over one million students, 380,000 of whom are white, 700,000 of whom are black or Hispanic, provides a perfect case in point...

...Suspensions: In no other area has it been so easy for principals and teachers to take advantage of the ambiguity in school rules and act in a discriminatory fashion against minority children...

...Tracking: By grouping students, on the basis of standardized tests (often given during early elementary school) or teacher evaluations of academic performance, any number of school systems have found it possible to separate black and white students, even though they attend classes in the same building...

...As for the practice of unofficial exclusion, since school officials have tacitly and overtly encouraged it, they are in the best position to stop it, In the case of some schools, a new administration might be required if such a step is to be taken, but in most cases nothing so drastic is required...

...The investigators doing the research for Its Not Over in the South were able to cite case after case of Southern school officials manipu-lating rules in order to assure white control of student councils, and the councils were ironically often a sec-ondary concern by comparison with the extracurricular activities surrounding football...

...yet in only one case was a white deemed at fault...

...In contrast to the college-bound honors students, the "G" students knew they were marking time, and their class hour was generally spent either ignoring the teacher or creating a disturbance...

...Unofficial exclusion: In terms of the new segregation this area is the icing on the cake...

...conducted by among others, the Alabama Council on Human Relations, the Delta Ministry, and the American Friends Service Committee, found "special" schools in Little Rock and Savannah serving this function and more Southern cities making similar plans...

...IS the South suspensions are, moreover, frequently just the tip of the iceberg...

...THE NEW SEGREGATION NICOLAUS MILLS The struggle is taking on a new focus Twenty years after the Supreme Court's Brown decision and ten years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, segregation remains a way of life in America's public schools...

...Joe High in Gulf County more than twice as often as whites...

...In Columbia, South Carolina, during the first three months of one troublesome school year 741 blacks students as com-pared to 267 white students were suspended...

...Office for Civil Rights data show that 45 per cent of the country's black students are still in schools where enrollment is 80 percent or more minority, and in the 20 cities containing one-third of the nation's black students, over 81 percent are in schools where enrollment is 80 percent or more minority...

...During the four-year period studied by the Fifth Circuit Court, only one white student was ever expelled, while 22 black students (95.7 percent) were expelled...

...For school officials anxious to combat this situation, any number of practical measures are available, however, To deal with suspensions, for example, an obvious but important step would'be to have an ombudsman immediately hear out the parties involved...

...Even in schools where the chances for racial balance were good, segregated tracking was common...

...In-formation gathered by the Office for Civil Rights confirms this pattern...

...Desegregation per se is no logger the primary source of contention...

...The expulsion figures for Port St...

...But then ft is enough if they, begin to erode the process by which 20 years after Brown the nation's education system is affected by, discrimination as insidious as that with which the Supreme Court first dealt.which the Supreme Court first dealt...

...The figures for that County are similar to those for other areas of the South...

...At Seward Park High, for example, where only 20 percent of the school's Lower East Side residents are white, the vocational track might serve the vast majority of students...

...at Stuyvesant High 1,801 of the 2,436 students are white...

...In Norfolk, Virginia, for example, at prestigious Maury High, 48 percent of the student enrollment is black but in 1970-71, 96 percent of the suspensions involved black students...

...Even with recent court rulings on suspension and tracking, no quick solution to this e-lusive second generation racism is in sight...

...The formal abolition of the South's dual school system has not led to integration on a nationwide basis, nor even stopped resegregation in the 11 states of the NICOLAUS mills is the author of The Great School Bus Controversy (Teachers College Press...

...In the South parr ticularly, tracking has led to a second-generation racism in which black students once more find themselves in interior, segregated classes...

...Unfortunately, the suspension strategy, followed by so many Southern schools is not, as the figures cited earlier indicate, unique to the South...

...The sad part is that the North is not far behind in any of these abuses...

...Data from a Children's Defense Fund survey show that at the high school level black students are suspended three times as often...

...Joe High suffered 185 suspensions, while the 710 white students were suspended only 97 times...

...Of these expulsions, 11 were because of interracial strife...

...Blacks and whites can go there four years and never see each other in class except for, ten minutes a day in homeroom and one semester of hygiene...

...So as far as the South goes, there is at least a legal baste-although one implicitly limited by time- for attacking a good deal of die tracking now going on...

...In, a case involving Mississippi's Tate County School District, the Fifth Circuit Court rated this February that tracking that results in racially segregated classrooms may not be used by a school district that previously operated a dual school system without a period of time sufficient to assure that the underachieve-ment of slower students was not due to prior segregation...

...at Brooklyn Technical High 3,491 of the 5,651 students are white...

...The ombudsman would be neither a school official nor a student representative but someone they both chose, and the value of his office would be its impartiality and his ability to make decisions before an incident could fester...

...A no less effective tactic is to place a suspended student in a "special" school within the system...

...yet the machinery in the vocational program is out of date, and no one in the school has thought to introduce a course like computer operating into the curriculum...

...Joe High are even more telling...

...But even without changes in these two areas, ft is still possible for school officials to begin de- veloping tests that are not simply educational barom-eters but reveal potential...

...In his New York Times Magazine report on Iaines Madison High, Bruce Porter found the school's major extracurricular activities even more segregated than the classes...

...It may be all right to field an integrated football team, but a racially mixed band-above all, black and white cheerleaders-remains a problem in the South...

...As for tracking, that problem is not an easy one to solve so long as non-white students enter school with teaming problems or receive an inferior elementary education...

...In Montgomery, Savannah and New Orleans school principals have made extensive use of a procedure known as "indefinite suspension," whereby a suspended student is allowed to return to school only when the principal decides to readmit him...

...New York's prestigious Hunter High has, for example, reversed its admissions policy to take in 20 to 25 percent of its class on the basis of their academic promise rather than raw test scores, and, the result has been an important rise in their black and Puerto Rican enrollment and no loss in their academic standing...

...For Porter, the difference between an honor class, where a student might do calculus, and a "G" class, where arithmetic was likely to be the order of the day, was more than a matter of subject...

...Moreover, as is typically the case in the South, the fast, college-preparatory classes were for whites, while the slow classes were for blacks...

...To cite three examples: Office for Civil Rights figures show that at Bronx High School of Science 2,407 of the 3,161 students are white...

...yet they were suspended from Port St...

...But what would the "G" students have gotten if they had paid attention...

...A year ago pupils at one junior high in the Bronx were given the choice of being paddled or suspended, and even after they chose paddling, many were still suspended...

...In a study of Brooklyn's James Madison High, which recently appeared in The New York Times Magazine, reporter Bruce Porter found a situation in which the 900 blacks and 50 Puerto Ricans who make up 34 percent of the school's 2,800 enrollment rarely meet white students...

...Certainly none of these measures promises to end racism in the public schools...

...In these schools the majority-minority ratio of New York's public school population is reversed, and they do nothing so much as confirm the inferior early education of nonwhite students or the learning problems such students bring with them from home...

...Indeed, even in schools that, unlike Madison, have a majority of nonwhite students, the vocational sis is of little use...

...As for "regular" suspensions in New York City, a 1971 study by the New York Civil Liberties Union (during 1969-70), 14,000 students were suspended from New York schools) found that in every case it checked either state law or Board of Education rules were violated...

...Blacks constitute only 28 percent of the County's high school population...

...At issue is the treat-ment of minority students within "desegregated" systems and the use of suspensions, tracking and unofficial ex-citation to discriminate against these students...

...Often they are a tool for fording Hack students out of the regular school system...

...At Madison the "G" (for general) classes are over-whelmingly black, while the regular and honors sections are mostly white...

...Seventy-seven percent of the time students were suspended for illegal reasons, and 99 percent of the time neither the student nor his parents were given a specific reason for the expulsion, although the Board of Education requires such notice...

...Indeed, in no other non-academic area are examples of school officials bendiag rules and encouraging discrimination more common...