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— REZONING—which is often the same as ungerrymandering. In San Francisco, mostly white Grant School lies near mostly Negro Emerson School in a rectangular area cut by a horizontal attendance line; made vertical, the line would integrate both schools. New York City's school zoning boss, Assistant Superintendent Francis A. Turner, a Negro, is such a skilled mixmaster that balanced schools are rapidly increasing.
— THE PRINCETON PLAN, SO Called for the New Jersey town that devised it. Formerly segregated schools are rematched, so that one school accommodates all children of perhaps three grades, a second school the next three, and so on. This works well in small communities, might do in big cities by clustering each grade group in several nearby schools to avoid long bus trips.
— RECOMBINATION. An example: A Negro elementary school can be turned into a junior high school serving a wider area, or into a school for gifted or retarded children, while the original pupils are sent to other schools.
— SCHOOL SPOTTING. New schools are built only in areas of integrated housing. For fast-changing big cities, the latest idea is "educational parks," putting all new schools in one or several central clusters. Last week a New York City board of education member suggested a perfect site: the World's Fair grounds, where after 1965 an education center could accommodate 15 public schools and a teachers' college, enrolling a total of 31,000 students.
Fears & Illusions. All these changes stir deep fears and emotions. Negroes, demanding more than token integration, have lately attacked de facto segregation by street-marching protests in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, "study-ins" at the white schools of Englewood, N.J., sit-ins at the boards of education of New York and Chicago. Whites envision their neighborhood schools being flooded with poorly prepared Negro pupils, or their own children being forced to "integrate" Negro slum schools. A feeling of "discrimination against the majority" has sparked reactions like that of white parents in Montclair, N.J., who filed a federal suit under the 14th Amendment, claiming that Negro children were allowed free transfers while theirs were not. The long-honored concept of the neighborhood school—a homey place that children can walk to, a living symbol of local pride and progress—seems in danger.
Yet behind the stresses and strains is a consensus, by many school authorities, some courts and most Negroes, that de facto segregation must go. The problem is to break the low-income Negro's vicious circle of slum birth to slum school to bad education to low-paid job and parenthood of more slum children. The widely accepted premise is that the circle can and must be broken at the school stage. Equally important is that segregated neighborhood schools refute the original aim of Horace Mann's "common school," strengthening democracy by serving all races, creeds and classes. Integrationists believe that schools can help to heal U.S. race relations by returning to Mann's ideal.