The New York School Crisis
Larner, Jeremy
UFT Official: Why is it we can get young people to volunteer for the Peace Corps to teach in Ghana, yet we can't get them to teach in public schools in Harlem? Answer: Because in Ghana,...
...Would it be heresy to suggest equal salary for every school position...
...On boycott day, whether from principle, fear of injury, or a natural desire to take the day off, 364,000 pupils stayed home...
...Third, cautious whites send their children to private or parochial schools rather than "risk" a neighborhood school where minorities predominate...
...They pointed out that at this rate the school system would never be desegregated...
...As they are at last beginning to .. . West Harlem 6th-grade boy (F): Teacher...
...6th-grade Harlem boy (F): Fable Once upon a time there was two men who were always fighting so one day a wise man came along and said fighting will never get you anywhere they didn't pay him no attention and they got in quarrels over and over again...
...6th-grade Harlem girl (S): I wish that the hold city can chage...
...Or will the Negro scrape through bloody, bitter and confused, ready to perpetuate the authoritarian ethic he has so far, to his unique credit, managed to evade...
...Thus the effort to "understand the disadvantaged child" turns out in practice to be the science of patronizing the slum-child without feeling guilty about it...
...The most quoted of these was inspired by the radio interviewer who asked him if there was a chance that the integration conflict might destroy the public school system...
...Yet, when all is said and done, are not these conditions surmountable by individual effort...
...But now automation is chopping away at the colony...
...So one day they went to church and the preacher said you should not fight and they got mad and knock the preacher out Can't find no ending...
...The lady under us robbed Teddy's aunt for $17.00's...
...In essence the December 3 plan was identical with the August plan: its basic approach was the free transfer program and a study of the Princeton Plan with a view to applying it at some unspecified date to only sixteen schools...
...This book is only to be read by men and women boys and girls who feel deeply serious about segrigation and feel that this is no joke...
...While the February plan was being drawn up, a sincere if belated effort might have been made to give the civil rights groups representation among those responsible for the planning of school integration...
...for the men of his world have not been accorded the honorable work men need to earn self-respect...
...They even had in the papers that this block is the worst block, not in Manhattan but in New York City...
...Unfortunately, teaching attracts types who enjoy relations where they have undisputed superiority...
...The answer to this question depends in part on our schools...
...Now take a sheet of lined paper and write at the top "English notes...
...Maybe it has run its course anyway, the public school system...
...Banding together as the Citywide Committee for Integration, they threatened a school boycott unless greater use were made of the techniques for massive rezoning...
...How did they get this way...
...According to the Harlem Youth survey, whose figures many observers regard as conservative, only one-half of Harlem children under 18 are living with both parents, more than one-quarter of Harlem youth receives welfare assistance, and the rate of narcotics addiction in the area is ten times that for the rest of the city...
...Looking around him, the young Negro boy will find few "father figures" to imitate...
...It would be unkind to expect too much of an organization so urgently needed and besieged with such difficulties as is the UFT...
...Even Leo Tolstoy, • Education courses are not the only obstacles in the paths of potentially valuable teachers...
...Most of the teachers are conscientious: that's one of the hallmarks of the professional person...
...The woman went on screaming while her listeners applauded her...
...Gross's office—manned by an extremely able public relations staff—made a big show of conferring with "responsible" parent groups, and staged several open meetings to collect "constructive" opinions from civic groups that had already published their opinions...
...Also, the civil rights groups demanded a "timetable," a guarantee that in a given number of years desegregation would be complete...
...Wherever Negro parents reach the middle class, at least some of them send their kids to private schools...
...When lower-class Negro children enter elementary school, they are already "behind" in several important respects...
...Sure enough, I found Riessman's book preaching "a sympathetic, noncondescending, understanding of the culture of the underprivileged...
...We ain't gonna pay no more taxes...
...You can't learn to make the big A unless you're looking...
...Even since the 1954 Supreme Court decision, the Board of Ed has never done much to relieve de facto segregation unless pushed...
...But neither Riessman nor the average teacher realizes how un-noncondescending sympathy delivered from the top can be: Moreover, self-expression and self-actualization, other aims of education, particularly modern education, are equally alien to the more pragmatic, traditional, underprivileged person...
...Kenneth Clark, disagree, it is hard to believe that the social conditions under which most New York Negroes live are not responsible for some of the difficulty...
...There is small hope of that masculine self-respect which is the traditional basis of family pride...
...There are also curriculum problems which integration will not necessarily solve...
...Most of those who stayed out did so in observance of the picket line...
...Bitter, confused, withdrawn, violent against one another, lower-class Negro men do not usually last long with their women...
...Efforts of the Board of Education in the past six years to eliminate blatant gerrymandering and allow some voluntary transfers have reduced by a third the number of schools where Negroes and Puerto Ricans are less than 10% of enrollment...
...their former teacher bitterly wonders how the life in them can survive...
...Mrs...
...Let's face it: what we're running is a baby-sitting service...
...What good is this union if it can't take a stand on the most important issue in our whole damn society...
...A Negro teacher told me that the last Higher Horizons film he had taken his class to see was about Jamaica, and every scene depicted Negro servants smilingly waiting on whites...
...It was some time before she could be quieted...
...As for the curriculum, it is hopelessly inappropriate...
...they can't look beyond the ends of their noses...
...So what the boycotters are demanding, ultimately (and more power to them...
...But we black people cannot by ourselves solve the problems of housing, unemployment and schools...
...The school should represent that possibility...
...The Citywide Committee, led by Galamison, went ahead with boycott plans...
...We bus blind kids, retarded kids, handicapped kids, 15,000 Open Enrollment kids, and thousands of private and parochial school kids...
...Segregation in ghetto schools is more than racial...
...Please help to get and keep them out...
...The fact that these kids have been encouraged to describe their surroundings is the first sign of hope that they will be able to change them...
...It was up to the experts to work out the details, he said...
...According to a study of the New York schools sponsored jointly by the PEA and the UFT, "30% of the daily instructional staff is made up of substitutes and other persons on similar temporary or emergency status...
...Instead, the school board, as in St...
...Norman, would you be so kind as to put your hand down...
...According to one assistant principal, It's the 2-8% who are unteachable and uncontrollable—the ones with very deep emotional disturbances—who take so much time and trouble in the lower neighborhood schools...
...Let me quote from two batches of essays which were gathered at different Harlem elementary schools from a 6th-grade class of "slow" readers (S) and a 6th-grade class of "fast" readers (F) . I think the language shows as much about the children— their educational retardation and yet their straightforwardness and toughness—as about the conditions they describe...
...The 6th-grade teacher quoted above reports that with a "slow" class he begins with checkers, and that it takes weeks to getthe children to play together without turning over the board and having at each other...
...These children are treated as inferior, just as their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were—and there is no sense of any possibility that such treatment is ending...
...The flattener was about a half inch over his head now he made a decision he would have to kill the ladie bugs he quickly pressed the button...
...The "600" schools have no more room anyway...
...You don't have paper...
...Lowerclass Negro kids find themselves isolated in schools which are understaffed, underequipped, overcrowded, demoralized, and conspicuously lacking in the mixture of cultural backgrounds which can make life in New York such an educational experience...
...The classroom confronts the child with the same old arrangement: a woman with too many kids...
...NY Times editorial, Jan...
...On August 23, Superintendent Gross submitted a plan calling for a free transfer program—wherein any pupil in a school with a high percentage of minority enrollment might transfer to any school with an empty seat for him, transportation supplied by the city...
...Whether or not the boycott represented the Negro people as a whole is another question...
...I say "revolutionary" because at times the driving figures behind the boycott spoke with that appetite for pure destruction which far exceeds the reasoned desire for social reform...
...6th-grade boy (F): This story is about a boy namely me, who lives in a apartment in and around the slum area...
...You just can't talk that way about a child entering elementary school...
...Until the problem is understood and attacked on this scale, the local projects of the Negro movement cannot achieve their full objectives...
...If such a development gains further momentum, the civil rights movement will continue divided against itself, exhausting itself in desperate forays...
...He read them Greek myths and stories, and they wrote him back their own myths, classic transformations, and one boy even wrote an illustrated history of the Trojan War...
...Life in the big city goes on somehow, though where it goes no one knows...
...Our ideal should be schools in which each child can develop as an individual, according to his capacities and desires...
...The only remedy was for parents to keep their children home...
...In a bit of brilliant improvisation, Galamison when interviewed on TV pledged that his demonstrators would remain nonviolent, but warned that nonviolent action often attracts "sociopaths" to the scene...
...Not only is one out of every two teachers a substitute, but some classes may stay without a regularly assigned teacher all year, defeating one temporary substitute after another...
...There's no place to put them...
...He visited their homes, which is absolutely unheard-of...
...Galamison, in order to keep the various member groups of the boycott organizations together, had reluctantly agreed that the boycott would last one day only—would be, in effect, a demonstration rather than a reprisal...
...if they could not get their paperwork properly submitted and filed, the system would collapse...
...Donovan, missing no opportunity to put his foot in his mouth, was quick to announce that the boycott had been "a fizzle...
...But the problem gets more difficult all the time, as is indicated by the fact that 52%—an outright majority—of the city's 1st graders are Negro or Puerto Rican...
...there were some high IQ's, but it was not an "SP" (specially gifted) class and had attracted no special attention to itself...
...Others, with the best will in the world, are baffled by children who literally speak a different language...
...They're impossible...
...I've worked for the NAACP for years, but I don't want 300 years of wrong to weigh upon the shoulders of my 5-year-old...
...Second, discrimination, economic pressures, and lack of effective planning confine the newcomers to ghettoes...
...Young Negro man teaching kindergarten in Harlem: The unfortunate thing about the black teachers is that they are threatened by these kids —because the teachers themselves have swallowed the middle-class dogma hook, line and sinker...
...The current teachers' pay scale is based on these pointless credits, and to upset it would invalidate years of useless course-taking...
...At any given moment, only about five of her children are paying attention, and at least three-quarters of the words she utters are devoted to discipline...
...Then there is the problem of the teachers themselves and their organization, the UFT...
...An occasional movie or trip to the museum does not effectively change a child's view of himself or help him learn what he is not learning...
...Dismal to tell, the schools in many ways duplicate the situation of the homes...
...Instead of responding with a guarantee of safety for all children attending school, he ranted that he would hold Galamison "personally and criminally responsible" if any child, Negro or white, were injured during the boycott...
...Some newspapers criticized Donovan and the Board for going beyond Gross...
...The Board of Education says the facts are essentially beyond its control...
...There are 132 elementary schools and 31 junior high schools in New York City whose students are almost entirely (over 90% in the elementary schools...
...Maybe the most important thing for them is to have a teacher who will expect something from them, let them know there is some authority who cares...
...Besides, men like Philip Randolph and James Farmer supported the boycott from the beginning, as did most other Negro leaders from Jackie Robinson to Martin Luther King...
...Easier said than done...
...Due in part to the machinations of a rurally-dominated state legislature, the City and its residents pay 49.7% of all state taxes and get back only 37.3% in benefits...
...This stand drew the fire of both sides...
...We can't even assign them to a "600" [special problems] school without their parents' permission...
...Even though the City tax rate is high, moreover, funds collected are minimized by the gross undervaluation of property holdings...
...And the civil rights groups began to argue among themselves about just when and how they would take further action...
...Or, as one of the fable-teller's female classmates puts it: I think the white people should stop taking advantage of the color people before they get punched in the face...
...Civil rights leaders are] dealing in jingles [instead of] constructive, practical plans...
...His teacher: We've got to keep these kids from exploding ten years from now when they grow up and can't get jobs...
...It is estimated that 85% of the 8th-grade students in Harlem are "functional illiterates," which means that their reading is not above 5th-grade level —in many cases it is much below...
...In terms of its own objectives, too, it was successful, forcing a more definite integration plan than the Board of Ed would ever have volunteered...
...6th-grade girl (S): I don't like people going around youing bad Lanugwsh around litter Kide a bearking in Store and fighting and youing dop...
...Replied the Reverend, I would rather see it destroyed...
...Both plans were to "include provisions for a substantial, realistic and working program of integration in every school district in September, 1964...
...The UFT was caught in a difficult position...
...for the more intelligent members of a certain junior high school, with the result that their achievement levels went up considerably, many fewer of them dropped out of high school, and more went to college...
...As indeed it should be, but the effect of such ambition is to pull the teachers away from political action...
...I think we are on the threshold of a new political movement—and I do not mean it in the party sense—that is going to change the face of New York in housing, in jobs and in schools...
...6th-grade boy (S): I deslike the peple being hit by cars, the car crashes, peple fighting, the peple jumping of roofes, stelling paper from the stores, peple picking pocketes, the peple with out thir cubs on dogs and stop peple from taking dop in this naborhood...
...Johnson, too, was applauded...
...By the time they reach junior high school, ghetto children are well aware of their social situation, and it does not exactly give them a feeling of unlimited possibilities...
...It was conceived as a political device to seem to be doing something for integration...
...One of the effects of such grouping is that in schools where a small population of whites remains, it is in effect segregated vertically in the advanced classrooms...
...In contrast to the political publicity stunts of the school system's critics, it offers a realistic and at the same time dramatic road to improved education for slum children...
...Most of the 600,000 Puerto Ricans have come in the past decade, while the white population has dwindled by 500,000...
...The boycott was a punch thrown off-balance: it brought on all the reaction to a punch in the face without gaining enough of its satisfaction...
...and whites...
...It would seem, too, that for some the boycott only reinforced doubts as to the value of nonviolent protest in general...
...the catch is that the City also has stupendous upkeep expenses...
...6th-grade girl (S): I am not satifeyed with the dope addictes around our block...
...The best teacher I met in Harlem had taken a class of bright 6th graders who up to that time were demoralized and undisciplined...
...And drunk in hallwall...
...Instead Donovan chose to confirm their opinion of him...
...Perhaps it's already lost by the time 1st graders move to the 2nd grade, when only 107 of them are on reading level...
...To open the Free Transfer program, 65,000 questionnaires were sent out to eligible families and only 5,500 applications were returned...
...No...
...in fact, since most Negro children lag in classroom skills, it might not do them much good to be thrown in with white children of their own grade level—at least not without drastic changes in the present set-up...
...Of course this particular teacher will get his kids talking and thinking about time and space and jobs and where the money comes from...
...drug addiction, for example, will begin to appear in their ranks while they are still in junior high school—and addiction is only the most dramatic form of withdrawal and defeat...
...Because your child's future and my child's future are bound up together...
...Which proved to the Board that Negro parents are interested in improving their neighborhood schools rather than in integration, and to the Committee that it is asking too much to expect individual parents to make exceptions of their kids...
...But after a month have we received any materials...
...James Allen, called for all local Boards of Education to submit plans to end "racial imbalance" in the public schools, the Board of Ed was not unresponsive...
...According to Martin Mayer, "New York City employs more people in educational administration than all of France...
...Now can you make a big A? Let's see if you can...
...The unemployment crisis indicates a natural alliance between the Negro and the labor movement: they must jointly demand full-scale public works programs to construct race- and class-integrated schools and housing, even whole new decentralized cities...
...Consequently, the union straddled the issue, passed a vague motion in favor of integration, and vowed it would defend any teacher penalized beyond loss of a day's pay for his absence on a matter of individual conscience...
...Most of them are long since lost...
...One can see that the atmosphere in minority schools is hardly conducive to learning...
...I feel that other people should be interested in what I have to say and just like me, try to do something about it, either by literal or diatribe means...
...We're not against bussing, we're against the Negro...
...The issue is by no means so simple as Galamison often made it out to be: We feel that if we desegregate the public schools, these other problems —like overcrowding, low curriculum, etc.—will go away...
...The little boy is regarded as inferior to the little girl, and has less chance of survival—by which I mean simply less chance of getting through life without cracking up, without sliding into some form of self-obliteration...
...Most experts now agree, however, that homogeneous grouping leads to stereotyping of individuals and is not desirable on the grade school level...
...There was great stress on beefing up minority schools through special "crash" programs: as a starter, the Board initiated an after-school study center program, to begin immediately, under which some teachers would receive extra pay to help pupils who stayed to do homework or receive extra instruction...
...The Board's final plan was supposed to be announced on February 1, and if it were unacceptable the boycott was scheduled for February 3, the first day of the new semester...
...Reading this book, they told me, had helped them to understand the nature of the children they had to deal with...
...all they wanted for the schools was money...
...for they envision a day when the UFT will be an important voice in making educational policy...
...His failure, our failure...
...And you're not looking...
...As for the timetable, Gross disposed of that with a masterpiece of white liberal rhetoric: Like other cherished aspirations and ideals of humanity, [the timetable] represents a direction rather than a fixed point, and a general movement upward...
...Schoolteachers are especially prone to what used to be called bourgeois individualism—which is the greatest virtue of the best and the most exasperating failure of the mediocre...
...the advice of his group had been consistently rejected anyway...
...Otherwise, any plan might amount to lip service...
...This whole subject of bussing has been caricatured and exaggerated by these same anti-Negro values that created segregation in the first place...
...the civil rights groups say they are the facts of a racist society, and must in all justice be eliminated by whatever means possible...
...If the opposition—or the reluctant approval—of national leaders like Roy Wilkins was recorded on the front pages, local leaders could legitimately claim the stronger grassroots contacts...
...One of the conspicuous failings of the boycott was its lack of political content...
...Not necessarily the national civil rights organizations, which for years have been run by small cadres of dedicated people, some of them white, who struggle to collect dues from their rosters of mostly inactive members...
...The boycotters pointed out that it would leave the bulk of the ghetto schools untouched...
...You cannot accept the privilege of being superior because you're white any damn more than I can accept the stigma of being inferior because I'm Negro...
...over 85% in the junior highs) Negro and Puerto Rican...
...The civil rights groups were up in arms...
...But for that one year they produced a body of work uniquely theirs...
...Financial shortages drastically affect the operation of the schools...
...Who could...
...They have a priority on operating funds, too...
...Because they have to spend so much time on discipline.* Because they get poor support from their principals and from the rest of the top-heavy school bureaucracy...
...wiskey and go to sleep And I not happy about the peole who come in my hallway and go up stairs and take a neals and, stick there themselve in the arm...
...It is true, however, that New York has done more for school integration than other cities of comparable size...
...Furthermore, much of the non-school bite on New York's property taxes goes to pay for problems that only large cities have—such as the costs of tearing up streets and assigning extra police to direct traffic when property owners decide to pull down or put up new buildings for their private profit...
...5th grade Lower East Side boy (F): I have a problem that I am colored...
...One problem that will not go away is that of money...
...Galamison on bussing: Anyose who says he's in favor of integration and the neighborhood school is a liar—he's in favor of segregation...
...Will we have to chip away at our stone walls to let them in, as the Trojans did for the Greek horse...
...There is obviously something rhetorical about these statements...
...By the morning of the boycott, most teachers were sincerely trying to look beyond their noses but not at all sure that the issues were clear to see...
...As the teacher starts on the little a, I do what most of the kids want desperately to join me in: escape...
...One young white teacher, extremely hard-working and perhaps more honest than most, told me after a grueling day, I hate these kids...
...I never thought I'd become so authoritarian...
...Only if the boycott failed to produce significant changes would it be repeated...
...In the opinion of this observer, no one could sit for long in Harlem classes without seeing overwhelming evidence of the demoralizing effects of segregation...
...Is it not possible for the majority of these youngsters to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, as so many of their 2nd-generation American teachers say that they or their parents did...
...Yet the union, although ambitious to work out a joint recruiting program with the Board aimed at attracting Negro teachers from the South, shows little interest in this question...
...And the boycott was on...
...In the classroom of a 1st-grade teacher who was a militant supporter of the boycott, I was surprised to find cut-out pictures of white children used almost exclusively as bulletin board illustrations...
...Thelma Johnson, who was onstage as a representative of the Harlem Parents Committee, made the following reply: I offer you your child's future...
...Nevertheless, its paper achievements will be proudly recounted by the functionary flown to a conference of "educators" at public expense...
...Thus New York City suffers from an educational problem which it has come to describe as de facto segregation...
...But what difference does high school make...
...Hurry up, I haven't got too much time...
...Negro parents, for their part, might well wonder what changes a boycott might make in the depressing economic conditions they face...
...And so many teachers are mediocrities in the world of adults—timid, stubborn, and prissy...
...it seems Negro children are naturalborn fable-writers, for—as we have seen—they are not likely to pull their punches when it comes to the moral...
...Losing false friends was one thing, but the boycott did not do enough to make positive supporters...
...I would have all the people I liked to get out of the block and then I would become very tall and have big hands and with my big hands I would take all of the narcartic people and pick them up with my hand and throw them in the nearest river and Oceans...
...They don't even know what checks are...
...boycott leaders were predicting 50,000 absences and were ready to call that a victory...
...Even at best our schools educate our young to fit into a world where ability is measured by quantity only...
...The missionary approach is well articulated by a writer in Commentary (January, 1964): The draining away of the white middle classes from the public schools could probably be slowed down by the addition of more cultural opportunities to the curriculum...
...Is it really true, as the 1954 Supreme Court decision contends, that "Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children...
...In front of the class stands a shy, finger-sucking little girl, her hair in pigtails, absolutely adorable and black...
...And Killing people...
...the purpose of an American education is to replace these values with symbols of measure...
...They are so many bums in our block...
...Most teachers feel that the after-school study centers have been a total flop...
...Not until Bayard Rustin joined the Committee just before the February 3 boycott were there any great efforts in this direction...
...Though some authorities, e.g...
...But I think the white liberal has had to do a lot of thinking in the past year—answer a lot of questions—and when he answers those questions he finds he's not a liberal after all...
...Concepts of art, science, knowledge, creativity for their own sake survive at kindergarten level only...
...He read them French translations and they wrote him parables and fables...
...Now it is a year later, the kids are dispersed into a notoriously depressing junior high, and most of them have lost what they gained...
...What effects did the boycott have...
...And those kids who most need to stay don't...
...No one knew what to expect...
...Little by little most groups surfaced into the middle class, leaving behind among unlucky remnants of themselves a permanent body of American Negroes, who, handicapped by years of slavery and oppression, remained what a Negro teacher describes to me as "a colonial people encapsulated within the colonial country...
...theoretically Manhattan is worth only $13.5 billion—but don't try to buy it if that's all you can raise...
...To be specific, the value of taxable property per pupil in New York City is $31,878, far above the state average of $26,600...
...As one Harlem teacher involved in the program told me: It's bull...
...Speaking at a rally January 31, he reminded his listeners that the Negro is at the center of all America's problems...
...At present, there is not enough room, time, or personnel to take care of all the children...
...Besides, relations with the Board of Ed were tenuous, and the UFT leaders wanted to improve them...
...The highly-touted Open Enrollment program was initiated in the fall of 1960 only after neighborhood school strikes and the threat of further strikes led by Rev...
...The machine stoped he was saved and the ladie bugs were dead...
...Like when you have an injection, and you take a shot of penicillin...
...One could go on by describing a series of tests and achievementlevels, but tests and levels are irrelevant to children who mostly do not pass or reach them...
...What can be said of a society which reduces its culture to True-False and multiple-choice tests even on the college level...
...I never talked to a single good teacher who claimed to have learned anything of value in these courses...
...6th-grade boy (S): Im not happy about the people who dink...
...First of all, there is the school bureaucracy...
...Of all groups involved the most bewildered and uncertain were the teachers...
...If a teacher doesn't in some way enjoy being alive he has nothing to teach...
...Students tend to mistrust the motives of guidance interviewers from class backgrounds different from their own, and to put them on...
...This plan drew attack from both sides...
...I would like to be handsom but I cant because other people have strait blond hair and they are handsom...
...As the crisis developed, Dr...
...Some dope backs live under us...
...and it is this ratio on which state aid is based...
...The battle is lost long before then...
...In such a bureaucracy, the people who move toward the top are the yes-men, the round pegs, whom the public pays to rise away from the children...
...I asked for only those who didn't have pencils to raise hands...
...Yet to read the papers, and to hear the president of the Board of Education, one would think that the Negro could not be "responsibly" represented unless Booker T. Washington dropped down from heaven for a cup of tea...
...In crowded tenement apartments children are in the way from the moment they are born...
...For the disadvantaged child, of course, is really not that at all, no matter what it helps one to know about his background: he is a person, and as such something splendid in his own right even before a teacher gets to him...
...and that the governor make new laws, that there to be no dirt on streets and no gobech top off and wish that my name can chage and I wish that whether can trun to summer...
...What is needed for the classroom above all else is a free and democratic, truly revolutionary society based on human value instead of compulsive striving, competition and accumulation...
...But this was only a pilot program which did not reach every child even in the school where it took place...
...To date Open Enrollment busses at city expense only 15,000 children each day...
...UFT Official: Why is it we can get young people to volunteer for the Peace Corps to teach in Ghana, yet we can't get them to teach in public schools in Harlem...
...Small wonder that one of the best teachers at this school could not get enthusiastic about the boycott: What if the boycotters are successful and get the Board to come up with a plan...
...Let me quote the girl who warned of "a punch in the face": If I could change my block I would stand on Madison Ave and throw nothing but Teargas in it...
...Almost never has the New York Board of Education voluntarily taken steps for greater integration...
...In Chicago, for example, the Negro sections lie in two long narrow strips, so that it would be easy to pair off overcrowded Negro schools with adjoining white schools...
...The teacher disciplined them, yes, kept them in order, but did it not to triumph but to show them he cared...
...Kids from "underprivileged" homes want to express themselves and realize themselves just as much as anyone else...
...Donovan on TV: The grave danger here has been that the responsible leaders...
...The essence of the new "first plan" (as it was mysteriously called) was that 10 out of 31 segregated junior highs and 20 out of 134 segregated elementary schools would be Princeton-planned, and a definite and quick timetable was announced for this...
...The big question is, will they come in having truly changed and purified and reformed our social structure, as some say they must...
...You can't talk to them about the future—say, about jobs —because they won't know what you're talking about...
...Open Enrollment is a voluntary transfer program designed ostensibly to relieve overcrowding as well as to integrate...
...At the Harlem school where the 6th-grade "slow" letters I have quoted were written, the principal assured me, I don't notice any demoralization on this level...
...Later I found the purified faces of Sally, Dick and Jane beaming out at me in ghetto classrooms of teachers Negro or white, liberal or not: as if to say, these are what good children are like...
...In fact, despite the teacher shortage, there are a number of employees listed on the Board of Ed budget as classroom teachers who never report to their assigned schools...
...Such demagogic devices as the projected school boycott and the Public Education Association's "March on Albany" create divisions in the community that impede integration, rather than advance it...
...Otherwise they are surrounded, as the little girl says...
...As a result, many whites and Negroes alike remained puzzled and gave only passive support...
...To give you an idea of these kids six years later, here is the teacher of a 7th-grade English class...
...Judges were Leslie Fiedler, Mary McCarthy, and Walter van Tilburg Clark...
...Ironically, the policy directives they type, like great portions of our public school funds, may never filter down to the classroom...
...Donovan to press: [The Board of Ed] is doing more than those who are advocating freedom now and integration now...
...First, rural minority groups are moving into the city and middle-class urban whites are heading for the suburbs...
...Alas for the PEA...
...Afterwards one of the rebel teachers said to me, Yes, I know the union might be destroyed...
...The size of classes, usually around 30 pupils per class, makes individual attention—and thus the development of positive identity and incentive—as unlikely at school as it is at home...
...Whereupon they laugh...
...Whether they know the word "discrimination" or not, these kids know they are not worth much to the world they live in...
...Most of the children wrote novels, and one 11-year-old boy, without having read a single modern novel, began a remarkable autobiography with the sentence, "I am dreaming and crying in my sleep...
...Though they're fantastically sophisticated, more sophisticated than maybe they ought to be, about how adults behave, their mental orientation is almost utterly without abstract concepts...
...ityville...
...Or is this problem unique somehow, does it have to do with the unprecedented oppression and separation of a group that has never in the history of this country been free...
...I count: of 23 portraits, 1 red, 1 green, only 2 brown, and 19 white as the paper they're drawn on...
...The Negroes Neither did the boycott clear up the confusion among those Negroes who had, as requested, given the civil rights organizations "the benefit of the doubt...
...she set fire to Doris's door...
...This, in turn, would still the fears of Negro leaders about racial imbalance...
...The most pressing practical issues are submerged in the desire to preserve their "professional image...
...Also, the Negro has a natural basis for alliance with those liberals who fear the militaryindustrial complex: they must jointly demand that a substantial portion of the annual multi-billion defense budget be diverted for education and social reconstruction...
...A major classroom problem is that one or two children can disrupt an entire class and dissipate most of the teacher's energy...
...Teaching middle-class children the ins and outs of a culture made for them is obviously easier than struggling with ghetto children, most of whom are members of a racial group which has never been allowed to recover from the effects of slavery...
...The $200 million does not include extra funds urgently needed for new construction...
...I doubt, for instance, that there is a single public school in this country where children are given a chance to learn at their individual rates of speed and without grading...
...Those of its officers who were sympathetic to the boycott felt they were way ahead of the membership, so far ahead that open support could lead to mutiny and collapse of the union...
...But the manner in which teachers are trained and chosen—which I will discuss below—is practically guaranteed to eliminate those possessing the imagination and flexibility to get through to slum children...
...Beyond that Gross announced the pairing of two junior high schools, some limited rezoning, and a number of studies, advisory groups and community cooperation gimmicks...
...But experts also agree that heterogeneous groupings cannot effectively be taught unless class size is reduced to no more than 15 children, a procedure which would require twice as many classrooms and teachers...
...The class didn't like it, though not all of them could say why...
...I am desatifed with the lady that live under us...
...Furthermore, they discourage many of the specially talented people gathered in New York City from seeking employment as public school teachers...
...Among the children of a certain Harlem school that was empty on boycott day, there was great fear of "integration," for rumor had it that white kids were coming to fight the black kids...
...with all his genius, his wealth, his command, and with not a single bureaucrat to hamper him, could not educate his peasants into free men...
...The only positive event in the final stages of preboycott hostilities was the entrance of Bayard Rustin, Coordinator of the March on Washington, who evidently decided that if this boycott was going to occur, it would be better off with him than without him...
...From her neck hangs a large square of cardboard, on which an adult has painted the head of a white girl with abundantly flowing golden hair...
...Though there was some truth in this sort of statement, it was not the most useful kind to make...
...On the other side, an organization called Parents and Taxpayers prepared to go to court to save neighborhood schools and the purity of their children...
...After the success of the boycott, however, the only "new political movement" in the offing was a national group coordinating school boycotts in big cities across the nation...
...In the middle of December and again on December 31, Galamison led picketing and sit-ins at Gross's office which resulted in the arrest of 62 demonstrators...
...Few people, black or white, fully understood the aims of the boycott...
...the failure is always the same: the failure to educate each man—not for a prestigious "function" or "role"— but to fulfill his own capacities for living, for being alive, for finding and making his own kind of beauty, for respecting the diversity of life without, in his frustration, turning to violence, self-suppression, and the worship of authority...
...to get comparable income, you gotta have comparable training...
...One of the transformations begins, "I was transformed from a poor little infant into a nice boy, and as I grew I was transformed into a magnificent extraordinary deceiving nuisance to the world...
...That's not funny...
...Teachers from the South or from Puerto Rico with advanced academic degrees may find themselves disqualified on the interview section of the teachers' license exam for "speaking English with an accent...
...Then he brings out the readers...
...In every ghetto school I visited, teachers recommended a book called The Culturally Deprived Child by Frank Riessman...
...Boys and girls, we're not getting our work done and if we don't settle down we won't be able to have recess today...
...In a 2nd-grade Harlem classroom the teacher, a lively, intelligent Negro woman, has her kids acting out a nursery tale...
...And why assume that the official "culture" is truly educational...
...Bussing is worth it for me because I'm on the lower end...
...The local Urban League went along as a supporting member and later the Committee was joined by Puerto Rican groups also...
...Real estate in New York's five boroughs is currently valued at the bargain total of $35 billion...
...It's hard to believe that they do a lot of good...
...If I could do this you would never see 117 st again...
...Gross evidently felt that his professional competence was being challenged...
...You hear all this talk about our losing friends, but what friends do we lose...
...While the adults of the matriarchal clan unit work or wander, children are brought up by older children, who have reasons of their own to feel impatient or harassed...
...That's the trouble with unions in this country...
...6th-grade girl (F): (True) What a Block...
...6th-grade West Harlem boy (F): How come we don't have no Negro president...
...A good teacher is someone with a talent for getting through to children and letting them get through to him...
...An individualism of petty crankiness is perhaps most pronounced in the Negro teachers, some of whom struggle mightily not to think of themselves as Negroes...
...The families are matriarchal, the children remaining with their mothers while a succession of "uncles" come and go...
...I remember one young teacher with an all-Negro "slow" 1st grade, extremely conscientious and worried that she is not more successful, yet unaware that her tone of voice is superior and humorless...
...6: The saturation program combines imagination with good sense...
...How much longer must I prove to be your superior in order to be accepted as an equal...
...One night a dope addict went cazey in our hally way...
...Later he wrote a letter saying he was misquoted and sent it to the leaders of national, not local, organizations...
...In the 196465 state budget, New York City, which has 34% of the state's schoolchildren, is slated to receive only 25% of total state aid to schools...
...The boycott leadership made only token efforts to reach them, and up to a week before the boycott they were hopelessly confused and uninformed...
...When Bayard Rustin made his last-minute entrance into the boycott organization, he tried to broaden the perspective...
...By contrast, Bayard Rustin knows what he wants, and hopes against hope it will come about peacefully...
...As a rule the Special Service personnel are resented by other teachers...
...Many of them know little of what goes on in their own schools and make no effort to learn...
...So transporting kids from their neighborhoods will not by itself guarantee them an integrated classroom experience...
...Meanwhile press and public worked themselves into a frenzy about "bussing," and the notion was widespread that the leaders of the boycott were fanatics who did not really speak for the civil rights organizations...
...true) My block is the most terrible block I've ever seen...
...In Open Enrollment overcrowded schools (mostly minority schools) are designated as "sending schools, whose pupils may apply—on an individual basis—for transfer to "receiving" schools in other neighborhoods...
...I mean that literally...
...to get comparable training, you gotta have comparable education—and here the schools are turning out thousands of retarded Negro children each year...
...Look: they don't even know who pays the welfare...
...There are at lease 25 or 30 narcartic people in my block...
...The subject of New York's schools and what's wrong with them cannot entirely be discussed in terms of more cash, more teaching and more integration...
...Meanwhile, on January 5 Gross announced to the press—in language worthy of the pentagon—a "saturation program" for minority schools, involving "task forces" of "hand-picked" teachers, who with the cooperation of universities and teachers' colleges would carry out a program of "reading mobilization...
...Bright, educated people who want to try their hands at teaching children can't, not in New York, not even if they have PhD's, unless they are willing to go back to school for their "education credits...
...The job of the principal is to spend his time in educational conferences, or addressing committees, or preparing reports for higher-ups who never come to check...
...Also beyond the reach of the boycott is the teacher herself, who is often unaware of her middle-class attitudes and the damage they do her ability to teach...
...We must open the door and let them in...
...The friends who are only friends as long as things stay the way they are...
...Now they must be allowed that dubious privilege...
...they look as though they have drawn curtains across the inside of their eyeballs...
...for of New York's 1,100,000 Negroes, 340,000 have arrived in the last ten years, 630,000 in the last twenty years...
...Sooner or later these kids are caught committing a serious crime: you send them to a judge and he sends them right back to school...
...They should stop drink They are teacher the Kide how to Steel I see it alot of tim but I dont pay it no mind I am surrounded by them...
...So what...
...Not that they are worse than teachers in other places, they are simply less suited to their jobs...
...Despite the fact that the announcement carried not a word as to finance, training, methods, probable limitations or starting date, The Times and The Post flipped over it...
...Demonstration Guidance provided extra reading and math teachers, guidance counsellors, materials, and trips to symphonies, museums, etc...
...As for the Higher Horizons program, most of the better teachers in the system regard it as a farce...
...Why don't teachers make more progress with these children...
...Some minority schools have annual teacher turnover rates of over 60...
...The Schools Anyone who knows anything about the New York schools cannot help but be uneasy about the gap between the strategy of the boycott and the situation it attacks...
...He gave the boycott exactly what it lacked: an organizational efficiency which got signs made, statements issued, propaganda mimeographed, volunteers directed...
...Already the white people of America are beginning to dread the day when these children, as some day they surely must, will recognize their real enemies...
...It was a beautiful example of what Tom Kahn in the last issue of DISSENT calls "project-centered provincialism" based on "a middle-class integrationist ideology...
...A teacher on the Lower East Side whose school is over 95% Negro and Puerto Rican reports that the only ones who left her school in Open Enrollment were ten of the remaining white kids, who bussed daily all the way to Queens...
...The gap between theory and practice is nowhere more striking than among the school principals...
...But whereas City taxes amount to $54.27 per $1000 of property valuation, the City spends $39.39 of that money for municipal purposes and only $14.88 for schools—which compares poorly with what is spent by surrounding districts...
...But in other areas the effects were moot...
...Surely, many of these are middle-class Negroes...
...I remember a junior-high-school social-studies teacher trying to discuss the school boycott with his 9th-grade "slow" pupils...
...Last June, when New York State Commissioner of Education, Dr...
...A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of the child to learn...
...well, why did you raise your hand if you had a pencil...
...From beneath the embarrassment there slinks a kind of arrogance, thriving it seems on the mere fact that the teacher is trying to teach them—as if to say, imagine this fool, asking me a question...
...What we need is to replace the authoritarian teacher who has traditionally plagued and scourged the children, whether black or white, achievers, nonachievers, or underachievers...
...is a change in the nature of the lives we lead...
...Some are flunking...
...The structure of the rights organizations is chaotic beyond description...
...Even by the time these kids reach the 6th grade, most of them can't tell time...
...But as the boycott loomed nearer, public pressure brought the city administration into the act, and the main combatants were brought together in the office of the City Commission on Human Rights, where they signed an agreement on September 5. The boycott was called off, and in turn the Board of Ed agreed to have a tentative plan for integration by December, 1963, and a final plan by February, 1964...
...others drop out as the school year proceeds...
...Is there anything that could be more relevant to teaching or schools or education...
...He respected them, which is something you can't learn from books...
...Fortunately he did not assume they weren't interested in self-expression...
...Before then, Galamison specialized in statements like the following: White people just don't understand the problem...
...The pre-boycott warfare tended to concentrate on Milton Galamison and the president of the Board of Education, James Donovan...
...You have to decide if it's worth it for you...
...He worked patiently with each child, and got them to work with each other...
...And we are all relieved...
...Donovan soon emerged as a self-righteous type...
...The original Committee was formed by the local chapters of the NAACP and CORE, plus the Harlem Parents Committee and Parents Workshop for Equality (from Brooklyn...
...Over 450,000 New York children attend private or parochial schools, a figure that would represent a staggering percentage even for an exclusive suburb...
...While the newspapers began deciding he was "not the right man for the job," Donovan was announcing that the boycott would make absolutely no difference in the Board's program or policy...
...I not happy about the people who buy wine and wiskey and broke the bottle in the hallway 6th-grade girl (S): the be out there in the hall taking dope and I be freighter...
...Many of them are children of parents who are in effect first-generation immigrants from southern and rural areas...
...The boy could have soped the machine from coming down but there were two ladie bugs on the button and in order to push the button he would kill the two ladie bugs...
...They live in a world without space or time...
...For the present, boycotters might take some satisfaction in a provision of the February integration plan, wherein the Board agreed to eliminate IQ tests...
...For instance, a teacher's license in New York City cannot be obtained unless the applicant has passed the expensive and utterly idiotic education courses offered at teachers' colleges...
...The emphasis has usually been on adding "cultural enrichment" to the minority schools rather than on breaking them up...
...Some times they make me so mad that I feel like slaping them and stuffing bag of garbage down their throats...
...Of New York's one million schoolchildren, roughly 40% are Negro and Puerto Rican, 60% "other...
...The charge that the boycott leadership was not the true Negro leadership was essentially a red herring...
...Let me say simply that the end effect is too often the mirror image of the bureaucracy they are arrayed against...
...are having their leadership threatened by some irresponsible publicity seekers...
...With the present system, the classroom teacher can be in a panic for materials she ordered three years ago, while the assistant superintendent is sincerely assuring the area superintendent that everything is all right in his sub-sector...
...Caption: "GOLDILOCKS...
...I believe I have alluded to the public relations men on the Board of Ed staff, but I have perhaps failed to mention the endless associations, commissions, sub-commissions, advisory committees, deputy directors, associate supervisors, district superintendents, coordinators, directors, foundations and independent consultants who must be involved in every policy decision...
...To quote Martin Mayer, "in New York, Wrightstone's study of comparative performance showed no significant advantage for bright kids grouped with their fellows over bright kids scattered through the school at random...
...Now your assignment is going to deal with this, so get these facts accurately...
...I want all of you to copy down right this second the facts I'm going to give you...
...Not that the leadership didn't have its weaknesses, which stemmed from oversimplification both in the boycott's demands and in the way demands were pressed...
...He assumed that they had something to express, the fruits of their own experience, which is in so many ways deeper and more demanding than that of middle-class children...
...Many who went in felt a kind of wretchedness they had never before been forced to feel...
...The children are happy, well-behaved and eager to learn...
...for if America is to solve them, "the lowest must come first...
...That's not funny, Wilma...
...If conditions within the classroom are bad enough, to look beyond them is to find oneself in a jungle of stumbling and makeshift, where stentorian voices boom from the tops of trees, and clusters of officious missionaries rush about distributing memoranda on the cannibal problem...
...March 1, 1964 Jeremy Lamer recently won the Delta Prize for his novel Drive, He Said, which will be published in August...
...In another 2nd-grade classroom, where well cared-for Negro children are industriously and quietly working under the direction of a Negro teacher, I glance up and see a row of self-portraits above the front blackboard...
...He was not anxious to confer with lay men or let them have a voice in the planning...
...The Whites Naturally the boycott did nothing to ease the growing anxiety of white middle-class parents...
...Whereupon Mrs...
...6th-grade Harlem boy (F): Fable Once a boy was standing on a huge metal flattening machine...
...Here is New York City with a mass of black people, most of whom have never been allowed to partake of our civilization...
...But all school systems are—and have always been—failures...
...It was a long haul, after eleven years of neglect, but eventually he got them writing and writing well...
...The curriculum guide suggests "round-table, panel, and forum discussions" on "questions relating to allowances, dating, working after school, selecting and entertaining friends, choosing a career, minding younger brothers and sisters, helping with household chores, contributing earnings to the family, decorating one's own room, choosing family vacation places, using the family car...
...Far too few of the elementary schoolteachers are men, let alone Negro men...
...Because they are woefully short of books and materials, especially good readers based on the facts of urban life...
...From that point on, quiet hatred changed to open warfare...
...Now it spends $200 per child less, which amounts to about $200,000 per school and a total of $200 million per year simply to bring the system up to par in staff, materials, textbooks and upkeep...
...Though the Negro in the United States has been historically nonviolent in relations with his white oppressors, nonviolence is by no means the lesson he learns from the life around him...
...This was an ordinary 6th-grade Harlem class...
...It made no attempts to connect itself with the Rent Strike that was gaining headway in Harlem at the time, nor did it seek identification with efforts to end job discrimination...
...They have to...
...In a country with 50 million poor, only the black people are in movement...
...The sense of inferiority runs deeper than skin-deep...
...And oh the tortured embarrassment with which they answer questions...
...In previous eras of American life, there was some room for a variegated lower class, which took care of the dirty work and was not permitted entrance into the cultural mainstream...
...Finally, there is the conglomeration of civil rights groups, divided and sub-divided within itself, spreading out towards too many separate targets with only the most general slogans to hold itself together...
...And yet there was a "revolutionary" ardor to the boycott that went beyond political programs...
...The NE (non-English) coordinators, who are supposed to help teachers teach Puerto Rican kids English, are not required to know Spanish, and many will explain to you that it's better they don't...
...The trouble with demonstrations for limited ends is that the "power structure" can easily afford a compromise which will soon be absorbed in the shifting sands of our profit-controlled economy, without much damage to the status quo...
...That the national NAACP did not participate as strongly as it might have is an old complaint of local-action projects...
...And Milton Galamison: Gross' interim plan is like saying we're gonna have you and your wife for dinner but not saying when...
...NOW I WON'T HAVE ANY MORE TALKING IN THIS ROOM...
...The readers still current in practically every school are those insipid productions featuring Sally, Dick and Jane, the golden-haired cardboard tots from Steril * Discipline as opposed to socialization...
...Another enrichment concept is the designation of minority schools as "Special Service" schools...
...In other words, no timetable...
...Let me start with some statistics...
...Another is they break in stores and bars...
...We need a teacher who will nourish talent and individuality rather than crush it...
...And since current property taxes don't entirely cover the costs of municipal overburden, the City shifts the load to the public in regressive taxes such as the 4% city sales tax...
...Even if you don't understand the situ ation," Galamison appealed, "give us the benefit of the doubt...
...Correspondingly, the rights groups were anxious to make the Board assume full responsibility...
...The flattener was coming down slowly...
...Galamison for his part took strong moral positions, but remained fuzzy as to details...
...In the past six years, while Negro and Puerto Rican enrollment has gone up 53%, white enrollment has fallen 8%, and the number of predominantly Negro and Puerto Rican schools has doubled...
...some stay in slum schools because apparently it gives them a sense of security to blame the kids for what they fail to teach them...
...there is segregation by economic class as well...
...We have to strike for president...
...The structure of the boycott organization is interesting as a sign of the new forms the Negro movement is taking...
...Deborah, where is your paper...
...Who has to implement it but these same shits...
...clusters of schools either in central locations or on the fringes of the city, to which thousands of children of all ages would be brought by special transportation...
...Donovan, meanwhile, staunchly resisted all attempts to bring the disputing parties together again...
...Jumping the gun on the February deadline, he took the whole Board on TV January 29 to explain the new plan directly to the people...
...Some teachers flatly refuse to take assignments in such schools...
...MORAL: smash or be smashed...
...we draw two lines across and that's the big A. Now I see that Freddy didn't hear me, Becky didn't hear me, Nicholas didn't hear me, Roger didn't hear me...
...This program involves beefing up school staffs with extra non-classroom personnel: psychologists, guidance spe cialists, and teacher coordinators...
...I would go to some of those old smart alic cops and throw them in the Oceans and Rivers too...
...But it must be said that an excessive concern of teachers black and white is their own respectability...
...Milton Galamison and Paul Zuber...
...Have I captured the confusion...
...They weren't for the boycott...
...They hang all over the stoops and when you say excuse me to them they hear you but they just don't feel like moving...
...Answer: Because in Ghana, there's hope...
...The trouble with such a set-up is that the basic concern on every level points up, toward impressing the higher-ups, rather than down, toward serving the classroom teacher...
...they are clerks and typists working in the central offices...
...But what the lower-class kids need right now is that somehow we conquer the chaos they live in...
...Also, specific efforts would be made to eliminate double-sessions, overcrowding, and school construction in segregated neighborhoods...
...All right, I'll give you more .. . After twenty minutes, a majority of the children are making big A's...
...The press generally counted the union with the forces of evil, while a group of boycott-minded teachers which tried to force UFT into a position of outright support, was easily outmaneuvered on the floor of the delegate assembly by UFT president Charles Cogen...
...I'll start over again...
...Gross became ill and flew to California...
...And when you refer to concepts of space, why you can't talk about "somewhere else," .. tell how far away another city is, how long a river is, or simple facts of geography...
...Not all of them are bothered by their failure...
...This is a Board of Education, not a Board of Transportation or a Board of Integration," he blurted out to reporters...
...Raise hands if you need help...
...The coordinators supposedly gather special materials, brief teachers on the problems of teaching certain subjects, keep records of individual cases, etc...
...Among other things, that this society rewards cheating, and that the more advanced the competitors the more extensive and complex the cheating will become, until the cheaters finally cheat themselves of the knowledge of what they are doing...
...The schools are short by 27,500 permanent staff members, including 12,500 "professionals," who would be required to bring the City up to the average only of the school districts among which it once enjoyed leadership...
...Both the principals' association and the UFT came out against them...
...I suspect that when the warm weather comes, the after-school centers will be empty...
...we see the natives in the street, shaking their fists...
...But who does represent the Negro people...
...anonymous board members were quoted to the effect that it would be impossible to carry out this new plan, that there was no money to finance it, and that when the paired schools were announced in March there would be hell to pay...
...His positions on the two most frequent objections to the boycott were candid and sharp and right as far as they went, but they didn't go far enough to lift debate out of the circular tail-chasing it soon settled into...
...They are not necessarily the words of a man who wants to bus every Negro child, but the words of a leader fighting an enemy who he knows from experience will not even admit he's under attack, let alone move an inch, until he's hit with every weapon one can command...
...One of the most controversial is the practice of grouping the children according to reading level, and later, IQ test, so that fast, "achieving" children are in a homogeneous group entirely separate from the classrooms of the slow, "non-achieving" youngsters...
...So you can't start with housing...
...The class he has taken such pains with finds itself a year later without an assigned teacher, and the boy who last year wrote a brilliant autobiography is in danger this year of flunking at junior high, breaking down, and spending his high school years in and out of institutions...
...for there is no other place for them...
...At times Galamison, the Presbyterian minister who sends his own son to a private school and drives an expensive car, made statements that would have done justice to Cromwell or Lenin...
...In the summer they don't do nothing except shooting, stabing, and fighting...
...Said June Shagaloff, education director of the NAACP, The Board of Education has simply proceeded as if a commitment did not exist—as if the civil rights movement did not exist—as if the Negro community did not exist...
...Some of them, all too many, are not worth much to themselves, and lash out in self-hating violence at the nearest target, usually someone who reminds them of themselves...
...It develops that they do not know the words "boycott" or "civil rights," and to them "discrimination" is something that happens down South...
...The only solution is for the working classes to forge a political movement...
...But the truth is that most of New York's teachers are too middle-class, too insensitive or too fragile to teach ghetto children successfully...
...The American Jewish Congress—which has been offering "constructive" integration plans since 1957—stated that at least 83 segregated elementary schools could be paired immediately...
...According to the teacher whose "fast" 6thgrade pupils I quoted above, . middle-class Negro kids need integration...
...Galamison in answer to the objection that segregated schools can't change until housing is desegregated: If you're gonna say you need housing first, well—to get comparable housing, you gotta have comparable income...
...The more Donovan insisted that the boycott leaders were irresponsible, the more he convinced them that only the most extreme demands could bring worthwhile results...
...That leadership position was held in the early 1940's, before suburban flight began in earnest, when the City spent more per child than its suburbs did...
...No matter how firmly demonstrators insist that they will not compromise within their area of attack, complete change of one institution is not possible unless other institutions are also transformed...
...Perhaps the most serious lapse was the failure to establish liaisons with liberal or labor groups and to publicize those liaisons...
...But there aren't enough like him, and one year of a good teacher can dispel the chaos for very few...
...The increase in segregated schools is due to three factors...
...it should be a fortress of security in which the children are respected, accepted and developed...
...The rationale for low school aid is that New York has an abundance of taxable property with which to finance its schools...
...The best-publicized program along these lines so far is the Higher Horizons program (since 1959), which grew from the Demonstration Guidance program (1956...
...At an open meeting of a district school board, a white mother stood up and shouted hysterically, What are you going to give me to keep my child in the public school system...
...Now this boy was a boy who loved insects and bugs...
...Also Rustin's attitude toward the boycott itself was different from Galamison's, as we shall see...
...Let me give some flavor of her monologue...
...I would let the people I like move into the projects so they could tell their friends that they live in a decent block...
...They have no stability whatever—no family, no home, no one to talk with them...
...Was not the boycott in some sense one more appeal to the great white father to do right by his poor black children...
...In the caveman days, if there were Negro cavemen, did the white cavemen use them as slaves...
...The re sponsibility is on the parents of each child, and the response to Open Enrollment has indicated no desire on the part of ghetto Negroes to rush their children to schools in "better" neighborhoods...
...Louis and other cities, prefers to attach portable classrooms to the Negro schools, and this has led to rioting and great bitterness...
...Donovan played right into his hands...
...These included the pairing of elementary schools (the Princeton Plan) , the reorganization of junior high feeding patterns, and the building of "educational parks," i.e...
...In terms of Negro self-respect, undoubtedly positive...
...If many more of them withdraw their children, there will be no question of integration...
...And the boycott offered no program for the Negro children to realize their own particular talents, no social-action program with which to unite the Negro community in self-respect...
...And now that the project is over, that school is depressing to visit: performance seems as low as ever and white children in the neighborhood look for excuses to transfer elsewhere for junior high...
...It comes from the feeling that the society one lives in is so hopelessly corrupt that one's only recourse is to tear the whole thing down...
...They take dope in our hallway every night...
...The cops come around there and tries to act bad but I bet inside of them they are as scared as can be...
...but they do reach the publicity department, from which they are carefully distributed to the newspapers, which in turn describe to us a school system that doesn't really quite exist...
...Let me quote Martin Mayer (from his book, The Schools) on what our young tenement-dwellers are supposed to be learning by the time they get to high school: In New York...
...At this point Dr...
...and as one might expect, difficult children are more prevalent in slum schools...
...the major Theme Center for tenth-grade "Language Arts" is "Learning to Live with the Family...
Vol. 11 • April 1964 • No. 2
