Guidelines Under Fire

In 1955, the Supreme Court declared that Southern schools should be desegregated with "deliberate speed." During the nine years that followed they weren't. Negro parents who wanted to send their children to previously all-white schools almost invariably met resistance from local school officials. Even token desegregation required long, laborious court suits.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided the first hope that the situation would improve. It paved the way for the U.S. Office of Education to require real progress in desegregation from school districts receiving federal aid, What integration there has been in Southern schools has virtually all come about since the Office of Education began laying down guidelines for school integration; the guidelines now require annual percentage increases in the number of Negroes attending formerly all-white schools.

With the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965--a huge windfall for the nation's school systems--impoverished Southern districts began at long last to open doors to Negroes in order to keep the money coming. The anguished cries from Southern Congressmen are evidence as much of the impoverishment of the region's schools as of the guideline's effectiveness.

But the Administration's request for a one-year extension of the Act is in trouble in the House, and it will need Southern Democratic support. The Johnson Administration is in a dilemma. If it insists on retaining the guidelines, Southerners may back a Republican drive to have the aid given to the states in block grants, instead of earmarking money for individual programs. The Republican plan could jeopardize the entire aid bill, igniting questions of state vs. federal control, aid to parochial schools, and wealthy vs. poor states.

The Southerners are hopeful that under the Republican scheme, school officials could skirt federal desegregation requirements. With a loosening of federal supervision--and with the diligent disregard that many Southern officials have shown for the law laid down by the Supreme Court--that would probably be the result.

But there is a more direct way of eliminating the guidelines, and Southern Congressmen are exacting it as a price for their support of the Administration bill. A House appropriations subcommittee has already moved to bar the use of federal funds to achieve school desegregation.

The Administration has so far shied away from an ardent defense of the guidelines, and has instead made token efforts to placate the Southerners. It has transferred authority for enforcement of the guidelines from the office of Education Commissioner Harold Howe to the office of Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare John Gardner. And Gardner has announced that compliance with the guidelines will be supervised by Southerners rather than the Northerners that local school officials found intolerably conscientious.

It seems clear that these gestures by themselves will not still Southern zeal to quash the guidelines. If the Administration wants them kept, it will have to fight a determined battle. If desegregation is to proceed at all, it must do so. President Johnson has spoken out forcefully against the Republican block grant proposal; he should make it clear that he supports the guidelines, and he should do everything in his power to preserve them.

But the real blame for the sorry impasse lies with House Republicans, who under the shibboleth of state control have put forth a plan that is unwise and inequitable. It would result in poorer states getting a good deal less money than they now receive; Negroes and poor students would be the casualties in the Republican plan.

When House Republican leader Gerald Ford was at Harvard, he spoke of "constructive Republican alternatives" to Administration proposals. That grandiose pronouncement has little apparent grounding in reality; the Republican alternative to the Administration's education proposal strikes a harsh blow at education and equality of opportunity.