Victims of the Ghetto

...Each page bears the stamp of reality and the most severe critic would be hard put to challenge the picture presented...

...The myth of America as a land of opportunity prevails even over the grimmest reality...

...he incurs a long absence from school simply for lack of a pair of shoes...

...Donald overcomes his passivity and gains identity through helping in the lunchroom...

...She makes no attempt to sugar-coat his predicament...

...Until there is an educational revolution from withinmatching in scope and intensity the pressure for economic and social reform from without-these piecemeal efforts, at best, will merely prevent further decline...

...And it is surprising to find a glaring omission here and there...

...In the Spanish Harlem school an overt and oppressive despair pervades-different from that of the streets outside in that it is directed at the children, who are regarded as uneducable by the teachers and the school staff...

...Approaches vary...

...widespread team teaching in Pittsburgh...

...And the statistics support her: Between the third and eighth grades children slip further and further behind in achievement levels until they join a legion of the lost in the drop-out rolls...

...Once the name of the civil rights leader was grafted onto their consciousness, however, it took hold and grew...

...4.95 Reviewed by MAURICE R. BERUBE Assistant Editor, "The United Teacher" Had The Schoolchildren appeared a few years ago there would have been little doubt about its impact...

...They invoke a pious cant-the "children are underprivileged but teachable.' Their unconcern is revealed in the response of the assistant principal on what should be done about the schizoid fourth grader: "If you think he's crazy, you should see his brother in the sixth grade...

...Only two of Miss Burke's pupils initially were able to identify Martin Luther King when they were questioned week to week...

...But the pathology of defeat, in both cases, is nourished by a higher source, the apathy of the Board of Education...

...You can't read...

...The authors have missed, for example, the semantic irony of "opportunity" classes on each grade level...

...The next point of embarkation will be Jefferson Junior High, where sexual promiscuity and narcotics addiction abounds, and then-the streets themselves...

...The total impression given by the book is one of a faithful recording-free from polemic-of conversations and events either by means of a tape recorder or by the more laborious process of keeping accurate and lengthy notebooks...

...He'll have-but we don't know, do we...

...Instead, the school has become simply an extension of the slum itself-an institution where the longer one lingers the worse the illness becomes...

...Now, however, this admirable chronicle of how conditions really are in slum schools may be lost in the expanding plethora of poverty tracts...

...But, as The Schoolchildren shows so clearly, the entering wedge has yet to be driven...

...Speaking of Danny Aquilez, a fourth grade pupil with pronounced schizoid behavior, she asks: "Did being in P.S...

...The authors have drawn upon their years of apprenticeship as teachers in New York City slums to write a series of vignettes of two elementary "special service" schools (pedagese for ghetto schools)-one in Spanish Harlem and the other in Harlem...

...Leonore, who previously had been in a "Home,' responds when Miss Burke visits her mother and soon is "reading Madeleine, furiously, to get a leaf up on the reading tree...

...You've got the odds against you in this world, don't you know that...

...The suggestion pursued by the authors is that the major impetus and direction of reform may well come from beyond the educational sphere...

...He has to know someone will follow him up," a teacher tells Miss Burke...

...Over it all a sense of defeat threatens...

...Even where there is a competent principal and a generous smattering of altruistic teachers, heroic efforts to break the spell of the streets are defeated...

...The school is plagued by a bedlam of interruptions, from messengers with needless forms to fill, to outbursts of brawling...

...Miss Myles, the Negro remedial reading teacher, handles the class disciplinary problem with a firm hand: She cracks Curtis across the mouth when he swears at her...

...200 help him or make him sicker...

...Monty Lamont, who would "scream last year from pains in his head" is subject to asthmatic attacks while reading...

...Who is at fault...

...The principal was "wonderful when he first came," a teacher recalls, "then what is it that happens...

...Few publicly admit what they privately believe...

...Miss Burke believes the school should be a redeemer of life in a brutalizing sea of poverty with its malnutrition, its broken homes, its drug addicts, its mental illness...

...The system, the authors imply...

...Since to her slum schools are more than custodial barracks, she quickly gets to the heart of the matter...

...You'll be dumped in a cruel world, and no one's going to help you much longer...

...There are triumphs but these are few and far between...

...One hears from time to time of significant educational experiments: an integrated basic reader depicting parents at recognizable occupations in an urban setting used in Detroit on a trial basis...

...a pilot project in New York with smaller classes and saturation services operating in 20 elementary schools...

...the school is understaffed, overworked, badly equipped, without training in teaching the poor, and assigned a curriculum suited for another time and another people...

...For children living in the catacombs of slum housing, who avoid school seats in the sunlight, the allwhite world of Dick and Jane in the suburbs is unintelligible...

...The authors succeed so well in recreating the character, speech and mannerisms of children that one is apt to overlook that The Schoolchildren is, after all, a book by teachers and, in general, for teachers...

...If the book were to be converted into essay form, it would pose the question of whether the educational establishment is able to educate the children of the urban poor...

...It's too late, but next year he won't even have you or me...

...But as a seasoned teacher remarks, these prove the exception, since "a school can't be left to what emanates from the Board...

...these are the dumping ground where the "left-backs" and the more seriously disturbed are gathered...

...No place for a kid who can't read...

...Still, The Schoolchildren is by far the best book written from a teacher's standpoint we have had to date...

...The teachers are left only with a desire to survive the school day by estranging themselves from the pupils...

...The central figure upon which the narrative hangs is a fictionalized teacher with high motives, Miss Burke...

...It is a savage discovery of how the educational establishment has failed the children of the poor...

...The school is already running not on the lowest but a low level, and [he] moved onto this level...

...Misses Greene and Ryan end their chronicle on a symbolic note: The children avidly following the Selmato-Montgomery march, with King climbing the steps of the Alabama State Capitol at the head of 25,000 marchers...

...Those sturdy souls like Miss Burke who believe in the children's potential and strive toward its realization make advances only over the most overwhelming odds...

...That would be an injustice, for at the very least, the book should serve as a flesh and blood companion guide to other scholarly tomes on poverty and its effects in America...

...There are some schools in the slums which escape the spell, the authors note, just as there are James Baldwins who manage by some superhuman resource to rise from the rubble of their beginnings...

...The difference between the Spanish Harlem school and the Harlem school is the difference between hell and purgatory-in the latter there is cause for some hope...

...Can the cycle of an inbred poverty culture be broken by the most highly motivated and capable teachers without sweeping school reforms...