INTEGRATION: BURDEN OF BLACKS

Dr. SIZEMORE. In the desegregation effort in Evanston, Ill., it was a total busing effort, the complete burden of which was on the shoulders of the black community, in that the black children were the children who were bused.

As a resident of Evanston-my family came to Evanston in 1943, and I was a senior at Evanston Township High School from September 1943 until January 1944.

It's a township high school, and everyone who resides in the township attends. So therefore, it is an integrated facility.

Within that facility, at that time, which was in 1944, it was a segregated facility within an integrated institution. In that black people are in certain divisions and in certain classes.

My daughter attended Evanston Township High School in 1962 to 1966, and at that time, almost a little more than 20 years later, it was still an integrated institution and a segregated facility.

When she went there, you could walk through the halls, Senator, and if you saw no blacks in a classroom, then you knew it was advanced trig, chemistry, physics, et cetera. If it was full of blacks, you knew it was basic English, one and two, and basic math, and so forth.

And in extracurricular activities, there were scarcely any black students because there was a requirement stipulated that you could participate in extracurricular activities only if your grade point average was 3.5 or better.

Now this regulation operated to the complete advantage of the white community, in that you didn't have to worry about any social mixing of the black and white students in extracurricular activities because the blacks students simply wouldn't be there because the requirement precluded any kind of participation of that kind.

My daughter was talented in dance and drama. And as Mr. Haskins has stated, the black students were excluded from participation in that area because of the social implications of playing main roles in plays, et cetera.

And the general condition, or state, I should say, of integration in that high school was a very low level. So that the black students really didn't go to the high school in the social sense. They complied with the compulsory school law, they went to the classes, they went to the school. But they were really not a part of it.

Except in athletics. They played basketball.

BUSING CONDITIONS

In elementary school, my mother lived on the corner where the bus stopped every day, Senator, and when the busing operation began, the black children would stand and wait for the bus. They would get on the bus. There were no attendants there, and they would just hustle on as best they could, and as children do, they would play and wrestle, and do these kinds of things.

And there was no adult supervision, except for the driver. The children who were left by the bus were unsupervised. They were just left. I followed the school bus for 3 days-this was in the early days of the

integration-and at the school where I visited, the bus came up to the school, and the black children got out of the bus to walk into the school, and the other children in the neighborhood were standing there saying, "Here come the coal cars. Here come the coal cars."

In some of the schools, in these middle-class communities the mothers are generally at home, because this society being a society that values male superiority, has consigned the role of women to the home, and their human potentials are not maximized in the sense that they should be, and they are confined to housekeeping and other menial activities that this society considers unworthy of remuneration.

And so they are at home. And therefore, the schools do not have facilities for lunch. And so when these black children were shipped off into these neighborhoods, they couldn't come home for lunch. And the bus didn't come to take them home, so they had to bring lunches and eat in the schools.

This the teachers resented, because they hadn't had this problem before, because the children went home to lunch, and therefore the teachers had an additional responsibility of having to supervise these black children who had to eat at school.

So they were crowded into classrooms and cubby-holes and closets, and resentful teachers were used to supervise these lunches. It was a very cold and hostile environment, Senator. And many black children were subjected to it in the early years.

EFFORTS OF SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT

Mr. Coffin-Gregory Coffin, who was superintendent of schools at that time-met with parents and I had many opportunities to talk with him about this condition, and he subsequently worked very hard to correct it. He did several things. He tried to relieve the conditions in the lunch rooms by making provisions for the students. They put attendants on the buses. And he tried to employ more black people in the system. in positions like administrative positions, counseling positions, teaching positions, in order to help black children make the necessary adjustments to the hostility they were meeting.

Now in his efforts to do this, he came un against a lot of resistance in the city of Evanston, because Evanston has a large black population for a suburb-close to 25 percent now--and Evanston was about the business at that time of confining this black community in the west side of Evanston, so that it wouldn't spread. It was considered like the black plague and often called the black blight.

And the black people were moving out of the west side into other areas in Evanston, and the city was resisting this movement through zoning laws and other legal and extra-legal operations.

And so Dr. Coffin came up against this community control, Senator: in his effort to assist the black community in adjusting to the hostility it was meeting in its efforts at desegregation, he, too, was dismissed.

So the problems that committed people have to true integration meet with such massive hostility from the community control of white areas, that I see the black people suppressed by this hostility and being the losers in integration.

WOODLAWN ORGANIZATION

Now let's look at community control. In the Woodlawn area of Chicago, where I worked as director of Woodlawn experimental schools district project, there is an organization called the Woodlawn Organization, which is a mass-based community organization, and it collaborated with the University of Chicago, and the Chicago Board of Education, in the Woodlawn experimental schools district project, which was a title III-funded project, whose primary objective was to restructure the social system through a mutuality of effort.

One goal was to change the roles and relationships in the school, and the other was to change the roles and relationships in the community.

And the project was not only concerned with who worked together, but how they worked together.

And there was a community board. Now this community board had three delegations or contingents: One from the University of Chicago, seven members; the Chicago Board of Education, or Chicago public school system, seven members; and one from the Woodlawn Organization with seven members.

Subsequently the University of Chicago gave up three of its seats to the Woodlawn Organization, so Woodlawn then had 10, University of Chicago had four, and the Chicago public school system had seven.

The Chicago public schools then gave up two of their seats to two students at Hyde Park High School, and two teachers in the experimental district, thereby limiting their participation to three seats.

There were 21 members on this board, and this board was to make policy for the three schools in the district--Wordsworth Elementary, Wordsworth Upper Grade, and Hyde Park High School. It is an allblack district, 3,200 students, a kindergarten through 12 system.

VETO POWER

This board was really a recommending board that participated in the initiation stages, but when the decisions were made about whether or not they wanted to do something, it was really left in the hands of the Chicago Board of Education. But the Chicago Board of Education never used its veto powers. Never. Most of the vetos were executed by middle management, central office staff, and the school principals. Because the memorandum of agreement made between the Chicago Board of Education and the other two participating institutions was very vague, and the line staff was unclear, these many ambiguities furnished the school principals and central office middle management with avoidance routes so that they could circumvent the decisions made by the local community board.

Let me give you some examples. The previous director, who is now superintendent of schools in Newton, Iowa, Dr. Willard Congreve, ordered a couch for his office in December 1968, and it arrived in May 1970.

With short-term, federally funded projects which have only 2 or 3 years to operate, these kinds of purchasing requirements are really

obstructive. They keep the project from really doing what the funds said it should do.

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And though the community board made allocation of these moneys, the central office middle management still could keep them getting it.

Also travel vouchers could be obstructed. If parents wanted to go to Atlantic City to attend the AASA convention which is a conservative organization, and they felt it was not responsive to the needs of the parents in the community control, it was obstructed. Though the funds were finally granted, they were cut and were not what the parents thought they should be.

These kinds of obstacles were placed in the way by middle mana ge

ment.

GANG VIOLENCE

But some beautiful things happened. Not in community control, but in citizen participation efforts. One was the alleviation of the very bad gang problem at the Wadsworth Upper Grade Center when the project began. The newspapers and the former principal described this yard as a mini-Vietnam, because there were so many shootings and incidents of violence in the yard.

The parents and the students and the teachers met and addressed themselves to the issue and designed some programs to work on the problem. One was a work-study program so that each one of the Nations could participate in it. These are youth organizations, sometimes called gangs; the Black Disciple Nation, and the Black P. Stone Nation.

And this program afforded an effort for these two groups of young men to talk with each other about this problem, with the idea that they would work toward its alleviation. This program started out with an all-male counseling project with the youth in the school, at Wadsworth Upper Grade Center. These youth were being recruited to meet with ombudsmen from the two youth organizations to address themselves to this problem.

Since October 16, 1969, until this present day, there has been no act of violence on the Wadsworth Yard. That is one of the accomplishments of this project, and citizen participation, and collective decisionmaking model.

ACHIEVEMENT LEVELS

Another is the almost complete elimination of nonready first graders, so that less than 1 percent of the kindergarten students now entering first grade-less than 1 percent are now not ready to read.

Achievement scores for third grade students, that have been just released, indicate a massive improvement in all the quartiles of the medium achievement ranks in almost every area tested, and I have given you a table citing these improvements.

As you move up, it becomes more difficult to move the achievements, because of experiences the students have had in schools preceding the project. But even in sixth grade, there are instances where improvement is showing.

With the male counseling group, which we call the Young Men of Wadsworth, the counselor who is in charge of that group (Mr. Julius

Newborn), for a master's degree thesis did a study with this group of young men. He worked with them and tested them in several studyskill areas, and then compared their achievement with boys in the same age bracket in a neighboring school, in like social and economic circumstances. And he found our young men improved in all except two areas of study skills.

So I am saying that in a school where you have an aggregate model, where everyone participates in the decisionmaking, and everyone has a chance to put in his ideas of what the needs and demands and programs are, that there is a better chance of a development of a positive self concept, a better chance for the development of a sense of power over one's destiny, a better change for a reduction in alienation, and thereby a much better chance for improvement of the achievement."

Senator MONDALE. How do you deal with the findings of the Coleman report, which concluded, as I understand it, that children from "disadvantaged backgrounds"--the poor, often undernourished, from poor housing, with poor health care, without books, et cetera-will do better if they are permitted to attend schools in which the dominant makeup is of children from so-called advantaged social and economic backgrounds.

COLEMAN REPORT

As I understood Dr. Coleman, his point is not a racial one-black kids can only learn when with white kids-but that the same process would work with upper middleclass blacks dominating a school into which poor black children came.

And that from his study, considering all the inputs teachers, money, classrooms, and so on-that the greatest and most hopeful variable was this kind of social-economic integration in a stable environment. That is his argument.

That study is enormously influential in American education. My impression is that both of you reject it. But I would like to hear you respond.

Dr. SIZEMORE. Well, I have many quarrels with that study. Social science, Senator, in this country has a tendency to support the institution or the value system of male superiority, of white-European superiority, and superiority of people with money.

And it seems to me what Dr. Coleman found out is that money makes a difference, and I certainly agree with that.

There is another study-(Sexton study) on education and income, which validates that premise. There is another study by (Susan Stadolski and Lesser) and another man, which found that as a groupI think they tested three groups-Jewish, black and Puerto Rican and Chinese, I think-and they found that in each group, as the group became more economically stable, in other words, came up, the achievement scores did too.

CRITICISM OF COLEMAN REPORT

No one took this seriously, though, Senator. Because if anyone had taken it seriously, then they would have taken the money and given it to the parents. You know, they would have said, OK, this is the way you raise reading scores, and just raised all of the income levels of all the families to $5,000, and this would raise the achievement scores.