The American Underclass

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crying long-range need is to improve public education. As the poorest of the poor have inundated inner-city schools, it has been easier for educators to concede the trappings of success—passing grades, graduating diplomas—than to teach the skills necessary for living and working. Ghetto school officials need to enforce their lax truancy rules, putting more pressure on parents to insist that their children attend, and need to concentrate rigorously on the reading, writing and math skills required to get ahead in an advanced industrial society.

One effective program is New York City's Auxiliary Services for High Schools. Started in 1969 by Educator Seymour Weissman, it is aimed at hard-core dropouts, problem students and those suspended from the school system, who become disillusioned out on the streets and volunteer to return to school. Most are age 16 to 21. Says Weissman: "The traditional high school has gym, music education, sex education. But for our kids, it is more important to learn the real basics of math and reading." Students learn at their own pace and are not promoted unless they are qualified. Discipline is strict, work is closely supervised, but at the same time an important goal is to instill self-reliant attitudes. Says Julian Washington, the program's assistant coordinator: "A lot of the youngsters, especially blacks, have a negative self-image. We try to make them believe in self-esteem and in getting a new and positive image of themselves." Some 14,000 students participate in the program each year, and about 2,000 pass the New York State high school equivalency test; better than 70% of these former dropouts go on to college. Though small in national terms, the program could be successfully expanded and imitated elsewhere.

The underclass would also be better served by tougher law enforcement in the ghettos and swift and sure justice for offenders. Some of the reasons: 1) to suppress the near anarchic violence on many ghetto streets that terrorizes underclass members and leads some of their youngsters to believe that they too can be a law unto themselves; 2) to give the law-abiding poor a better chance in their increasingly hostile environment; 3) to motivate businessmen to return to the inner city. Local governments also have to work harder to recruit minority members for their police forces so that the cops are not viewed as occupying armies but as servants of the vast majority of law-abiding citizens in the underclass. The cost—for more police, judges and jails—will be high. But a serious attack on ghetto crime will drive a wedge between the poor who are struggling to get ahead and those who are preying upon them.

There is also a great need to tear down, or at least lower, the many barriers to employment that confront the unskilled, the unlettered and the immobile. One obvious bar is the overly strict and exclusionary union apprenticeship rules. They should be relaxed—despite the howls certain to come from trade unionists.

A still more controversial barrier to employment is the minimum-wage law. Now $2.30 an hour, the minimum will probably be raised by Congress to $2.65 next year and around $3.15 by 1980. Of course, the talents of many members of the underclass—particularly the unskilled young—are not worth that much off the street. Employers would rather hire someone who shows