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Segregated Equals Bad. Nothing in theory prevents the hundreds of predominantly Negro schools in the North (see map) from excelling, but in practice a school that becomes 30% to 50% Negro is in for trouble. Whites pull out and it "tips" toward 100%. Gone are the "motivated" bright white children who might have been models for slum kids to copy and compete with. Good teachers become hard to get (although the "spirit of the Peace Corps" is diminishing this problem, according to Cleveland's School Superintendent William B. Levenson). "Once we become concentrated, we become ignored," says a Boston Negro leader. Most of Los Angeles' 53 Negro schools are on double sessions. Chicago's Urban League calculates that in operating expenses Negro schools get only two-thirds as much per pupil as white schools.
The result is unsurprising. In Boston, where special high schools require entrance exams, one Negro boy typically complains: "I never saw that kind of math before I went for the exam." In his recent civil rights speech, President
Kennedy said: "The Negro baby born in America today has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby, born in the same place, on the same day; one-third as much chance of completing college; one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man; twice as much chance of becoming unemployed."
Big-City Problems. While small Northern cities may attack the situation in the manner of New Rochelle, big cities, with miles of Negro ghettoes, have problems that range up to hopeless. Washington, where even the most civil-righteous New Frontiersmen are prone to send their children to private schools, can hardly give classes a desegregated look when 85% of public school students are Negro. Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia are marking time. A measure of New York's quandary is that some integration crusaders have proposed mass transfer of whites into Harlem schools, although few officials see it as a workable solution.
Nonetheless, the nation's biggest city school system is also the most enterprising. New York is trying to make slum schools so good that Negroes can rise more easily into an integrated society. It devised the famed Higher Horizons program, heavy on culture and counseling, which now involves 64,000 students in 76 schools. At state level, New York's Commissioner of Education James E. Allen Jr. recently requested school boards to report by September on what steps they intend to take to balance schools with more than 50% Negro enrollment.