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The idea first took shape in 1956 at New York's now-famed Junior High School 43 (TIME, Oct. 12, 1959), where only 40% of the predominantly Negro and Puerto Rican students went on to graduate from senior high school. They came from families of six people living in one room, where dinner was likely to be one hamburger per child, served from a paper bag. Could such youngsters be college material?
With money from Nessfeness, able Principal Daniel Schreiber brought in one guidance counselor for every 100 students, special teachers for remedial reading and math. He persuaded defeatist parents that their children could become doctors and lawyers, got them to make room for homework. He ushered children to the opera, the theater, atomic laboratories and college campuses. The result—soaring aspirations—was so dramatic that IQs leaped and retarded readers outstripped national norms. This year Junior High 43's proud products are at Amherst, Columbia, Franklin & Marshall, Union and the University of Michigan.
Higher Horizons. With Dan Schreiber in charge, New York has since launched a "Higher Horizons" program for 32,000 children in 13 junior high and 52 elementary schools. Using Schreiber as consultant, the Ford Foundation recently gave $1,000,000 to start similar programs in Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. Stirred by Nessfeness, other cities are well launched, notably Washington, where a project at Macfarland Junior High School makes one official gloat that "we may be actually discovering a new dimension in education." Last week, answering queries from Hawaii to Germany, Dan Schreiber said: "We want to recognize the diamond in the rough and start polishing it."
As one of the talent hunt's loudest cheerleaders, Harvard's Dean Monro calls the progress "extraordinary." But he is deeply concerned that colleges are not doing their part. He wants them to "stop making scholarship awards, for embellishment purposes, to well-off students." He also thinks that professors should haunt "submerged" schools with the same tenacity as football coaches. "Why should 300 college representatives visit New Trier High School each year and hardly any, except coaches, visit the big downtown Chicago high school, only 20 miles away?"
The big need, says Monro, is coordination of all the talent hunters. Plaut of Nessfeness agrees. Last month he urged a coast-to-coast Higher Horizons program, costing up to $100 million, to be run by an agency patterned after the National Science Foundation. In Washington last week, top officials of the prestigious American Council on Education mulled ways to get Plaut's scheme started. As one of them put it: "Unlike gold, human talent is perishable. We can't let it lie in the hills until we get ready to mine it."