of this in New York as in the Southwest where youngsters have entered school knowing only Spanish, or some other "foreign" language, only to have it drummed out of them, without even giving them a knowledge of English in return. The child drops out of school and faces the world with marked inability to read or write Spanish and with a very little amount of English. The result is a dialect understood neither by Cervantes nor Shakespeare. What time is it? or Que hora esc, becomes Que tima tienes¿, and the very people in the education process who have caused this dialect pull their hair out in despair and insist that these students are unteachable.

Success has many parents while failure is an orphan. Though no one in particular is to blame for this situation, unless we recognize that the schools have a responsibility to educate all children-a difference in language not withstanding-we will be consigning many children to barren lives as adults. In most cases great strides have not been made. However, there are several programs being implemented in various parts of the country which could be the forerunner of widespread application in our educational systems. One such program is being conducted at the Bilingual Sub-School in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville School District of Brooklyn, New York.

The community served by this project is 35 percent non-English speaking (mostly Puerto Rican) and 65 percent black. Admission to the school is voluntary; children can be placed by their parents either in regular classes at the school or in bilingual rooms. During 1968-69, the first year of this

program, 180 children were enrolled-only 1 percent of them spoke English. Bilingual education is provided from kindergarten through the fifth grade, and is now proposed to be expanded to the eighth grade. In kindergarten and first grade, all teaching is done in Spanish only. The English language is spoken but not for teaching purposes. In the second through fifth grades, teaching takes place in both Spanish and English, varying with the teacher. For instance, an instructor may stay with one language for the entire period except for a 5-minute summary in the other language. Another teacher may continually change from one to the other during the session.

The principal of the school was the first Puerto Rican to be appointed to head an elementary school in New York City. Recruitment of the teachers was done in New York City as well as in Puerto Rico. Some problems were encountered with the latter in that they had to pass New York City certification. Of the eight teachers in the subschool, six are bilingual (some being native English-speaking) and two speak English only. There are five teachers' aides in the program-two speak Spanish only, one speaks English only, and two are bilingual. In addition, a corrective reading teacher and a guidance counselor, both of whom are bilingual, are on the staff.

The curriculum and materials do not necessarily follow the citywide standards. The teachers are able to innovate freely and many of the materials are created by the instructor who is assisted by the students in the class.

Concerning testing and evaluation, the emphasis is on self-evalu

ations by teachers through their semi-monthly reports of goals for the coming 2 weeks, and teaching effectiveness based on a daily log of teacher and student perform

ance.

The parents and community are significantly involved in the bilingual program. An advisory committee with representative membership makes recommendations on curriculum and guidance matters. Visitors are welcomed to observe classes in action at any hour of the day. Also, regular meetings are conducted with parents in a workshop setting.

Another innovative program is taking place in the Rough Rock Navajo Demonstration School in Chinle, Arizona. The school district of which Rough Rock is a part has a population of which only 5 percent speak English and only 10 percent have any formal education. The traditional schooling provided for Indians serves a large geographical area and, therefore, requires boarding away at the school. In contrast, the Demonstration School serves the immediate area as do other American public schools.

At Rough Rock the course of instruction for Phase I classes (preschool to grade 2) originally had a program in English as a second language. In Phase II (grades 3 to 9) there was teaching of Navajo reading. As the program flowered, formal instruction was instituted for Phase I in oral Navajo. Currently, Navajo is the primary language in the early grades, coupled with continuous teaching of the Navajo language and culture at all grade levels.

The latest thinking has produced a daily program design for preschool youngsters of 4 hours of

spoken Navajo and 2 hours of spoken English. In kindergarten to grade 2, there are 4 hours of written and spoken Navajo and 2 hours of spoken English. In subsequent grades, the ratio is 2 hours of spoken and written English.

The role of the community and parents at Rough Rock is similar to what is developing in other parts of the United States. But this involvement is a dramatic departure from the traditional Indian school. Historically, total control has been kept by non-Indian personnel, causing a major gap between Indians and whites, with a growing hostitily among those who are purportedly the "beneficiaries" of the schooling. However, all this is changed in the Demonstration experiment. The school board is composed of Navajos only. They have true authority in determining policies and programs. Parents themselves evaluate and programs parent teams visit elders of the tribe in order to close the pre-existing communications gap. Visitations at the school are so successfully encouraged that in the last 3 years 12,000 visitors have been logged in from 42 States, eight foreign countries, and 86 Indian tribes. These visitors are able to sleep over in the school dormitories for several days, eat in the school cafeteria, and continuously observe classroom activity.

The techniques for instruction used in the Sustained Primary Program for Bilingual Students at Las Cruces, New Mexico for a group of Mexican American youngsters could also serve as a model for other educational institutions. These students are in kindergarten through the third grade and are from low-income families.

One of the innovations in this particular experiment is that the children have the same teacher from kindergarten through third grade, and no new children are permitted to enter a class after it is established in kindergarten. This helps to achieve the goal of continuity. At the inception of the Las Cruces project, instruction was provided in Spanish during the morning and in English during the afternoon. In the evolution of the program, however, teachers began to institute their own schedules. Although the two halves of the day for each language are maintained approximately, some instructors combine both languages during class, while others have a more formal separation.

As an inherent part of the program, an intensive orientation and in-service training schedule is provided for the teachers. They also meet weekly to discuss such matters as teaching materials, evaluation, curriculum, or to hear guest lecturers. Further, sensitivity training is provided for the teachers' personal growth. Another innovation is the periodic half-day visit of teachers to each others' classes. In addition, every summer a weeklong workshop is conducted on Mexican culture, language patterns, and classroom management.

Instructors develop much of their own teaching materials and emphasize phonics in teaching both languages. Each classroom has a listening center with taped lessons in both Spanish and English.

The involvement of parents as learners and advisors is a major ingredient of the program. Home visits by teachers and other school personnel are standard procedure and all parents can visit the

classrooms at any time they wish. During the monthly parent meetings, which are held in both languages, educational policies are discussed. At these meetings parents are taught how to use various instructional materials SO that they are in a position to assist their own children with homework. In addition, twice annually the school conducts special workshops for parents, aides, and teachers to discuss all aspects of the school program.

The projects identified above, along with other special programs that exist*, provide a good start in reversing a most regrettable and damaging set of circumstances. There is an overwhelming need for American society to take a full honest look at itself, and then to take meaningful steps to correct the injustices which exist in many quarters. One area of these inequalities definitely relates to the bilingual education of minority citizens. These programs prove how much progress can be attained if the will to do something is present. But these undertakings are only a beginning. A massive and permanent improvement must be accomplished if the ideal of America is to be as compelling to our minorities as it has been to others.

EDWARD MERCADO

Mr. Mercado is the District Director for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands with the Office of Economic Opportunity, Region 2.

Certain of these programs are reported in the September 1969 issue of The Center Forum and will soon appear in book form.

Today's proliferation of publications devoted to urban problems and crises reaffirms the many traditional, historical, and cultural biases that have characterized analyses of American cities since their inception. At different points in time problems of the city have been depicted according to their institutionally relevant roles, the vested interests of their promulgators, the theoretical concerns of an intellectual elite of interpreters, and the ambivalence of many social engineers, as well as the trends and emphases of existent social

movements.

Within these generalized frames of reference the specific delineations of problems have ranged from immigration of the 1880's to South-North migration of the 1920's; from rural-urban migration of the 1930's to metropolitanization of the 1940's and suburbanization of the 1950's and 1960's. Where ethnic groups have been caught up in these ecological shifts of population, their movement into urban areas has been made to reflect the fears of urbanites relative to such attendant problems as increased rates in vice, crime, fertility,

morbidity, and mortality; deficits along educational, occupational, and income lines; and augmentation of two major concomitants- poverty and welfare.

Each of the preceding factors has, no doubt, contributed to the criticality of urban situations at one time or another. However, scientific knowledge and civic action have helped bring many of them within the bounds of social control so that urbanites no longer feel as threatened by them as previously. It is no wonder then that, where today's cities seethe with demonstrations, seizures of buildings, riots, arson, looting, sniping, and intermittent guerrilla warfare that there has been a revival of fear among urbanites-one which avows existence of unprecedented crises in the city today. Perhaps this is viewed as being all the more critical because, unlike her European or Asiatic counterparts who have faced war on their own soils, the American city has escaped being a battleground for major conflicts. Until recently even the "town and gown" conflict so characteristic of other parts of the Western World were more covert than overt in the American city.

and increased their metropolitanization.

The rapid influx of Negro Americans into the metropolises of the United States was observed by the Bureau of the Census for each of the 50 largest cities of the United States between 1950 and 1960. While the central cities of the 12 largest metropolitan areas contained only 13.2 percent of the population as a whole, they contained over 31.0 percent of the Negro American population. As the proportion of whites living in the 12 central areas consistently decreased between 1930 and 1960, the proportion of nonwhites (predominantly Negro Americans) consistently increased. Nonwhite population groups made substantial gains in many large cities between 1950 and 1960. Newark, N.J., went from a nonwhite proportion of 17.2 to 34.4 and Washington, D. C. from 35.4 to 54.8. In the 1950's Negroes increased in such leading population centers as New York City by 46.0 percent, in Philadelphia by 41.0 percent, and in Los Angeles by 96.0 percent.

Resulting from changes of this type are several interrelated factors. Inner-city residents are more and more racially, ethnically, and economically homogeneous. As Negro Americans become highly concentrated in the core city, whites flee to the suburbs. Instead of a rural ring of "blacks" surrounding an urban core of whites, now white suburbia surrounds the dark inner-city which is only slightly lightened by whites trapped inside the city and unable to escape. More significant than the color factor, however, is the fact that lower and lower-middle class people are more ecologically segregated than ever before.

As long as low-income persons remained dispersed on single farmsteads in rural areas, they may have been illiterate, inadequately housed, impoverished slum dwellers but their city-bred cousins were only partially aware of this. City residents may have deplored such conditions for specific individuals, but the conditions were not problematic, for social problems are nonexistent until large numbers of people recognize certain situations as problems, see them as threats to many cherished values, and call for attack on them.

The recognition of such conditions as problems became urgent when excessive numbers of low-income persons began to over-crowd the inner-city, to avail themselves of job opportunities opening in the city, to search for low-cost housing, and to alter their life styles by exemplifying the materialistic values of the affluent. upper-middle class which they supplanted in the city. The longer and harder these non-affluent urbanities sought to equate the patterns of the former middle

class urbanite, now the affluent suburbanite, the greater the economic gap that developed between them.

This gap is readily observable in data recently released by the Census Bureau and summarized by the New York Times News Service. The report shows the number of poor persons to have declined for the entire United States, with one-third of the Negro Americans still classed as poor, the drop for the latter being from 56.0 percent in 1961 to 33.0 percent in 1968. Although this still connotes a large population segment as poor, for Negroes the drop exceeded that for the Nation as a whole which went from 22.0 percent in 1961 to 13.0 percent in 1968.

With the Government's new definition of poverty, which sets the cut-off for a non-farm family of four at $3,553, and the rising level of income the poverty percentage may continue to dwindle. This, however, will hardly solve the more serious problem of income gap. Last year's median family income for the Nation's families was shown to be $8,600, that for white families $8,937 and for Negro American families $5,360. Not only is the Negro family closer to the poverty cut-off, but it tends to be headed by a woman and the percentage so headed in 1969 edged upward to 29.0, which is three times the proportion for whites.

Realistically then, the urban crisis in the United States revolves around the high concentration of lowincome Negro American families in the inner-city of ever-growing metropolitan areas. This becomes further complicated by the fact that many central cities have developed into lower class Negro American slums; that Negro ghettos have increased in size; and that a subculture of poverty has evolved. Those for whom urbanism has made slums, ghettos, and poverty a way of life have felt the pangs of material want, psychological depression, unfulfilled ambitions, subverted open occupancy, and closed neighborhoods.

Intricately involved with the foregoing factors is the matter of housing which is often listed among the major problems of the city. In a technical sense, however, housing problems can only be termed urban in nature because of the rapid changes that have taken place and the persistent gap between need and supply in the urban community. Some persons would have us believe that the major problem of urban areas is that of inadequate and substandard housing; some would decree that vested interests have created a housing shortage; still others would place blame on types of dwellings constructed and their impossible acquisition by those at the income levels where they are most needed.