Should All Northern Schools Be Integrated?

The U.S. has long cherished the "neighborhood school," a concept as American as apple pie. It is the simple idea that children are best served by their own local school--a school that they can walk to. a living symbol of local roots, pride and progress. Now this idea is under sharp attack because it means that where neighborhoods are segregated by race, schools are too.

Organized Negroes, notably those in the N.A.A.C.P., argue that desegregating schools cannot await desegregating housing. Some federal judges and other authorities are beginning to agree.

Duty & Equity. Roughly 50% of the nation's Negroes now live outside the South, 31% of them in twelve big cities, and most of them in Harlems of one kind or another. Nothing in theory prevents schools in these areas from being good, but in practice they are often housed in overcrowded, deteriorating buildings and are taught by teachers too incompetent to get jobs elsewhere. The absence of white children. Negro leaders say, means a shortage of ambitious, education minded models for Negro children to copy and compete with. The result is schools so bad that three out of five Negro youngsters drop out. straight into the vanishing market for unskilled labor, and often into crime.

Negro leaders charge that this condition is heightened by deliberate gerrymandering of school district lines. The effect is a steady proliferation of conditions bearing out the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Until recently. Northern school administrators held fast to the neighborhood-school tradition. Last year they got strong support from onetime Harvard President James B. Conant, who argued that upgrading Negro schools where they are (mainly by expanding vocational education) is preferable to "token integration by transporting pupils across attendance lines." Then came the case of New Rochelle, N.Y.--a Northern community startled to find itself forced to desegregate under federal court order. Judge Irving R. Kaufman found New Rochelle guilty of deliberate gerrymandering to keep a 94%-Negro school Negro. As a result. New Rochelle was compelled under the 14th Amendment to allow the Negroes free access to white schools. More than half the Negroes transferred, leaving their old school near-defunct. Now the N.A.A.C.P. is battling for desegregation in at least 60 target areas from Connecticut to California: sbNine communities, from Newark. N.J., to Eloy, Ariz., have voluntarily desegregated. In more than 14 other communities, about half around New York City, the N.A.A.C.P. has filed federal suits or complaints with state officials. In Englewood. N.J.. a Negro store boycott is being urged by Negro Lawyer Paul Zuber. who filed the original New Rochelle suit. In Philadelphia, where public-school students are 53% Negro, the N.A.A.C.P. has filed a suit calling for the desegregation of schools on a mass basis.

sbCalifornia's state board of education urges schools to combat de facto segregation "with the full thrust of our legal authority and moral leadership." Resisting this stand, San Francisco's School Superintendent Harold Spears announced last June that he could see "no educationally sound program to eliminate schools in which students are mainly of one race," and created Central Junior High School, a school district so drawn that 60% of the students would be Negro. Upset parents--white and Negro--filed a federal suit to hold down Central's Negroes. (The overall rate in other schools is 20%.) Said a leading Negro lawyer: "Once the Negroes move in and the whites move out.

it's the end of decent schools in that area." Warned the San Francisco Chronicle: "This city is drifting toward a fully segregated black-and-white school system." Under this pressure. Superintendent Spears a fortnight ago backed down, killed the planned new district.

sbIn Chicago, where schools are 40% Negro. Federal Judge Julius J. Hoffman recently dismissed a similar suit on technical grounds, but added: "Chicago cannot deny the existence of de facto segregation or excuse it on the pretext of a benign indifference." Chicago's $48,500-a-year (tops in the U.S.) School Superintendent Benjamin Willis long defended neighborhood schools. Last month Willis retreated to an imitation of New York City's two-year-old "open enrollment" plan, which this fall will allow 9,000 youngsters in heavily Negro and Puerto Rican schools to attend underused schools in white neighborhoods.

The Alternatives. No one is entirely pleased with open enrollment, which in big cities involves exhausting bus trips across town. Relatively few Negroes are using it in New York City (total enrollment: 1,004,265). In small communities, white schools cannot accommodate an influx of Negroes.

Little more satisfactory are the major alternatives. One of these is redrawing school lines to include both whites and Negroes. Another is the "Princeton (N.J.) Plan" of using one school for all children of perhaps three grades, using a second school for three other grades, and so on. This works well in small communities, notably in Willow Grove, Pa., but involves buses in bigger places. The Northern school dilemma, rooted in de facto segregation in housing, is the difficulty of reconciling the cause called integration with the common sense of walk-to-school.

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