Mayer Hits Harlem Teaching Methods

"We don't know the first thing about what to do" to give the children of minority groups--especially lower-class Negroes and Puerto Ricans--"anything resembling an adequate education," Martin P. Mayer '47 told the Graduate School of Education Student Association last night.

Mayer, chairman of a local school board of the New York City Board of Education and author of The Schools, attributed the poor quality of slum schools to "20 years in which people were unwilling to spend money on public education."

Although more money is now spent in some Harlem schools than in Scarsdale, Mayer said, current teaching methods simply cannot cope with the problems of these schools.

Mayer described a pilot project in his own district aimed at developing methods that can increase achievement and motivation among Negro and Puerto Rican children.

Last year in the East Side district, 225 Negro children from Harlem--mostly first and second-graders--were "bussed in" to schools in all-white Yorkville. Teachers of the integrated classes were given new materials to use and were encouraged to experiment with new techniques.

Results Encouraging

Mayer termed the results of the programs "encouraging," noting that the newly-integrated classes have "nearly the same levels of achievement as previous classes that were all white.

Plans call for the project to be expanded next year to include 400 Negroes. In addition, classes in all-Negro Harlem schools will be paired with the integrated classes.

The Harlem schools will try to raise the achievement level of their own classes by using new methods developed in the integrated classes.

However, though last year's experiment indicated the value of integration, he said, there will be no large-scale integration "in the foreseeable future."

Over 44 per cent of the school population of New York City is Negro or Puerto Rican. The drop-out rate among these groups is over 60 per cent, and of the 110,000 students who graduate annually from the city's public colleges, less than 1500 are Negro or Puerto Rican according to Mayer.