Children were classified by race and ethnicity on the basis of their responses to questionnaire items. Because of response error, some misclassification arose. This misclassification was probably least serious at grades 1 and 12, for at grade 1 the teacher completed the questionnaire, and at grade 12, the students were less likely to make a response error. It was probably greatest at grade 6, which was the first grade at which the child himself both read the questions and checked the responses.

This misclassification is least serious for Negroes and whites, for the error responses constitute only a small fraction of the total for each of these groups, and also because a child was classified as Negro or white only if he did not check that he was Puerto Rican or Mexican-American on the question referring to ethnicity. It is probably greatest for Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans. The anonymity of the pupil data made it impossible to check or eliminate incorrectly classified individuals. As a consequence, the data in section 2 for Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, and Indian Americans for elementary schools should be interpreted with caution, as should the results for these groups for grades 3 and 6 in sections 3.1 and 3.2.

2.2 School facilities,

facilities, services, and curriculums

This section examines school facilities, services, and programs by comparing the availability of these various facilities and services for different minority groups, and for different parts of the country. No attempt is made to evaluate the significance of any of the differences found in this section. It merely presents the information derived from the questionnaires completed by principals and teachers regarding the facilities, special services, curriculums, programs for exceptional children, pupil evaluation methods, and extracurricular activities available in their schools.

Each school characteristic will be found in each of four tables, two of them dealing with elementary schools and two with secondary. In each case, one table deals with the availability of a characteristic to the various racial and ethnic groups and the other table deals with the availability to Negroes and whites in different regions of the country.

In examining the availability of school facilities

it is important to keep two points in mind, in addition to those discussed in section 2.1. The first is that not all facilities are equally relevant to learning, nor are they relevant in the same way to learning. A science laboratory performs a different function than does a school psychologist. Thus, there can be no overall summing up, to give a total measure of the differences in schools attended by the various groups under study. Particular clusters or areas of facilities can be viewed somewhat as a whole, but there can be no real comparisons between things in quite different areas such as auditoriums and textbooks, for example. At the end of this section, an overall view of the differences that exist in several large areas of school functioning will be presented as a summary. Even to do this, certain facilities will be grouped which are quite different, and which should be examined separately for most purposes.

A consequence of the noncomparability of these items is that they cannot be put in a general order of importance. Different persons will have different orders, depending on their beliefs about what factors most affect learning. The order of discussion of items in the text follows closely the order of the tables, which use the same general groupings as used in other Office of Education publications.

The second point that must be kept in mind is that for some services, there should be no presumption that they ought to be equally available. Certain services, such as free lunches and free milk, are services specifically provided for children from low-income families. Such items are presented simply to show the level of availability of such services to different groups, with no possibility of assessing equality or inequality by the existence or absence of differences.

The geographic designations used in the tables are explained in section 2.1. The abbreviations of racial groups are slightly different. The term "whites in the same county" uses six symbols defined as follows: whites in the same county as Negroes, W(N); as Mexican Americans, W(M); as Puerto Ricans, W(PR); as Indian Americans, W(IA); as Oriental Americans, W(OR); and as other races, W (OT). An explanation of the meaning of this statistic is given in section 2.12. The tables designate the questionnaire item which supplied the data using the letters P for principal, T for teacher, and U for pupil or student; thus P-11 refers to the 11th item on the school principal's

a percentage means less than one-half of 1 percent.

2.21 School buildings, facilities, and equip

ment

Tables 2.21.1, 2, 3, and 4 refer to the questions and special measures from the principal's questionnaire about the physical characteristics of the classrooms. In studying these four tables the major differences between Negroes and whites can most easily be seen in the geographical groupings of tables 2.21.2 and 2.21.4. The other two tables are primarily useful for nationwide comparisons of the non-Negro minorities with Negroes and whites.

Observing the nationwide averages first it appears that school children of all groups differ relatively little in the physical school facilities available. In elementary schools (table 2.21.1) they all have about the same: number of pupils per instruction room and teacher; number of makeshift instruction rooms; and percentage of students in schools with an old building. The largest difference from either the national norms or from whites in the same locality appears for Puerto Rican children in buildings over 40 years old where it can be seen that 24 percent of them are in such buildings

same counties as Puerto Rican children are in such buildings.

Turning to table 2.21.3, it can be seen that the situation is similar with small differences generally prevailing. The largest exceptions are that Puerto Rican and Oriental children are seen to be in older school buildings. Another significant difference can be seen in number of pupils per room and pupils per teacher for Negro children but this can best be examined in the regional tables to which we now turn.

On the national level it appears in table 2.21.1 that there is no difference between Negroes and whites regarding the number of improvised or makeshift rooms in the schools attended by elementary school pupils, the elementary schools having an average of only one such improvised room per school building. However, on the regional level (table 2.21.2) we find some differences. For example, in the metropolitan regions (except South and West) the Negro students attend elementary schools which have on the average one makeshift room while the white students of the region have no such rooms. The largest number is found in the secondary schools

use facilities.

'See app. 9.42 for explanation.