 Chapter 17 Recommendations for National Action, Part 2 We are proposing programs in six areas in order to illustrate how we believe the basic strategies we have outlined can be put into effect. Consolidating and concentrating employment efforts, opening the existing job structure, creating 1 million new jobs in the public sector in three years, creating 1 million new jobs in the private sector in three years, developing urban and rural poverty areas, encouraging business ownership in the ghetto, consolidating and concentrating employment efforts, recruitment. There is an urgent need for a comprehensive manpower recruitment and services agency at the community level. The Federal State Employment Service is not serving this function in many urban areas and cannot do so unless it is substantially restructured and revitalized. This was recommended in 1965 by the Employment Service Task Force, but has been only partially achieved by the Employment Service's new Human Resources Development Program. We believe that every city should establish such a comprehensive agency with authority to direct the coordination of all manpower programs including those of the Employment Service, the Community Action Agencies and other local groups. The Concentrated Employment Program established by the Department of Labor last year and now operating in the ghettos of 20 cities and in two rural areas is an important beginning toward a unified effort at the local level. A related effort by the Department of Housing and Urban Development is underway in the Model Cities Program now in the planning stage in some 63 cities. Placement. In order to match mended jobs, we need more effective interchange of information. A computerized nationwide service should be established as recommended in 1966 by the National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress with priority of installation given to the large urban centers. An information system of this sort would simplify placement, including inter-area placement and placement from ghetto to suburb. This in turn will often require transportation assistance and counseling. The existing Experimental Mobility Program under the Manpower Development and Training Act should be greatly expanded and should support movement from one part of the metropolitan area to another. Aid to local public transportation under the Mass Transportation Program should be similarly expanded on the basis of an existing experiment with subsidies for root servicing ghetto areas. Job development and placement in private industry is critical to our proposed strategies and is now handled separately by a wide variety of agencies and programs. The Manpower Development and Training Act programs, the Vocational Education programs, the Vocational Rehabilitation program, the Job Corps and recently the Neighborhood Youth Corps and several new adult work experience and training programs. All seek to place trainees with private employers, sometimes with and sometimes without, training assistants, through a wide variety of local agencies as well as through the Employment Service, Community Action Agencies and others. A single cooperative national effort should be undertaken with the assistance of business, labor and industrial leaders at national, regional and local levels. It should reach both individual companies and trade associations, systematically and extensively with information about incentive programs and aids and with authority to negotiate contractual arrangements and channel incentive funds to private employers. The recently created Urban Coalition, with its local affiliates, brought together many of the interested parties in the private sector. The National Alliance of Businessmen, just established by the President, will be concentrating private industry efforts in on-the-job training of the hardcore unemployed. We believe that it may be helpful now to create a federally-chartered corporation with authority to undertake the coordination of the private sector job program outlined below. Opening the existing job structure. Arbitrary barriers to employment and promotion must be eliminated. Federal, state and local efforts to ensure equal opportunity in employment should be strengthened by A. Including federal, state and local governmental agencies as employers covered by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The federal anti-discrimination and employment law, which now covers other employers of 50 or more employees, and as of July 1968, will cover employers of 25 or more employees, labor unions and employment agencies. B. Granting to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, the federal enforcement agency under Title VII sees and assists power comparable to the enforcement power now held by other federal agencies administering regulatory national policies. C. Increasing technical and other assistance now provided to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to state and local anti-discrimination commissions under the provisions of Title VII. D. Undertaking through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission an industry and area-wide enforcement effort based not only upon individual complaints but upon employer and union reports showing broad patterns of discrimination in employment and promotion. E. Linking enforcement efforts with training and other aids to employers and unions so that affirmative action to hire and promote may be encouraged in connection with investigation of both individual complaints and charges of broad patterns of discrimination. F. Substantially increasing the staff and other resources of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enable it to perform effectively these additional functions. Equal opportunity for employment by federal contractors under Executive Order 11246 should be enforced more vigorously against both employers and unions. This is particularly critical in regard to federal construction contracts. Staff and other resources of the Office of Contract Compliance in the Department of Labor should be increased so that withholding federal contracts is made a meaningful sanction. The efforts of the Department of Labor to obtain commitments from unions to encourage Negro membership in apprenticeship programs are especially noteworthy and should be intensified. Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which provides for withholding federal grant and aid funds from activities which discriminate on grounds of color or race should be supported fully particularly in regard to recruitment for federally assisted job training in hospitals, universities, colleges and schools. The staff and other resources of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare which has primary jurisdiction over these functions should be expanded for this purpose. The federal government through the Civil Service Commission and other agencies should undertake programs of recruitment, hiring and on-the-job training of the disadvantaged and should reexamine and revalidate its minimum employment and promotion standards. In this regard the federal government should become a model for state and local government and the private business community. To enlist the full cooperation of federal agencies they should be reimbursed by internal allowances for the extra costs of training disadvantaged employees. One way to improve the condition of the underemployed on a national basis would be to increase the federal minimum wage and widen its coverage. The recent increase to $1.60 per hour yields an annual wage only slightly above the poverty level and only for those employed full time. As an alternative we recommend consideration be given to an experimental program of wage supplements or other methods for achieving the same income goals. Creating one million new jobs in the public sector in three years. Existing public employment programs should be consolidated and substantially increased. The Neighborhood Youth Corps last year involved approximately 300,000 youths between the ages of 14 and 22 in three programs of work experience. New York City offers either full time positions, year round or during the summer, or part time positions during the school year. Several similar but considerably smaller public employment programs involve chronically unemployed adults, generally in subprofessional community betterment work, operational mainstream in small towns and rural areas, new careers and special impact in urban areas, and work experience and training for welfare recipients under the 1967 amendments to Title IV of the Social Security Act. Emphasis in the expanded public employment programs should be shifted, so far as possible, from work experience to on the job training and additional federal assistance above the present payment of 90% of wages should be provided to pay for the additional costs of training and supportive services to trainees. Federal assistance should be scaled so it does not terminate abruptly. The public employer should pay a progressively larger share of the total cost as trainees' productivity increases. Emphasis should also be placed on employing trainees to improve run down neighborhoods and to perform a variety of other socially useful public services which are not make work, including community service officers in police departments as recommended by the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice and as discussed above in Chapter 11. Public employers should be required to pay on-the-job trainees not less than the minimum wage or the prevailing wage in the area for similar work, whichever is higher. We recommend a three-year program aimed at creating 250,000 new public service jobs in the first year and a total of one million such jobs over the three-year period. The Department of Defense should a. Continuous emphasis on, and consider expansion of, Project 100,000 under which it accepts young men with below standard test scores, b. Intensify its recruiting efforts in areas of high unemployment so that young men living there are fully aware of the training and service opportunities open to them, c. Substantially expand project transition which began on a pilot basis in 1967 and involves training and counseling for servicemen scheduled to return to civilian life, creating one million new jobs in the private sector in three years. Eighty-four percent of the nation's 73 million civilian workers are at work in 11.5 million private enterprises. The involvement of only five percent of all private companies would represent the use of more than 500,000 enterprises and provide a massive additional spur to job development. Based on experience with training by private employers, primarily under the Manpower Development and Training Act, our recommendations are aimed at inducing a substantially expanded number of companies to hire and train the hardcore unemployed. Recruitment and referral of the disadvantaged unemployed should be undertaken by a public body such as the Manpower Service Agency we have already described. The Manpower Service Agency will determine eligibility and certify a chronically unemployed person for on-the-job training by issuing to him a certificate of eligibility or a similar identifying document. This would entitle the private employer to reimbursement for certain costs. A similar technique was used under the GI Bill for training veterans of World War II and the Korean conflict. The direct reimbursement system currently used in on-the-job training programs should be expanded and the existing programs should be consolidated under a single administration. These programs include the Manpower Development and Training Act and the new work training and industry components of the Neighborhood Youth Corps, new careers and special impact programs. Under these programs, a federal agency contracts to reimburse each employer for a negotiated average cost of training and supportive services for each trainee. If a corporation is chartered by Congress to serve as the government's primary instrument for job development in the private sector, the corporation, through regional and local subsidiaries would, a. systematically work with trade groups, companies and labor unions, b. arrange for any necessary supportive services and pre-vocational educational training which employers are unable to provide, and c. enter into contracts with employers providing for their reimbursement for the extra costs of training. The employer would of course undertake not to dismiss existing employees in order to hire trainees, to provide job training along with supportive services, and to give reasonable assurance that the employee would be fairly promoted if he successfully completed his training period. To serve as an incentive to widespread business involvement, the average amount of the reimbursement must exceed substantially the approximate $1,000 per year payment now made under federal on-the-job training programs, and, for the hardcore unemployed, should at least equal the $3,500 recommended by the president in his Manpower Message of January 23, 1968. An additional and potentially lower cost method of stimulating on-the-job training and new job creation for the hardcore unemployed is to a tax credit system provided that guidelines are adopted to ensure adequate training and job retention. The commission believes this alternative holds promise. With respect to the tax credit device, we note that since its enactment in 1962, the existing 7% incentive credit for investment in new equipment and machinery has been highly successful as a technique for reaching a large number of individual enterprises to effectuate a national policy. During the 1962 to 65 period, the credit was taken on 1,239,000 corporate tax returns representing new investment in the amount of approximately $75 million. To assure comparable simplicity in administration, the tax credit should be geared to a fixed amount for each certified employee hired and retained at least for a six-month period, with decreasing credits for retention for additional periods totaling another 18 months. No credit will be allowed if existing employees are displaced, or if the turnover rate among certified employees during each period exceeds more than twice the employer's usual turnover rate. The corporation chartered by Congress would establish performance guidelines, compare and evaluate the results of job training programs by contract and under the tax credit, and arrange to share with all participating employers the experiences of other companies with techniques for training the hardcore unemployed and holding them on the job. The commission recommends a three-year program aimed at creating 300,000 new private sector jobs in the first year, and a total of 1 million such jobs over the three-year period, provided that the tax credit is enacted at an early date. If the tax credit is not so enacted, a realistic goal would be 150,000 such jobs in the first year and 1 million jobs over a three-to-five-year period. Developing Urban and Rural Poverty Areas A tax credit should also be provided for the location and renovation of plants and other business facilities in urban and rural poverty areas, as already defined jointly by several federal departments and agencies. The existing incentive tax credit for investment in new equipment, but not for real property or plant, is available without regard to where the investment is made. For investment in poverty areas, the existing credit should be increased substantially and extended to investments in real property and plant, whether for the construction of a new plant or the acquisition of an existing facility. Plant and equipment in these areas should also be eligible for rapid amortization within as little as five years. These incentives would be designed to attract to the poverty areas the kind of industrial and commercial development which would create new jobs and provide other economic benefits for the disadvantaged community surrounding the enterprise. An employer eligible for the poverty area investment credit would also be eligible, if he employed certified trainees, for the hardcore employment credit. The two credits are designed to meet separate needs and different costs to investors and employers. To begin an intensified national effort to improve rural economic conditions and to stem the flow of migration from these areas to large urban centers, the new investment credit should also be available for firms investing or expanding in rural poverty areas. The authority and the resources of the Economic Development Administration should be enlarged to enable it to expand its operations into urban poverty areas on a substantial scale. Encouraging business ownership in the ghettos We believe it is important to give special encouragement to Negro ownership of business in ghettos areas. The disadvantaged need help in obtaining managerial experience and in creating for themselves a stake in the economic community. The advantages of Negro entrepreneurship also include self-employment and jobs for others. Existing small business administration equity and operating loan programs, under which almost 3,500 loans were made during fiscal year 1967, should be substantially expanded in amount, extended to higher risk ventures, and promoted widely through offices in the ghettos. Loans under small business administration guarantees, which are now authorized, should be actively encouraged among local lending institutions. Counseling and managerial assistance should also be provided. The new Department of Commerce program under which Negro small businessmen are assisted in creating associations for pooling purchasing power and sharing experience should be expanded and consolidated with a small business administration loan program. The Interracial Council for Business Opportunity and other private efforts to provide counseling by successful businessmen outside the ghettos should be supported and enlarged. End of Section 51. Recording by Todd. Section 52 of the Kerner Commission Report. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Kerner Commission Report. Chapter 17. Recommendations for National Action. Part 3. Two. Education. Introduction. Education in our democratic society must equip the children of the nation to develop their potential and to participate fully in American life. For the community at large, the schools have discharged this responsibility well. But for many minorities, and particularly for the children of the racial ghetto, the schools have failed to provide the educational experience which could help overcome the effects of discrimination and deprivation. This failure is one of the persistent sources of grievance and resentment within the Negro community. The hostility of Negro parents and students toward the school system is generating increasing conflict and causing disruption within many city school districts. But the most dramatic evidence of the relationship between educational practices and civil disorder lies in the high incidence of riot participation by ghetto youth who have not completed high school. Our survey of riot cities found that the typical riot participant was a high school dropout, as Superintendent Briggs of Cleveland testified before the Commission. Many of those whose recent acts threaten the domestic safety and tear at the roots of the American democracy are the products of yesterday's inadequate and neglected inner city schools. The greatest unused and underdeveloped human resources in America are to be found in the deteriorating cores of America's urban centers. The bleak record of public education for ghetto children is growing worse. In the critical skills, verbal and reading ability, Negro students fall further behind whites with each year of school completed. For example, in the metropolitan northeast Negro students on the average begin the first grade with somewhat lower scores than whites on standard achievement tests, are about 1.6 grades behind by sixth grade and have fallen 3.3 grades behind white students by twelfth grade. The failure of the public schools to equip these students with basic verbal skills is reflected in their performance on the Selective Service Mental Test. During the period June 1964 to December 1965, 67% of Negro candidates failed the examination. The failure rate for whites was 19%. The result is that many more Negro than white students drop out of school. In the metropolitan north and west Negro students are more than three times as likely as white students to drop out of school by ages 16 to 17. As reflected by the high unemployment rate for graduates of ghetto schools and the even higher proportion of employed workers who are in low-skilled, low-paid jobs, many of those who do graduate are not equipped to enter the normal job market and have great difficulty securing employment. Several factors have converged to produce this critical situation. Segregation The vast majority of inner-city schools are rigidly segregated. In 75 major central cities surveyed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in its study Racial Isolation in the Public Schools, 85% of all Negro students in elementary grades attended schools with enrollments that were 90% or more Negro. Almost 90% of all Negro students attend schools which had a majority of Negro students. In the same cities, 83% of all white students in those grades attended schools with 90 to 100% white enrollments. Racial isolation in the urban public schools is the result principally of residential segregation and widespread employment of the neighborhood school policy, which transfers segregation from housing to education. The effect of these conditions is magnified by the fact that a much greater proportion of white than Negro students attend private schools. Studies indicate that in America's twenty largest cities, approximately four out of ten white students are enrolled in non-public schools, as compared with only one out of ten Negro pupils, the differential appears to be increasing. Urban schools are becoming more segregated. In a sample of fifteen large northern cities, the Civil Rights Commission found that the degree of segregation rose sharply from 1950 to 1965. As Negro enrollments in these fifteen cities grew, 97% of the increase was absorbed by schools already over 50% Negro and 84% by schools more than 90% Negro. By 1975 it is estimated that if current policies and trends persist, 80% of all Negro pupils in the twenty largest cities, comprising nearly one half of the nation's Negro population, will be attending 90 to 100% Negro schools. Segregation has operated to reduce the quality of education provided in schools serving disadvantaged Negro neighborhoods. Most of the residents of these areas are poor. Many of the adults, the products of inadequate rural school systems in the south, have low levels of educational attainment. Their children have smaller vocabularies and are not as well equipped to learn rapidly in school, particularly with respect to basic literary skills, as children from more advantaged homes. When disadvantaged children are racially isolated in the schools, they are deprived of one of the more significant ingredients of quality education, exposure to other children with stronger educational backgrounds. The Coleman Report and the Report of the Civil Rights Commission established that the predominant socio-economic background of the students in a school exerts a powerful impact upon achievement. Further, the Coleman Report found that if a minority pupil from a home without much educational strength is put with schoolmates with strong educational backgrounds, his achievement is likely to increase. Another strong influence on achievement derives from the tendency of school administrators, teachers, parents, and the students themselves to regard ghetto schools as inferior. Reflecting this attitude, students attending such schools lose confidence in their ability to shape their future. The Coleman Report found this factor, destiny control, to have a stronger relationship to achievement than all the school factors together, and to be related for Negroes to the proportion of whites in the schools. In other words, both class and race factors have a strong bearing on educational achievement. The ghetto student labors under a double burden. Teachers The schools attended by disadvantaged Negro children commonly are staffed by teachers with less experience and lower qualifications than the schools attended by middle-class whites. For example, a 1963 study ranking Chicago's public high schools by the socio-economic status of surrounding neighborhoods found that in the ten lowest-ranking schools only 63.2% of all teachers were fully certified, and the median level of teaching experience was 3.9 years. In three of these schools the median level was one year. Four of the lowest-ranking schools were 100% Negro in enrollment, and three were over 90% Negro. By contrast, eight of the ten highest-ranking schools had nearly total white enrollments, and the other two were more than 75% white. In these schools 90.3% of the teachers were fully certified, and the median level of teaching experience was 12.3 years. Testifying before the commission, Dr. Daniel Dodson, director of the New York University Center for Human Relations and Community Services, stated that inner-city schools have not been able to hold teaching staff. Between 1952 and 1962 almost half of the licensed teachers of New York City left the system. Almost two out of every five of the 50,000 teaching personnel of New York City do not hold regular permanent licenses for the assignments they have. In another school system in one of the large cities, it was reported of one inner-city school that of 84 staff members, 41 were temporary teachers, 25 were probationaries, and only 18 were ten-year teachers. However, only one of the ten-year teachers was licensed in academic subjects. U.S. Commissioner of Education Harold Howe testified that many teachers are unprepared for teaching in schools serving disadvantaged children. They have what is a traumatic experience there and don't last. Moreover, the more experienced teachers normally select schools in white neighborhoods, thereby relegating the least experienced teachers to the disadvantaged schools. This process reinforces the view of ghetto schools as inferior. As a result teachers assigned to these schools often begin with negative attitudes toward the students and their ability and willingness to learn. These attitudes are aggravated by serious discipline problems, by the high crime rates in the areas surrounding the schools, and by the greater difficulties of teaching students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Reflecting these conditions, the Coleman Report found that a higher proportion of teachers in schools serving disadvantaged areas are dissatisfied with their present assignments and with their students than are their counterparts in other schools. Studies have shown that the attitudes of teachers toward their students have a very powerful impact upon educational attainment. The more teachers expect from their students, however disadvantaged those students may be, the better the students perform. Conversely, negative teacher attitudes act as self-fulfilling prophecies. The teachers expect little from their students, the students fulfill the expectation. As Dr. Kenneth Clark observed, children who are treated as if they are uneducable invariably become uneducable. In disadvantaged areas the neighborhood school concept tends to concentrate a relatively high proportion of emotionally disturbed and other problem children in the schools. Disadvantaged neighborhoods have the greatest need for health personnel, supplementary instructors and counselors, to assist with family problems, provide extra instruction to lagging students, and deal with the many serious mental and physical health deficiencies that occur so often in poverty areas. These conditions, which make effective teaching more difficult, reinforce negative teacher attitudes. A 1963 survey of Chicago public schools showed that the condition creating the highest amount of dissatisfaction among teachers was lack of adequate provision for the treatment of maladjusted, retarded and disturbed pupils. About 79% of elementary school teachers and 67% of high school teachers named this item as a key factor. The need for professional support for teachers in dealing with these extraordinary problems is seldom, if ever, met. Although special schools or classes are available for emotionally disturbed and mentally handicapped children, many pupils requiring such help remain in regular classes because of negligence, red tape and unavailability of clinical staff. An example is provided by a National Education Association study of Detroit. Before a disturbed child can receive psychological assistance, he must receive diagnostic testing, but before this happens the teacher must fill in a form to be submitted to a central office committee. If the committee decides that psychological testing is in order, the teacher must fill out a second form to be submitted to the psychological clinic. The child may then be placed on the waiting list for psychological testing. The waiting period may last for several weeks, several months or several years, and while he waits he sits in the regular classroom. Since visiting teachers are scarce and special classes are insufficient in number, the child who has been tested is usually returned to the regular classroom to serve more time as a sit-in. Teaching in disadvantaged areas is made more difficult by the high rate of student turnover. In New York City during 1963-64, seven of every ten students in the average segregated Negro-Porterican elementary school either entered or left during the year. Similar conditions are common to other inner-city schools. Continuity of education thus becomes exceedingly difficult. The more so because many of the students entering ghetto schools during the school year come from rural southern schools and are behind even the minimum levels of achievement attained by their fellow northern-born students. End of Section 52. Recording by Maria Casper. Section 53 of the Kerner Commission Report. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Kerner Commission Report. Chapter 17 Recommendations for National Action, Part 4. Enrollments. In virtually every large American city, the inner-city schools attended by Negroes are the most overcrowded. We have cited the vast population exchange, relatively affluent whites leaving the city to be replaced by Negroes, which has taken place over the last decade. The impact on public education facilities has been severe. Despite an overall decrease in the population of many cities, school enrollment has increased. Over the last twelve years, Detroit has lost approximately 20,000 to 30,000 families, yet during that same period the public school system gained approximately 50,000 to 60,000 children. Between 1961 and 1965, Detroit's Negro public school enrollment increased 31,108, while white enrollment dropped 23,748. In Cleveland, between 1950 and 1965, a population loss of 130,000 coincided with the school enrollment increase of 50,000 students. Enrollment gains in New York City and Chicago were even larger. Although of lesser magnitude, similar changes have occurred in the public school systems of many other large cities. As white students withdraw from a public school, they are replaced by greater numbers of Negro students, reflecting the fact that the Negro population is relatively younger and has more children of school age, also makes less use of private schools, and is more densely concentrated than the white population. As a result, Negro school enrollments have increased even more rapidly than the total Negro Central City population. In Cincinnati, for example, between 1960 and 1965, the Negro population grew 16%, while Negro public school enrollment increased 26%. The following data for four other cities illustrate how the proportion of Negroes in public schools has outgrown the Negro proportion of the total city population. Negro population and public school enrollment. Atlanta. Negro percent of population 1950, 36.6%, 1965, 43.5%, up 6.9%. Negro percent of public school enrollment 1950, 39.1%, 1965, 53.7%, up 14.6%. Milwaukee. Negro percent of population 1950, 3.5%, 1965, 10.8%, up 7.3%. Negro percent of public school enrollment 1950, 6.6%, 1965, 22.9%, up 16.3%. Oakland. Negro percent of population 1950, 12.4%, 1965, 30%, up 17.6%. Negro percent of public school enrollment 1950, 14.0%, 1965, 45%, up 31%. Washington. Negro percent of population 1950, 35%. 1965, 55%, up 20%. Negro percent of public school enrollment 1950, 50.1%, 1965, 89.4%, up 39.3%. Negroes now comprise a majority or near-majority of public school students in seven of the ten largest American cities, as well as in many other cities. The following table illustrates the percentage of Negro students for the period 1965-1966 in the public elementary schools of 42 cities, including the 28 largest, 17 of which have Negro majorities. Proportion of Negro students in total public elementary school enrollment 1965-66. Washington, D.C., 90.9% Negro. Chester, Pennsylvania, 69.3%. Wilmington, Delaware, 69.3%. Newark, 69.1%. New Orleans, 65.5%. Richmond, 64.7%. Baltimore, 64.3%. East St. Louis, 63.4%. St. Louis, 63.3%. Gary, 59.5%. Philadelphia, 58.6%. Detroit, 55.3%. Atlanta, 54.7%. Cleveland, 53.9%. Memphis, 53.2%. Chicago, 52.8%. Oakland, 52.1%. Harrisburg, 45.7%. New Haven, 45.6%. Hartford, 43.1%. Kansas City, 42.4%. Cincinnati, 40.3%. Pittsburgh, 39.4%. Buffalo, 34.6%. Houston, 33.9%. Flint, 33.1%. Indianapolis, 30.8%. New York City, 30.1%. Boston, 28.9%. San Francisco, 28.8%. Dallas, 27.5%. Miami, 26.8%. Milwaukee, 26.5%. Columbus, 26.1%. Los Angeles, 23.4%. Oklahoma City, 21.2%. Syracuse, 19.0%. San Antonio, 14.2%. Denver, 14.0%. San Diego, 11.6%. Seattle, 15.5%. Minneapolis, 7.2%. Source, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Racial Isolation in the Public Schools. Because this rapid expansion of Negro population has been concentrated in segregated neighborhoods, ghetto schools have experienced acute overcrowding. Shortages of textbooks and supplies have developed, social shifts are common, hallways and other non-classroom space have been adapted for class instruction, and mobile classroom units are used. Even programs for massive construction of new schools in Negro neighborhoods cannot always keep up with increased overcrowding. From 1951 to 1963, the Chicago Board of Education built 266 new schools or additions, mainly in all Negro areas. Yet a special committee studying these schools in 1964 reported that 40% of the Negro elementary schools had more than 35 students per available classroom, as compared to 12% of the primarily white elementary schools. Of the eight Negro high schools, five had enrollments more than 50% above designed capacity. Four of the ten integrated high schools, but only four of the 26 predominantly white high schools, were similarly overcrowded. Comparable conditions prevail in many other large cities. The Civil Rights Commission found that two-thirds of the predominantly Negro elementary schools in Atlanta were overcrowded. This compared with 47% of the white schools. In 1965 all Atlanta Negro high schools were operating beyond their designed capacity. Only one of three all white high schools, and six of eight predominantly white schools, were similarly overcrowded. Washington D.C. elementary schools, with 85 to 100% Negro enrollment, operated at a median of 115% of capacity. The one predominantly white high school operated at 92.3%, an integrated high school at 101.1%, and the remaining schools, all predominantly Negro, at 108.4% to 127.1% of capacity. Over-crowded schools have severe effects on education, the most important of which is that teachers are forced to concentrate on maintaining classroom discipline and thus have little time and energy to perform the primary function educating the students. Facilities and Curricula Inner-city schools are not only overcrowded, they also tend to be the oldest and most poorly equipped. In Detroit, 30 of the school buildings still in use in these areas were dedicated during the administration of President Grant. In Cincinnati, although from 1950 to 1965 Negro student population expanded at a faster pace than white, most additional school capacity planned and constructed was in predominantly white areas. According to a Civil Rights Commission report on Cincinnati, the added Negro pupil population was housed for the most part in the same central city schools vacated by the whites. With respect to equipment, the Coleman report states that Negro pupils have fewer of some of the facilities that seem most related to achievement. They have less access to physics, chemistry, and language laboratories. There are fewer books per pupil in their libraries. Their textbooks are less often in sufficient supply. The quality of education offered by ghetto schools is diminished by the use of curricula and materials poorly adapted to the life experiences of the students. Designed to serve a middle-class culture, much educational material appears irrelevant to the youth of the racial and economic ghetto. Until recently few texts featured any Negro personalities. Few books used or courses offered reflected the harsh realities of life in the ghetto or the contribution of Negroes to the country's culture and history. This failure to include materials relevant to their own environment has made students skeptical about the utility of what they are being taught. Reduced motivation to learn results. Funds Despite the overwhelming need, our society spends less money educating ghetto children than children of suburban families. Comparing the per capita education costs for ghetto and suburban schools, one educator in testimony before this commission said, If the most educated parents with the highest motivated children find in their wisdom that it costs fifteen hundred dollars per child per year to educate their children in the suburbs, isn't it logical that it would cost an equal amount to educate the less well-motivated low-income family child in the inner city? Such cost would just about double the budget of the average inner city school system. Twenty-five school boards in communities surrounding Detroit spent up to five hundred dollars more per year to educate their children than the city. Merely to bring the teacher-to-pupil ratio in Detroit in line with the state average would require an additional sixteen hundred fifty teachers at an annual cost of approximately thirteen million dollars. There is evidence that the disparity in educational expenditures for suburban and inner city schools has developed in parallel with population shifts. In a study of twelve metropolitan areas the Civil Rights Commission found that in nineteen fifty ten of the twelve central cities spent more per pupil than the surrounding suburbs. By nineteen sixty-four in seven of the twelve the average suburbs spent more per pupil than the central city. This reversal reflects the declining or stagnant city tax base and increasing competition from non-school needs, police, welfare, fire for a share of the municipal tax dollar. Suburbs where non-school needs are less demanding allocate almost twice the proportion of their total budgets to education as the cities. State contributions to city school systems have not had consistent equalizing effects. The Civil Rights Commission found that although state aid to city schools has increased at a rate proportionately greater than for suburban schools, states continue to contribute more per pupil to suburban schools in seven of the twelve metropolitan areas studied. The following table illustrates the findings. Revenues per pupil from state sources. Baltimore, city. Amount per pupil, nineteen fifty seventy-one dollars, nineteen sixty-four, one hundred seventy-one dollars, percent increase, nineteen fifty to fifty-four, one hundred forty point eight percent. Baltimore suburbs, nineteen fifty ninety dollars per pupil, nineteen sixty-four, one hundred ninety-nine dollars per pupil, one hundred twenty-one point one percent increase. Birmingham, city. Nineteen fifty, ninety dollars per pupil, nineteen sixty-four, two hundred one dollars per pupil, one hundred twenty-three point three percent increase. Birmingham suburbs, nineteen fifty fifty-four dollars per pupil, nineteen sixty-four, one hundred fifty dollars per pupil, one hundred seventy-seven point seven percent increase. Boston, city. Nineteen fifty, nineteen dollars per pupil, nineteen sixty-four, fifty-two dollars per pupil, one hundred seventy-three point seven percent increase. Boston suburbs, 1950 $30 per pupil, 1964 $75 per pupil, 150% increase. Buffalo City, 1950 $135 per pupil, 1964 $284 per pupil, 110.4% increase. Buffalo suburbs, 1950 $75 $165 per pupil, 1964 $270 per pupil, 63.6% increase. Chattanooga City, 1950 $62 per pupil, 1964 $136 per pupil, 119.4% increase. Chattanooga suburbs, 1950 $141 per pupil, 1964 $152 per pupil, 7.8% increase. Chicago City, 1950 $42 per pupil, 1964 $154 per pupil, 266.6% increase. Chicago suburbs, 1950 $32 per pupil, 1964 $110 per pupil, 243.8% increase. Cincinnati City, 1950 $51 per pupil, 1964 $91 per pupil, 78.4% increase. Cincinnati suburbs, 1950 $78 per pupil, 1964 $91 per pupil, 16.7% increase. Cleveland City, 1950 $50 per pupil, 1964 $88 per pupil, 76% increase. Cleveland suburbs, 1950 $39 per pupil, 1964 $88 per pupil, 125.6% increase. Detroit City, 1950 $135 per pupil, 1964 $189 per pupil, 40% increase. Detroit suburbs, 1950 $149 per pupil, 1964 $240 per pupil, 61.1% increase. New Orleans City, 1950 $152 per pupil, 1964 $239 per pupil, 57.2% increase. New Orleans suburbs, 1950 $117 per pupil, 1964 $259 per pupil, 121.4% increase. St. Louis City, 1950 $70 per pupil, 1964 $131 per pupil, 87.1% increase. St. Louis suburbs, 1950 $61 per pupil, 1964 $143 per pupil, 134.4% increase. San Francisco City, 1950 $122 per pupil, 1964 $163 per pupil, 33.6% increase. San Francisco suburbs, 1950 $160 per pupil, 1964 $261 per pupil, 63.1% increase. Source, US Commission on Civil Rights Racial Isolation in the Public Schools. Federal assistance, while focused on the inner city schools, has not been at a scale sufficient to remove this disparity. In the 1965-66 school year, federal aid accounted for less than 8% of total educational expenditures. Our survey of federal programs in Detroit, Newark and New Haven, during the school year 1967-68, found that a median of approximately half the eligible school population is receiving assistance under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, ESEA. Community School Relations Teachers of the poor rarely live in the community where they work, and sometimes have little sympathy for the lifestyles of their students. Moreover, the growth and complexity of the administration of large urban school systems has compromised the accountability of the local schools to the communities which they serve, and reduced the ability of parents to influence decisions affecting the education of their children. Ghetto schools often appear to be unresponsive to the community, communication has broken down, and parents are distrustful of education officials. The consequences for the education of students attending these schools are serious. Parental hostility to the schools is reflected in the attitudes of their children. Since the needs and concerns of the ghetto community are rarely reflected in educational policy formulated on a city-wide basis, the schools are often seen by ghetto youth as irrelevant. On the basis of interviews of riot-area residents in Detroit, Dr. Charles Smith of the U.S. Office of Education's Comprehensive Elementary and Secondary Education Program testified that one of the things that came through very clearly to us is the fact that there is an attitude which prevails in the inner city that says in substance we think education is irrelevant. Dr. Dodson explained this phenomenon as follows. The divergence of goals between the dominant class and ghetto youth makes schools irrelevant for the youth of the slum. It removes knowledge as a tool for groups who are deviant to the ethos of the dominant society. It tends to destroy the sense of self-worth of minority background children. It breeds apathy, powerlessness, and low self-esteem. The majority of ghetto youth would prefer to forego the acquisition of knowledge if it is at that cost. One cannot understand the alienation of modern ghetto youth except in the context of this conflict of goals. The absence of effective community-school relations has deprived the public education system of the communication required to overcome this divergence of goals. In the schools, as in the larger society, the isolation of ghetto residents from the policy-making institutions of local government is adding to the polarization of the community and depriving the system of its self-rectifying potential. Ghetto Environment All of the foregoing factors contribute substantially to the poor performance of ghetto schools. Inadequate and inefficient as these schools are, the failure of the public education system with respect to negro students cannot be appraised apart from the constant and oppressive ghetto environment. The interaction of the ghetto environment and the schools is described in the following testimony of superintendent Briggs of Cleveland. But what about the child of the ghetto? It is he whom we must save, for we cannot afford to lose this generation of young Americans. If this child of despair is a young adult, there is a better than fifty percent chance that he is a high-school drop-out. He is not only unemployed but unemployable without a saleable skill. Neither of his parents went beyond the eighth grade. Preschool or nursery school was out of the question when he was four, and when he was five he was placed on a kindergarten waiting list. At six he entered school, but could only attend for half a day because of the big enrollments. During his six years in elementary school he attended four different schools because his family moved often, seeking more adequate housing for the six children. When he got to high school he wanted vocational training but none was available. The family was on relief and he couldn't afford a good lunch at noon because Cleveland schools at that time were not participating in the federal hot lunch program and the average cost of lunches amounted to seventy cents. Of his few friends who were graduated from high school none had found jobs and they couldn't afford to go to college. Here he is now, discouraged and without hope, economically incompetent at a time in life when traditionally young Americans have entered the economic mainstream as job holders. A younger brother, age nine, is now in the fourth grade. He attends a new school opened in 1964. Though he lives one mile from Lake Erie he has never seen it. He has never taken a bus ride except when his class at school went on a field trip. The family still does not subscribe to a daily newspaper. The television set is broken and there is no money to have it repaired. His mother has never taken him downtown shopping. He has never been in the office of a dentist and he has seen a physician only at the local clinic when he was injured playing in an abandoned house in the neighborhood. At home there are no books. His toys, if any, are second hand. His shoes are too small and his sweatshirt, bought for twenty-five cents at a rummage sale, bears the insignia of a suburban school system. Each morning he looks forward anxiously to the free milk he gets at school because there is no breakfast at home. He can't study well at home because of the loud glare of rock and roll music from the bar up the street. There are nine bars in his rather compact neighborhood. The screaming police siren is a very familiar sound to him, for he hears it regularly in his neighborhood, where the crime rate is Cleveland's highest. These boys both have better-than-average intelligence, but they are the victims of neglect and are lost in a maze of statistics. Their plight and that of thousands like them in America's ghettos can certainly be considered the most pressing unattended business on America's agenda. To meet the urgent need to provide full equality of educational opportunity for disadvantaged youth, we recommend pursuit of the following strategies. Increasing efforts to eliminate de facto segregation. We have cited the extent of racial isolation in our urban schools. It is great and it is growing. It will not easily be overcome. Nonetheless, we believe school integration to be vital to the well-being of this country. We base this conclusion not on the effect of racial and economic segregation on achievement of Negro students, although there is evidence of such a relationship, nor on the effect of racial isolation on the even more segregated white students, although lack of opportunity to associate with persons of different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds surely limits their learning experience. We support integration as the priority education strategy because it is essential to the future of American society. We have seen in this last summer's disorders the consequences of racial isolation at all levels and of attitudes toward race on both sides produced by three centuries of myth, ignorance, and bias. It is indispensable that opportunities for interaction between the races be expanded. The problems of this society will not be solved unless and until our children are brought into a common encounter and encouraged to forge a new and more viable design of life. Provision of quality education for ghetto schools We recognize that the growing dominance of pupils from disadvantaged minorities in city school populations will not soon be reversed. No matter how great the effort toward desegregation, many children of the ghetto will not within their school careers attend integrated schools. If existing disadvantages are not to be perpetuated, we must improve dramatically the quality of ghetto education. Equality of results with all white schools in terms of achievement must be the goal. We see no conflict between the integration and quality education strategies we espouse. Commitment to the goal of integrated education can neither diminish the reality of today's segregated and unequal ghetto schools, nor sanction the tragic waste of human resources which they entail. Far from being in conflict, these strategies are complementary. The aim of quality education is to compensate for and overcome the environmental handicaps of disadvantaged children. The evidence indicates that integration in itself does not wholly achieve this purpose. Assessing his report in light of interpretation by others of its findings, Dr. Coleman concludes that it is also true that even in socially or racially integrated schools, a child's family background shows a very high relation to his performance. The findings of the Coleman report are quite unambiguous on this score. Even if the school is integrated, the heterogeneity of backgrounds with which children enter school is largely preserved in the heterogeneity of their performance when they finish. As the report indicates, integration provides benefits to the underprivileged, but it takes only a small step toward equality of educational opportunity. Moreover, most large integrated schools retain a form of ability grouping, normally resulting in re-segregation along racial lines. The Civil Rights Commission found that many Negro students who attend majority white schools are in fact in majority Negro classrooms. In short, compensatory education is essential not only to improve the quality of education provided in segregated ghetto schools, but to make possible both meaningful integration and maximum achievement in integrated schools. Attainment of this goal will require adoption of a comprehensive approach designed to reconstruct the ghetto child's social and intellectual environment, compensate for disadvantages already suffered, and provide necessary tools for development of essential literacy skills. This approach will entail adoption of new and costly educational policies and practices, beginning with early childhood and continuing through elementary and secondary schools. It will require extraordinary efforts to reconnect parents with the schools. It will also require unique experimentation with new methods to bring back into the educational process street-oriented teenagers and sub-teenagers who have lost all connection with existing school institutions. Improving Community School Relations In an atmosphere of hostility between the community and the schools, education cannot flourish. A basic problem stems from the isolation of the schools from the other social forces influencing youth. Changes in society, mass media, family structure, religion, have radically altered the role of the school. New links must be built between the schools and the communities they serve. The schools must be related to the broader system which influences and educates ghetto youth. Expansion of opportunities for community and parental participation in the school system is essential to the successful functioning of the inner city schools. Expanding Opportunities for Higher and Vocational Education To increase the relevance of education to the needs and aspirations of disadvantaged youth and to prepare them for full participation in American society, we recommend expanding opportunities both for higher education and for vocational training. Suggested Programs Increasing Efforts to Eliminate Defecto Segregation Increased Aid to School Systems Seeking to Eliminate Defecto Segregation, either within the system or in cooperation with neighboring school systems. Local school boards have experimented with a variety of techniques designed to accomplish desegregation. Among those commonly employed are school pairing, busing, open enrollment, boundary changes, strategic use of site selection, enlargement of attendance areas, and consolidation of schools to overcome racial imbalance. The results have not been uniform. Much appears to depend on the size and racial composition of the city and the attitudes of its suburbs. Some of the smaller cities have achieved considerable success. In many of our larger cities, however, the population shift earlier described has proceeded so far that integration is not feasible without the active cooperation of suburban communities. In others, distances between white and negro populations within city boundaries make these methods of accomplishing integration unfeasible. While each community should determine the appropriate desegregation technique, we believe substantial federal assistance should be provided. Title IV Under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.S. Commissioner of Education is authorized to provide technical assistance to state and local education agencies in the preparation, adoption, and implementation of plans for the desegregation of public schools. However, such aid is not available in support of locally designed programs to overcome racial imbalance in the schools. Moreover, this program has never been adequately funded even to accomplish its limited objectives. Applications for Title IV funds have consistently exceeded the amounts requested by the administration and the far lower sums appropriated by Congress. We believe that the Title IV program should be reoriented and expanded into a major federal effort to provide comprehensive aid to support state and local desegregation projects. To accomplish this purpose, Title IV should become the vehicle for a comprehensive federal construction, technical assistance, and operating grant program. Successful implementation will require repeal of the present statutory prohibition against the provision of assistance to support and encourage desegregation through assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance. To stimulate planning, formulation of long-term integration plans by applicant state and local agencies should be required as a condition to receiving assistance. Title IV aid would be available only for projects which promote integrated education in accordance with such plans. Bonus Support As an additional incentive to integration, the Title IV program might well be modified to provide substantially increased support upon attainment of specified levels of racial integration. Such bonus assistance should be large enough to enable each recipient school to attain a clearly superior quality of education in comparison with non-integrated schools. City Schools The Title IV program should stimulate development of exemplary city or metropolitan schools, offering special courses and programs designed to attract on a voluntary basis students of varying racial and socioeconomic backgrounds on a full or part-time basis. These model programs should make extensive and imaginative use of resources uniquely available to city schools, the city itself, its museums, galleries, governmental institutions, and other public and private facilities. To the extent that the quality of city schools influences migration to the suburbs, development of exemplary schools could operate to retain middle-class white families in the city and induce others to return, thereby increasing opportunities for integration. Through educational planning on a metropolitan basis, fostered by direct federal grants to cooperative planning bodies encompassing city and suburban school districts, opportunities for engaging central city and suburban students in common educational experiences can be provided. Scientific methods of providing integrated educational experiences under this program could include the following. Establishment of major educational magnet schools, depending upon the size and racial character of the city and its suburbs, these schools could serve all the students of a small city, students living in different sections of a large city, or subdivisions of a metropolitan area. Special curricula could include intensive instruction or specialized educational programs, for example, science or commerce. Establishment of supplemental education centers. These centers would offer specialized facilities and instruction to students from different schools for a portion of the school day. It is most important that courses be developed and scheduled to provide racially integrated educational experiences. Educational Parks Such a reoriented Title IV program could provide support, including construction funds, for communities choosing to develop the promising but costly educational parks now under consideration in several cities. As contrasted with the magnet schools and supplementary centers described above, educational parks would consolidate or cluster existing schools thereby broadening attendance areas to bring within the school zone a racially and economically heterogeneous population. These parks could be developed in conjunction with metropolitan plans to serve students from the suburbs as well as the city. Their location should be selected to accomplish this objective. Because of the economies of size made possible through consolidation, the quality of education offered to educational parks students could be improved. Problems raised by the size of such institutions could be overcome through the inclusion of smaller subunit schools and individualized instruction made feasible by educational technology, computers, television, and savings resulting from the school consolidation program, eliminating discrimination in northern schools. While racial isolation in urban public schools results largely from residential segregation, there is evidence that racial discrimination also plays a part in reducing opportunities for integration. For example, the Civil Rights Commission found that when crowding in certain Cleveland and Milwaukee Negro schools became acute, school authorities began busing students to nearby underutilized white schools, where they were segregated in separate classrooms and separate luncheon facilities. When Negro students objected, school officials in Milwaukee canceled busing altogether as educationally undesirable, even though white students had been bused and integrated into receiving school classrooms for years. In Cincinnati, to relieve overcrowding in a Negro school, students were bused past several nearby white schools with available space to a 98 percent Negro school five and a half miles away. The Civil Rights Commission also reported that in many cities school attendance boundaries and locations of new schools have been designed to perpetuate racial segregation. Title Six Under Title Six of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Congress prohibited federal financial aid to any program or activity which practices racial discrimination. Federal law requires that Title Six be applied uniformly in all states. Implementing this provision, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare has recently instituted a survey to examine compliance with Title Six in school districts of all fifty states. The Department has made clear that its investigation is not directed at de facto segregation arising from reasonable application of neighborhood attendance policies. We support this effort and urge that it be followed by vigorous action to assure full compliance with federal law in all sections of the country. Sufficient staff and resources should be provided to health education and welfare so that this program can be effectively carried out without reducing the Title Six effort in the south. Providing Quality Education in Ghetto Schools The teaching of disadvantaged children requires special skills and capabilities. Teachers possessing these qualifications are in short supply. We need a national effort to attract to the teaching profession well qualified and highly motivated young people, and to equip them to work effectively with disadvantaged students. The Teacher Corps program is a sound instrument for such an effort. Established by the Higher Education Act of 1965, it provides training in local colleges or universities for college graduates interested in teaching in poverty areas. Corpsmen are assigned to poverty area schools at the request of local school systems and with approval of state educational agencies. They are employed by the school system and work in teams headed by experienced teachers. The National Advisory Council on the Education of Disadvantaged Children and the National Education Association found that the Teacher Corps succeeded in attracting dedicated young people to the teaching profession, training them to teach effectively in poverty areas, and making substantial contributions to the education of students. The impact of this highly promising program has been severely restricted by limited and late funding. There are now only 1,406 interns and 330 team leaders in the entire nation. The Teacher Corps should be expanded into a major national program. The Education Professions Development Act, EPDA, provides grants and fellowships to attract qualified persons to the field of education and improve the ability of teachers through advanced training and retraining. The Act also provides funds for institutes and workshops for other educational personnel, including guidance counselors, social workers, teacher aides and administrators. Finally, EPDA offers grants to local educational agencies experiencing critical shortages of teachers and teacher aides. We recommend that the EPDA program focus on the special need for expanding the supply and improving the quality of teachers working in schools serving disadvantaged students and that it be substantially funded. Incometently, teacher training institutions should place major emphasis on preparing teachers for work in schools serving disadvantaged children. Courses should familiarize teacher candidates with the history, culture, and learning problems of minority group pupils. Classwork alone, however, cannot be expected adequately to equip future teachers of disadvantaged children. Intensive in-service training programs designed to bring teacher candidates into frequent and sustained contact with inner city schools are required. Other professionals and non-professionals working in ghetto-related activities, social workers, street workers, could be included as instructors in teacher training programs. The present anachronistic practice of releasing hundreds of thousands of children from a relatively full school schedule to idleness in the summer months is both a substantial factor in producing disorders and a tragic waste of time in facilities. Financing should be provided through ESEA for large-scale year-round educational programs in the disadvantaged areas of our cities. The testimony before this commission, including that of cabinet members and public educators, was unanimous in its support of this proposal. What is needed is not twelve months of the same routine, but innovative programs tailored to total educational needs, providing a wide range of educational activities, verbal skills, culture and arts, recreation, job training, work experience and camps. Planning on a twelve-month basis will be required. ESEA assistance should be provided through a single grant program rather than separate ten-month and summer grants and conditioned on the development of year-round educational plans. Technical assistance should be made available for such planning. As a step toward year-round education, federal funds should be made available for school and camp programs this summer. The National Advisory Council on Education of Disadvantaged Children studied summer programs established with ESEA funds and found that they offer special opportunities for new approaches to teaching disadvantaged children. Summer camp programs offer significant educational and recreational opportunities and should be encouraged. Educational components, particularly verbal skills projects, should be incorporated. It is essential that federal aid for such projects be committed well before the end of the school year so that adequate time to design effective programs is available. Early childhood education Early childhood education is the very heart of the effort to reconstruct the environment which incapacitates disadvantaged children educationally even before they enter the school system. Comprehensive preschool programs are essential to overcome the early language deprivation and conceptual disabilities of these children. Yet no more than forty percent of the eligible school population in most disadvantaged central city areas is receiving even one year, age four, of preschool training. We believe that the time has come to build on the success of the Head Start and other preschool programs in order to bring the benefits of comprehensive early childhood education to all children from disadvantaged homes and to extend the reach to younger children. For this purpose the Office of Economic Opportunity should receive substantially increased funds. Effective implementation of this expanded program will be vital to its success. We recommend the following guidelines. Early childhood education programs should provide comprehensive educational support tailored to the needs of the child and should not be simply custodial care. Both daycare and Head Start components are part of comprehensive early childhood education. Each should be designed to overcome the debilitating effect of a disadvantaged environment on learning ability. Parents and the home environment have a critical impact on a child's early development. Early childhood programs should involve parents and the home as well as the child. This can be accomplished through community education classes and the use of community aids and mother's assistance. To reduce the incidence of congenital abnormalities these community based programs should be tied in with prenatal training. Since adequate facilities are scarce in many disadvantaged communities where schools are overcrowded and other buildings deteriorated the program should provide funds for special early childhood education facilities. There is a need for maximum experimentation and variety. Funding should continue to support early childhood programs operated by community groups and organizations as well as by the school system. Early childhood education programs should include provisions for medical care and food so that the educational experience can have its intended impact. End of Section 54, Recording by Maria Kasper. Section 55 of the Kerner Commission Report. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Kerner Commission Report. Chapter 17 Recommendations for National Action, Part 6. Improving Educational Practices, Elementary Schools. Without major changes in educational practices greater expenditures on existing elementary schools serving disadvantaged neighborhoods will not significantly improve the quality of education. Moreover current assessments of preschool programs indicate that their benefits are lost in the elementary grades unless the schools themselves are improved. We suggest adoption of the following educational practices to improve school performance. Extra incentives for highly qualified teachers working in ghetto and economically and culturally deprived rural area schools. The most effective means to attract such teachers is to make these schools exciting and attractive places to work. The recommended practices set forth below contribute toward this end. In addition we suggest that opportunities for creative and imaginative teaching be expanded by allowing the teacher greater discretion in the selection and presentation of materials. Such an approach is likely to produce benefits in terms of attraction and retention of excellent teachers and improved student performance. Rewards related to attainment of career objectives should be provided for teachers working in schools serving disadvantaged children. For example all school systems should consider requiring service in such schools as a condition to advancement to administrative positions where the experience gained would be of great value. Reduction in maximum class size. It is clear that disadvantaged students require more attention and exert greater demands on teacher time than middle class students. While reduction of class size may not in itself improve pupil achievement it will free teachers to develop more time to educating disadvantaged students. It is of vital importance therefore that efforts to reduce the maximum class size in schools serving disadvantaged students be coupled with programs designed to improve the skills and capacities of teachers of disadvantaged children. Recognition of the history, culture and contribution of minority groups to American civilization in the textbooks and curricula of all schools. To stimulate motivation school curricula should be adapted to take advantage of student experiences and interests. Provision of supplementary services in the schools for severely disadvantaged or disturbed students. Such services should be made available within the schools rather than at centralized facilities and should include medical and psychiatric care. Individualized instruction through extensive use of non-professional personnel. There is impressive evidence that these workers can make a meaningful contribution by providing individualized tutoring and incentive lacking in segregated schools. In the Homework Helper program in New York City pupils in the fourth through sixth grades were tutored after school by senior high school students. Tutoring was provided four afternoons a week under the supervision of a master teacher. The tutors received training on the fifth day. Initiated with a Ford Foundation grant primarily to provide employment for the high school students the program had significant educational impact on both pupils and tutors. The Neighborhood Youth Corps and the College Work Study programs provide the tools for reproducing this program in every major city. In some cities Neighborhood Youth Corps students are already working in these schools, but in many Neighborhood Youth Corps job assignments are far less stimulating. Colleges and universities should be encouraged to assign more students participating in the College Work Study program to tutorial projects. Both programs, Neighborhood Youth Corps and College Work Study, should be expanded and reoriented for this purpose. Intensive concentration on basic verbal skills. A basic problem in schools in large cities is the low achievement in the fundamental subjects of students from the disadvantaged areas. This has been documented in the Har-U studies in New York, the study prepared for the McCone Commission following the Watts Riot of 1965, and nationally in the Coleman Report. The lack of reading and writing ability affects detrimentally every other aspect of the later school program. Intensive assistance in literacy skills, including remedial assistance, should be provided in all schools serving disadvantaged children. We recognize that the enrichment programs we recommend will be very costly. ESEA provides financial assistance for such programs, but the amounts available do not match the need. To make a significant improvement in the quality of education provided in schools serving disadvantaged children, ESEA funding should be substantially increased from its current level. In addition, Title I should be modified to provide for greater concentration of aid to school districts having the greatest proportion of disadvantaged students. This can be accomplished by altering the formula governing eligibility to exclude affluent school districts with less than specified minimum numbers of poor students. Improving Educational Practices, Secondary Schools Many of the educational practices recommended for elementary schools are applicable at the secondary level. In addition, secondary school students require extensive guidance, counseling, and advice in planning education program and future careers. Such assistance, routinely provided by middle-class families, is lacking for the ghetto student. To promote its acceptance, Indigenous personnel, college students, returning Vietnam veterans, should be utilized. The new Stay in School program for which the President recently requested an appropriation of $30 million, could provide funds for this and other projects designed to motivate disadvantaged high school students to pursue their education. We recommend that this program be fully funded. Intensive National Program to Increase Verbal Skills of Ghetto Residents For the products of the ghetto schools, many of them unemployed and functionally illiterate, these efforts will come too late. To compensate for educational disadvantages already incurred, we recommend a substantial appropriation to support an intensive year-round program beginning in the summer of 1968 to improve the verbal skills of people in low-income areas, with primary emphasis on the language problems of minority groups. The present effort simply does not match the need. Current estimates indicate that there are approximately 16,300,000 educationally disadvantaged Americans, those who have less than an eighth grade education. While exact figures are not available, it is highly likely that a disproportionate number of the educationally disadvantaged are Negroes. Census data establishes that 36.9% of Negroes over 25 years of age, but only 14.8% of whites, are functionally illiterate. The Principal Federal Literacy Program, Adult Basic Education, is meeting only a small fraction of this need. As of June 1966, it had provided assistance to some 373,000 people. The Adult Basic Education Program is a sound instrument for implementing an intensive literacy program. By affording both the public schools and the community-based organizations the opportunity to conduct literacy projects, this program provides desired flexibility. It should be strengthened and expanded to make a major impact on illiteracy. To concentrate its effect where the need is greatest and the potential payoff high, we suggest that priority be given to the unemployed and underemployed and to welfare mothers. Increasing the literacy levels of these groups would eliminate a major barrier to productive employment and improve support for education in the home. The high school dropouts should be brought into the program by lowering the age limit from 18 to 16 as proposed by the President. Course offerings should be expanded to include matters of interest and concern to residents of low-income areas. Expanded Experimentation Evaluation and Research Much remains to be learned about the most effective methods of teaching disadvantaged children in schools segregated by race and class. Research efforts should be increasingly oriented in this direction. In addition to research, federal support should be provided for promising but as yet unvalidated experimental programs designed to involve the talents and resources of the entire community in support of education of disadvantaged children and develop new and better educational techniques particularly adapted to the interests and needs of these students. Among the educational approaches which we believe should be considered and evaluated are the current efforts to develop new patterns of education such as storefront schools and street academies for students who do not fit the traditional pattern, possible forms of competitive education such as the use of businesses, universities and neighborhood corporations as subcontractors for the operation of certain education programs, concentration of assistance to a few schools serving ghetto children to test the effects of a maximum compensatory education effort, development of model experimental subsystems, high school and several feeder schools to provide specialized instruction, and teaching English as a second language to ghetto students whose dialect often constitutes a first language. Finally there is great need to evaluate not only these experimental programs but the entire enrichment effort. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act should be amended to require recipient school systems to undertake a thorough evaluation of their compensatory education effort as a condition to receiving ESEA funds. Improving Community School Relations. Community participation in the educational process should be encouraged. The school systems of our largest cities have become highly centralized with decision-making responsibility for a large and disparate population concentrated in a central board of education. While this process has produced substantial benefits, a city-wide tax base and non-political administration, it has sometimes entailed serious sacrifices in terms of accountability and community participation. What is necessary is to preserve the worthwhile features present in the existing system while eliminating the liabilities thus far encountered. The objective must be to make public education more relevant and responsive to the community and to increase support for it in the home. This can be accomplished through maintaining centralized control over educational standards and the raising of revenue while decentralizing control over other aspects of educational policy. The precise mix must be determined locally. However, specific mechanisms for seeking the advice and consultation of students and parents, such as parents' advisory councils or other similar bodies, should be adopted. Ghetto schools should serve as community centers. School facilities should be available during and after normal school hours for a variety of community service functions, delivery of social services by local agencies including health and welfare, adult and community training and education programs, community meetings, recreational and cultural activities, decentralization and the establishment of parents' advisory councils will afford the community a means through which to communicate needs for such services and to play an active role in shaping activities. In addition to making better use of the major capital investment in school plants, this approach will encourage ghetto residents to regard their schools not as alien institutions but as vital community centers. Use of local residents as teacher aides and tutors. We have noted the educational gains accomplished through the use of local sub-professional personnel in the schools. These workers can contribute to improved community school relations by providing a close link between the school system and the parents. Results of achievement and other tests should be made public on a regular basis. To increase the accountability of the public schools, the results of their performance should be made available to the public. Such information is available in some but not all cities. We see no reason for withholding useful and highly relevant indices of school but not individual student performance and recommend that all school systems adopt a policy of full public disclosure. Expanding Opportunities for Higher Education By enactment of the Higher Education Act of 1965, the Congress committed this nation to the goal of equal opportunity for higher education for all Americans regardless of race or economic circumstance. While progress has been made, this goal, the key to virtually all managerial and professional jobs, remains for the disadvantaged student an unfulfilled promise. Mr. Harvey Ostdeich, educational director of the New York Urban League, testified that less than one percent of the youth in Harlem go to college. In the nation approximately eight percent of disadvantaged high school graduates, many of whom are Negro, attend college. The comparable figure for all high school graduates is more than fifty percent. The fundamental reasons for this disparity lie in the cost of higher education and the poor quality of elementary and secondary education available to disadvantaged minorities. In the preceding sections we have recommended programs which we believe will ultimately eliminate these differences but the full effect of these changes will not be felt for some years. In the interim, if we are to provide equality of opportunity for disadvantaged youth with college potential, special programs are needed. Expansion of Upward Bound and Establishment of Special One Year Postgraduate College Preparatory Schools The Upward Bound program of the Office of Economic Opportunity, under which students from poverty backgrounds attend intensive six to eight-week summer sessions on college campuses and receive special assistance throughout the school year, is designed to motivate and prepare disadvantaged youth for college. The program has been effective. Of the twenty-three thousand students covered in nineteen sixty-seven, eighty-two percent of whom were Negro, eighty-three percent went on to college. However the size of the Upward Bound program is far short of the need. Estimates indicate that some six hundred thousand poverty area students could usefully be included. We believe that the Upward Bound concept is sound and recommend that the program be substantially expanded. Even an expanded Upward Bound program will not compensate for the poor level of secondary school education attained by ghetto youth. We recommend that federal funds be available for special one-year educational programs, with the function of providing college preparatory training for disadvantaged youth. These programs could be operated by community colleges or local boards of education. Removing Financial Barriers to Higher Education The effort to assist qualified but needy young people to obtain a higher education should be strengthened and expanded. Through the Educational Talent Search program the federal government provides financial assistance to public and non-profit agencies to identify and encourage disadvantaged young people with college potential to enter or re-enter educational programs. The president's proposed Educational Opportunity Act of 1968 would provide combined grant, work, and loan aid to poor college-bound students in need of financial assistance. Such assistance should be sufficiently flexible and substantial enough to accommodate the differing needs of individual students. These programs can make an important contribution to the realization of the goals set by the president in his 1968 education message to Congress that every qualified young person have all the education he wants and can absorb. If this promise is to become a reality these programs must be funded at a level commensurate with need. The benefit gained by increasing opportunities for disadvantaged students to seek and obtain higher education can be amplified by providing incentives for college-trained public service personnel, particularly teachers and health workers, needed to work in poverty areas. This can be accomplished by providing for the cancellation of loans at a reasonable annual rate if the recipient works in a low-income area. Such a forgiveness feature is included in the National Defense Education Act loan program. Expanding Opportunities for Vocational Education Despite substantially increased efforts made possible by the Vocational Education Act of 1963, quality vocational education is still not available to all who need it. The recent report of the Advisory Council on Vocational Education, established to evaluate the Act, concluded that although five out of six youths never achieved a college education, only a quarter of the total high school population in the country received vocational education. Similarly, a 1964 Labor Department Survey found that less than one half of the non-college-trained labor force had any formal preparation for the jobs they held. Existing vocational training programs are not effectively linked to job opportunities. The Advisory Council found little evidence of much effort to develop programs in the areas where critical manpower shortages exist. Examples are the health occupations and the technical fields. The special need of the drop-out is still being neglected. With an unemployment rate for negro youth more than twice that for white youth, this problem is particularly acute. To improve the quality and expand the availability of vocational education, provision of additional funds as recommended by the Advisory Council may be required. The Federal Vocational Education Program should be strengthened by enactment of the proposed Partnership for Learning and Earning Act of 1968. Significant improvement of vocational education, however, will depend on the use made locally of federal and other funds. We suggest the following guidelines. Inclusion of intensive literacy training. Literacy skills are obviously indispensable to productive employment. All vocational education programs should provide literacy training, either directly or in conjunction with adult basic education and other programs. Greater emphasis on part-time cooperative education programs, combining formal instruction and on-the-job training through the use of release time. The Advisory Council found that these programs, which provide students with jobs upon the completion of the course, are the best available in the vocational education field. They consistently yield high placement records, high employment stability, and high job satisfaction. The most important factor in improving vocational education is that training be linked to available jobs with upward mobility potential. To accomplish this goal, the active cooperation of the business community in defining job needs and effective training practices should be fully engaged. Consideration should be given to releasing students to attend pre-training opportunities industrialization centers. Full implementation of vocational training programs for high school dropouts. The Advisory Council found that assistance available under the Vocational Education Act for the training of this group is not being adequately utilized. The need for doing so is critical. Elimination of barriers to full participation of ghetto youth in vocational education programs. Some vocational schools attempt to improve the quality of their student body and enhance their prestige by raising entrance requirements. This policy eliminates those in greatest need. This practice should be discontinued and support for these students should be expanded. Follow-up support and assistance to ghetto youth receiving vocational training. The Advisory Council reported that the most successful vocational programs are those which assume responsibility for placing their graduates and thus get feedback on their strengths and weaknesses. Vocational educators should continue to provide counseling and guidance to their students until they have been successfully placed in jobs related to their training. Increased training to meet the critical need for more workers in professional, semi-professional and technical fields. Demand for public service workers alone exceeds supply by five to one. Preparation of disadvantaged students for these desirable positions should be intensified. Implementation of these programs. The Federal Role. The principal burden for funding the programs we have proposed will fall upon the federal government. Caught between an inadequate and shrinking tax base and accelerating demands for public expenditures, the cities are not able to generate sufficient financing. Although there is much more that state government can and should do, the taxing resources available at this level are far from adequate. The federal government has recognized and responded to this need. Federal expenditures for education, training and related services have increased from $4.7 billion in fiscal 1964 to $12.3 billion in fiscal 1969. These figures include aid for preschool, elementary, secondary and higher education, vocational education, work training and activities not related to the education of disadvantaged students. This network of federal educational programs provides a sound and comprehensive basis for meeting the interrelated educational needs of disadvantaged students. We need now to strengthen that base, as we have proposed, and to build upon it by providing greatly increased federal funds for the education of the disadvantaged. The State Role. Many states provide more support for suburban and rural schools than for inner-city education systems. Designed at a time when suburban school systems were poorer than those in the cities, state aid formulas now operate to reinforce existing inequities. We urge that every state re-examine its present method of allocating funds to local school districts, not merely to provide equal funds for all political subdivisions on a per pupil basis, but to assure more per student aid to districts having a high proportion of disadvantaged students. Only if equalization formulas reflect the need to spend larger amounts per pupil in schools predominantly populated by disadvantaged students will state aid be allocated on an equitable basis. To assist the states in devising equalization formulas which would accomplish this objective, we recommend that the Office of Education develop prototype formulas. Federal programs should require allocation of federal aid to education within each state in accordance with formulas which conform with the above criteria. We recognize that virtually all school districts need more money than they now receive. Provision of expanded state aid to education may well be justified. Whatever the amounts may be, we believe that allocation should be made in accordance with the standards described above. Finally, the states and in particular the state education agencies have a key role to play in accomplishing school integration. The states are in a unique position to bring about urban-suburban cooperation and metropolitan planning. We urge that the efforts of state educational agencies in this area be given clear direction through the adoption of statewide long-term integration plans and intensified by active promotion of such plans. The local role. We have emphasized that more money alone will not suffice. Accomplishment of the goal of meaningful educational opportunity for all will require exercise of enlightened and courageous leadership by local government. The programs which we have proposed can succeed only if imaginative and effective use is made locally of funds provided by the federal and state governments. Mayors, city councils, school boards, and administrators must lead the community toward acceptance of policies which promote integration while improving the quality of education in existing racially segregated schools. The cooperation of their suburban counterparts is no less essential. This responsibility is not limited to public officials. It is shared by the private community, business and professional leaders, clergymen, and civic organizations. Attainment of the goal of equal and integrated educational opportunity will require the leadership, support, talents, and energies of the entire community. End of Section 55, Recording by Maria Kasper.