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He skylarks down the scruffy street, the colored slum kid in the Northern city, headed for the public school. He wears a white shirt with a bow tie, and a good warm windbreaker. His smile is toothy, his epithets vile. He is eight, and can't read much. His teacher, a man with a heart of case-hardened gold, sometimes thinks of him as a "little bastard," but the boy has good intelligence and intentions. Such, in many variations, is the "disadvantaged" child, and he and his like now comprise one-third of all pupils in the nation's 14 largest cities.
They are the rural dispossessed—Southern Negroes, Appalachian whites, Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans—who fill the urban void left by middle-class migration to the suburbs. They share the American dream of salvation by education and go to the public school that everyone says will save them. Why is it that just the opposite happens so often in city schools across the country?
Different Immigrant. The focal point of this question is New York City, where the nation's biggest school system has just acquired a highly skilled school superintendent who may have some of the answers. At 44, Calvin Edward Gross is a man with more than a million children, almost half of them Negro or Puerto Rican. Seven months in office, he feels ready to cope with the hardest school job in the country. "We are now enjoying the best fall beginning we've had for a long time," Gross peppily wrote his teachers not long ago. "Let's take it from here."
How far anyone can take New York City depends on reconciling the disparity between the nature of the children and the nature of the school system. New York City has long specialized in educating immigrants, but these children—being Americans to begin with—are different. They are shorn of the drive that spurred their predecessors, weirdly cut off from the middle-class culture that teachers abide by.
"I don't want to grow up to be any dumb guy," said one Manhattan slum kid recently. Such children know adults who cannot even read the want ads, and sense the despair of unskilled teen-agers loitering on streets where drink, dope or death is the only exit. Yet as other Americans reach new heights of affluence and aspiration, slum kids are made to feel all the more worthless by their poverty and the color of their skin. Often, dinner is a hamburger served in a paper bag; books are nonexistent; home is a rooming house so transient that in a recent year 50% of all Manhattan pupils switched schools, making a mockery of sustained education."
"Try the Post Office." IQ tests use middle-class references that the slum child does not understand; his low score then plunks him into the slow group. He is repelled from reading by fatuous primers about "nice" children who seem laughable even in the suburbs, let alone in Harlem. Harried principals stand ready to expel him; guidance counselors are reluctant to encourage him too much. "Be realistic," they say. "Do what you can do. Try the post office."