Cheating Boston's Negroes

There are 49 predominantly Negro schools in Boston. During the past few months, the Boston School Committee was subjected to increasing pressure to reduce this shamefully large number--to move to balance racially the city's school system. Until it was satisfied that the School Committee's plans and promises for quick change were meaningful, the State Board of Education refused to release $6 to $9 million in tax revenues for Boston.

The School Committee submitted last month what was clearly its final offer. It was approved by the State Board of Education last Wednesday. Now, the fight is over--at least for the next six months, until the School Committee has to submit a new year's plan to correct racial imbalance.

Last month's plan is a step in the right direction, but more a political maneuver than a blueprint for the educational advancement of Boston's Negroes in the public schools. It is laudable that the School Committee is no longer refusing to count the number of Negroes in its schools and will begin to consider the effect of locating new schools and the redrawing of district lines on hastening the total integration of the city's educational system. More important, the settlement between the School Committee and the State Board should deprive Mrs. Louise Day Hicks, who fought the State Board every step of the way, of a dramatic issue to boost her own political ambitions and those of similar fear-mongers.

However laudable this may be, the view that the settlement will do much to help the 17,000 Negro students in Boston's imbalanced schools is myopic. In practical terms, the plan offers them nothing. While serving as a symbol of the State Board's and the School Committee's agreement on some final aims, the latest solution is, in its specifics, mostly a bit of overdrawn wishful thinking.

The plan lists some short-term proposals which, the Committee alleges, will "immediately reduce" racial imbalance. Three schools in Roxbury will be closed and the 611 affected students will be bused to generally white schools. This will, it is true, almost double the amount of students the School Committee presently buses out of the ghetto and will mark the first time the Committee has transferred students for the avowed purpose of increasing racial balance. It does not, unfortunately, alter the Committee's refusal to support anything more than small-scale redistribution projects.

A more extensive bi-racial busing program is not even considered in the present plan. The Committee, in addition, has continued to withhold its support from private busing programs such as Operation Exodus--run by Negro parents--except to permit them to bring children to any school which has empty seats. Genuine, widespread pressure throughout the school system for a fundamental redistribution will not be exerted.

The second short-term plan will give "expanded support" to METCO, a private group which buses a few hundred Negro students from Boston to suburban towns with Federal funds. The School Committee's support of METCO has been limited to a few words of encouragement--no more. This should be changed, hasn't been, and most likely won't be.

The third is the open enrollment, "empty seat" plan--based on the premise that there will be no basic shake-up throughout the city's schools.

The fourth is to replace gradually junior high schools with so-called "middle" schools. These schools may be more racially balanced, but if they are not they will "make it possible for pupils to leave one year earlier" to go to a balanced high school. Unfortunately, this won't make much difference for most Negro children. The Federal government-sponsored Coleman Report does indicate that Negro children who go to school--especially elementary school--with whites score higher on achievement tests than other Negroes. But it also shows, as might be expected, that one extra year with whites has no long-run effect.

The School Committee is more realistic in discussing the possible effects of its long-range program--to build new schools and to change the district lines to promote increased integration. In discussing each school in its report and projecting the number of students to be affected ultimately, it cautions that "rapidly changing neighborhood patterns may alter these projected figures; nevertheless we will draw...enough white children to open a racially balanced school."

This determination to open racially balanced schools is, of course, a refreshing change from the Committee's attitude of a year ago. But the new schools the Committee will see built on the fringes of the ghettoes are likely to lose any semblance of balance as the ghettos themselves spread over the present lines. Such a school system--for all its apparently good intentions--may become as imbalanced as the old one.

The Committee could build few enough schols--of great enough size--to prevent such seeping imbalance in the future. But the Committee feels strongly that "racially imbalanced schools cannot be eliminated in a large city school system...by any one method yet devised." "The panacea is yet to be discovered," they conclude.

In the past few years, the School Committee has demonstrated some enthusiasm at the prospect of aiding the city's Negro children. Sadly, it never has been sure enough of its own hopes--or its mandate--to appropriate the money and thought necessary to make its programs more than token efforts. The frustrating pattern repeats itself--and Boston's Negroes can quite justifiably wonder whether the Committee's loud pronouncements, even when backed by the State Board, are worth all the attention liberal whites give them.