A City's Shame

New Yorkers are proud of almost everything but their schools. They know that most of these are nothing to brag about: often dingy and dilapidated, the teachers underpaid and overworked, the classrooms overcrowded and dirty. New Yorkers have suspected that the city's worst schools are in the costive squalor of Harlem. But just how bad Harlem's schools are, few New Yorkers knew until last week.

A group of doctors, psychologists and educators, heading the "Harlem Project," had spent four years collecting the shocking facts, and trying to do something about them. The project examined three schools: P.S. 120 for boys, P.S. 101 for girls, and P.S. 10, a co-ed elementary school. It found class after class of sullen and wretched children. There were boys who stole and "unmanageable girls" who screamed and shrieked and bit their neighbors. In one school, one out of five boys had been in court for truancy or delinquency.

The project found that 20% of the truants were too scared of gangs to walk to school. These gangs of schoolkids, who called themselves the "Noble Dukes," the "Socialists," or the "Majestics," roamed the streets of Harlem, in warfare that was not childish. In two years, three boys had been killed.

The Kindly, The Resentful. In P.S. 120, the project found that more than 90% of the boys were at least a year behind in reading and math. Some with normal I.Q.s kept failing in their work; and no one bothered to find out why. There was seldom a full file on any student.

"She's nice," said one boy of a teacher.

"She don't yell at you, just kicks you in the shins and makes you get back in line." Not all Harlem teachers were so direct: many were hardworking, kindly people who tried to do their best. But the percentage of mean and ignorant teachers was high.

Many teachers resented appointment to Harlem, hated their Negro, Spanish, and Italian pupils ("All the boys are interested in," said one, "is women and shirking work"). The teachers rapped knuckles, shouted and yelled. One teacher ripped up pupils' notebooks whenever they were not perfectly neat. Another punished a child by having the whole class line up to smack him. In P.S. 10 ("A prison," said the school's principal), some kids were kept away from class for as long as a month, seated in an anteroom where teacher-clerks, to discipline them, kept them idle and quiet.

Camps, Clubs, Clinics. In the three schools, the Harlem Project set up a mental hygiene clinic for delinquents, boys' clubs and summer camps. It got after-hours jobs for the older boys. It organized child-psychology courses for parents and teachers. It negotiated truces between gangs. It investigated homes and health, gave psychiatric help to kids who needed it. Almost every truant and delinquent turned out to need such help.

After four years, the project thought its experiment successful enough to be tried in other Harlem schools. But Harlem, they insisted, would need dozens of camps, clubs and clinics, a battery of psychiatrists and new teachers to make up for its slums, sickness and ignorance. The project thought that the world's richest city could afford them.

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