door-to-door visits, provision of transportation for those transferring, teacher cooperation, heterogeneous grouping in the classrooms, and other factors.

The original plan provided that a student could apply to any one of a cluster of several elementary schools within a designated "cluster district," and the application would be approved on the basis of availability of space, effect on racial balance and certain unspecified educational factors; that students "presently enrolled" at a particular school would be given priority; and that transportation would be provided where necessary.

Desegregation by redistricting at the junior high school level. The junior high schools, customarily grades seven to nine, have been the focus of considerable effort and tension in desegregation plans in many communities. With most areas clinging to the neighborhood school at the elementary level with resultant patterns of racial concentration, and with high schools already more integrated because of their lesser reliance upon neighborhood boundaries and their prior consolidation to achieve maximum resources, junior high schools have been a natural place to start desegregation plans. Like the elementary schools, they have in the past been assigned students on the basis of geography; but on the other hand, they tend to represent some degree of consolidation in that children from several elementary schools feed one junior high school. Further, parental pressures have been less severe for the maintenance of rigid neighborhood boundaries than at the elementary level.

Pairing of two junior high schools to achieve greater racial balance has been tried in a number of communities. Redistricting or redrawing the boundaries of areas that feed the schools has been tried in other areas. In Berkeley, Calif., after considerable community tension and struggle, a plan was put into effect that desegregated all three junior high schools (one had been desegregated previously). All the ninth graders were sent to a single school, previously Negro, and the seventh and eighth graders were assigned to the other two schools. The new ninth grade school was given a new name to signal its new identity in the eyes of the community. The excerpt describes the period following initiation of this plan and the differential success of integration in the different schools.

A plan for racial balance at the high school level.In a number of communities, students are assigned to high schools on the basis of area of residence and

hence racial imbalance is continued. In Pasadena, Calif., a plan was initiated to redress this imbalance by opening places in the schools to allow the transfer of Negroes to the predominantly white high school. A measure of success was achieved but only after much resistance. Of interest particularly in this situation was the legal opinion that attempts to achieve racial balance were violations of the Constitution and that race could not be considered as a factor in school districting. Apparently previous racial concentration, aided by districting, had not been so regarded, yet attempts at desegregation were. The school board found its task made more difficult by such legal maneuvering. The excerpt describes the deliberations and controversy in the school board, and the impact of the court decision, which finally upheld the policy of transfers to achieve racial balance.

Segregation at a vocational school.-The Washburne Trade School in Chicago seems to be effectively segregated by virtue of the practices and customs of the trade unions, whose apprenticeship programs have been characterized by racial isolation. Washburne has presented the same picture since its founding in 1919 after the passage of the Smith-Hughes Act by Congress. That act provides for the creation of apprenticeship programs in which skilled workers are trained both in school and on the job. For example, a young man who wishes to be certified as a plumber may work at his job 4 days a week and attend a formal training program at least 1 or more days or evenings a week.

The apprenticeship programs are heavily financed and regulated by the Federal Government through the Department of Labor and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. In recent years the regulations have focused increasingly upon racial segregation within the union structures. One of the causes for this concern has been the rather discouraging racial pattern in the apprenticeship schools. Washburne seems to preserve that pattern. In 1960 an informal estimate showed that fewer than 1 percent of the 2,700 Washburne students were Negroes. Half of the apprenticeship programs conducted at the school had no Negroes whatsoever. This excerpt describes the state of racial segregation at Washburne and at Chicago's vocational schools.

Relation of a university to school desegregation.Education is a continuum-from kindergarten through college-and increasingly public school desegregation plans are having an impact on

colleges which are city or state supported. Free tuition, as in the New York City colleges, has no meaning for members of minority groups who have dropped out of school in high school and little meaning for those whose level of achievement is too low to permit work at the college level. A number of colleges, through summer tutorials and selective admittance of students whose grades would otherwise exclude them, are trying to redress this indirect form of racial imbalance.

In Newark, Del., the pressures for desegregation in the public schools have had an effect on the nearby University of Delaware indicated by the following excerpt:

In the first century of this Nation's history, opportunity was associated with the frontier; the pioneer was the symbol of success. For much of the second century opportunity has been associated with expanding industrial enterprise; the self-made man has been the symbol of success. Today, opportunity must be found in a highly organized technological society; the scientist is the symbol of success.

Public schools are the principal means in our society for providing opportunity by developing mental skills and imparting knowledge. Their task is most critical for those groups which, through economic or cultural deprivation or social exclusion, are least able to transmit to their children the skills that will provide them with opportunity in our Nation today. In this perspective, the question of this report becomes a simple one: How well do the schools of our Nation provide such opportunity for minority group children who would otherwise begin adult life with a distinct disadvantage? The minorities which today are at the greatest disadvantage in this regard are racial and ethnic minorities, and it is five of these minorities on which the report focuses most attention: Negro Americans, Puerto Rican Americans, Indian Americans, Mexican Americans, and Oriental Americans.

To answer such a question as the one posed above requires a variety of approaches. Most fundamental, of course, is the question of how well schools reduce the inequity of birth by providing minority children an equitable foundation of mental skills and knowledge; that is, what results do the schools produce?

Using the criterion of standard tests of those mental skills that are necessary for further education and for today's occupations, section 3.1 of this report examines this question. A related question has to do with the initial language deficiencies that minorities from linguistically different cultures have at the beginning of school,

and what happens to these deficiencies over the period of school. This question is examined in summary form in section 8.2. In addition to the outcome of school as measured by test results, another outcome of school is the extent of schooling itself. Many children do not complete high school; this outcome of schooling is examined in section 6.1.

Beyond such a question about the results of schooling, it is necessary to know about a number of other matters. First is the question of the resources that go into schools attended by children of minorities, in comparison with the resources that go into schools attended by other American children. The statistical tabulation and discussion of these resources is carried out in sections 2.2 through 2.9 of this report for elementary and secondary schools and section 5.1 for higher education. In addition, special aspects of school resources are examined in summary in section 8.3 on guidance counselors and section 8.4 on vocational education.

Once the results that schools produce, and the resources that go into schools are known, the question becomes: What is it about schools that has most effect upon the results that they produce? Why and how are schools effective? This question is examined in section 3.2 for elementary and secondary education. A special examination of the effects of an innovation in education-Head Start summer preschool programs-is carried out in section 8.1.

There is one special aspect of educational opportunity that has been, and continues to be, of critical relevance for racial minorities, particularly Negroes. This is racial segregation of schooling, whether by legal segregation, as has been true in the South, or by social and residential segregation, as is true in the North. This aspect of educational opportunity is examined throughout the report, but three sections of the report focus exclusively on facets of racial segregation. Section 3.3 examines in a preliminary way the results of school

ing, in elementary and secondary grades, in racially segregated and racially integrated schools. Section 4.1 examines the training of Negro and white schoolteachers. In racially segregated education, school faculties are also largely segregated by race. This section examines the joint implications of such segregation, taken together with the differential preparation of Negro and white teachers, for education of the generations of schoolchildren who will be taught by these teachers.

Another aspect of the problem of school segregation lies in the current attempts, both in the North and in the South, to reduce the amount of racial segregation in the schools. Part of the work that led to this report consisted of case studies of particular cities and communities which examined the condition of school segregation in the community, and changes in that condition. From these case studies excerpts that illustrate general problems in school desegragation have been selected. These are presented in sections

7.1-7.8.

2.11 General character of school environ

ments

The school environment of a child consists of many things, ranging from the desk he sits at to the child who sits next to him, and including the teacher who stands in front of his class. Any statistical survey gives only the most meager evidence of these environments, for two reasons. First, the reduction of the various aspects of the environment to quantitative measures must inherently miss many elements, both tangible and more subtle, that are relevant to the child. The measures must be comparable from school to school; yet the elements which are experienced as most important by the child will likely differ from one school to another, and may well differ among children in the same school.

Second, the child experiences his environment as a whole, while the statistical measures necessarily fragment it. Having a teacher without a college degree may indicate an element of disadvantage; but in the concrete situation, a schoolchild may be taught by a teacher who is not only without a college degree, but who has grown up and received his schooling in the local community, who has never been out of the State, who has a 10th-grade vocabulary, and who shares the local community's attitudes.

For both these reasons, the statistical examination of difference in school environments for mi

nority and majority children will give an impression of lesser differences than actually exist. More often, though not always, these differences are to the disadvantage of minorities, so that the subsequent sections will probably tend to understate the actual disadvantage in school environment experienced by the average minority child compared to that experienced by the average majority child. Such an understatement of differences is a necessary consequence of a systematic statistical comparison. This, however, is a lesser evil than the possible observer bias introduced by impressionistic and qualitative studies of school environments. (In certain areas, such as comi nunity responses to problems posed by segregation, qualitative study is almost necessary, and the possibility of observer bias must be accepted. The case studies which are excerpted in sections 7.1-7.8 reveal aspects of segregation problems and community response that a statistical study could hardly match.)

To reduce the fragmentation of school. environments that statistical tables create, the major differences between school environments for minorities and whites have been summarized in two ways. First, particular aspects of the environment are treated, examining the country as a whole and all regions. These aspects are divided into three major classes: the facilities and curriculum (sec. 2.2), characteristics of school staff, including both teachers and principals (sec. 2.3), and characteristics of fellow students (sec. 2.4).

Second, to give a better picture of the school environments that Negro and white children experience in different regions of the country, the eight regional strata used in the survey are grouped into four, and the schools, scaffs, and students in three of these are summarized for schools attended by Negroes and whites. The groupings are: the metropolitan North, including the West (sec. 2.5), the metropolitan South, including the Southwest (sec. 2.6), the nonmetropolitan South, including the Southwest (sec. 2.7), and the nonmetropolitan North. Since this last region contains less than 5 percent of the Nation's Negroes, it is not examined separately. Finally, section 2.8 describes the schools, staffs, and students in schools attended by each of the other four minorities, for the Nation as a whole. Section 2.9 presents a brief tabulation of school characteristics in the outlying areas. This dual organization is necessarily redundant, but such redundancy may better accomplish the aim of