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"The battle for better education will be won or lost in the big cities," says Calvin Gross. It is the big cities that school most of the people: the U.S. is now 70% urban. There is no intrinsic reason why urban schools cannot join or lead the academic reform going on in suburbia. The secret, Gross believes, is to humanize and decentralize city school administration—freeing teachers to reach individual children.
The measure of this job in New York City is the number of individual children: 1,047,800. They outnumber soldiers in the U.S. Army. To meet all his 42,000 teachers in one group, Superintendent Gross would need two Madison Square Gardens. If he tried to visit one classroom a day throughout the school year, he would not finish until the year 2184. Just to visit all of his 841 schools at the rate of one a day would take more than four school years. Gross frets: "The basic thing I've got to lick here is communication."
New York still has pockets of unmatched excellence. Talented youngsters, including 7,000 with IQs above 150, can study anything from college math through Chinese or Russian to conservatory-level art and music. Bronx Science, one of four academic high schools with stringent entrance exams, is a famed gateway to M.I.T. and Harvard. Performing Arts supplies Broadway, television and the ballet with recruits. New York City public schools, with 2% of all U.S. schoolchildren, have for 20 years averaged a remarkable 20% of all Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners. Of the 21,000 U.S. students taking Advanced Placement exams for college credit last year, almost 3,000 were New York City youngsters.
An able New York child rides an escalator to top colleges. In the fourth to sixth grade, he joins an I.G.C. (Intellectually Gifted Children) class that gets extra money and attention. Junior high puts him in an S.P. (Special Progress) class that skips a year or gets "enriched" work; he goes on to a specialized high school or Advanced Placement classes in a regular school. All the while, he sharpens his brains competing with some of the most aggressively bright kids in the country.
To Get a Bronx Accent? When a California woman moved to Manhattan two years ago, she plunked her two daughters in private school at $1,000 per pretty head. This fall, divorced and shy of cash, she nervously switched the girls to what is supposed to be a "blackboard jungle" junior high school on the upper West Side. Both girls are thriving in S.P. classes, and the one with a talent for art has never had better teaching. "Private schools are living on their waiting lists," says their mother. Calvin Gross, who has two children in Riverdale's P.S. 81, promises to "give private schools a little competition in this town. They've had their way too long."