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But casting a child adrift in New York's schools, perhaps to find excellence and perhaps only to acquire a Bronx accent, is not to the taste of most white parents affluent enough to afford any alternative. New York is losing four students to the suburbs for every one it gets back. The city's total public school enrollment is up 20,000 this year. But nonpublic enrollment is rising faster; 25,000 youngsters are in private schools and 400,000 in parochial (chiefly Roman Catholic) schools. Negroes and Puerto Ricans last year comprised 40.5% of the city's total enrollment and 76.5% of all elementary pupils in Manhattan.
In a variety of pioneering ways, New York has tried to fight its problems. George Washington High School's three-year Demonstration Guidance Project freed teachers for intense work with slum kids, and turned many of the pupils into honors graduates and earnest collegians. The famed Higher Horizons program, a strong dose of culture and counseling, offers a measure of hope and confidence to 65,000 children in 76 schools. The city has poured extra cash and supplies into 274 schools that have a concentration of problems. It has brought in hundreds of bilingual Puerto Rican teachers to ease Puerto Rican kids into New York life. And it has established 28 "600" schools that drain the worst delinquents away from the rest of the system while trying to handle them toughly but constructively.
All of this is far from enough. One out of three New York pupils is, as the latest educanto puts it, "culturally different"—a stranger to middle-class values. One out of three junior high students is at least two years retarded in reading—constituting the city's No. 1 academic deficiency. All too often those same youngsters are shunted into outmoded vocational schools or diluted "general" academic courses that lead nowhere. Roughly half of all New York high school students drop out before graduation.
Dumber & Dumber. In short, the schools are still failing those who need them most. School officials blame "cultural deprivation," the slum kid's lack of drive and books at home. As he falls behind in reading, he gets "dumber and dumber" in school. At Manhattan's High School of Commerce, for example, only one-fifth of this fall's entering tenth-graders read at ninth-grade level or above. "We do our best for our students," says Principal Murray Cohn, "but they just can't keep up."
Negroes react to this sort of charge the way all parents do when their kids are criticized. In central Harlem, where some children are a year behind in third grade and most are three years behind in eighth grade, civil righters say that "the schools are manufacturing retarded kids" and blame white teachers who give up too easily (only 8.3% of all New York teachers are Negro). In the typical view of the Rev. Milton Galamison, the problem is "low expectancy on the part of middle-class teachers whose concept of a human being is not met by these children."