Now, how is one to organize a viable public school—a completely desegregated school—under such conditions as these? If one is the superintendent of schools in the District of Columbia, one can cope with what Dr. Carl F. Hansen has described as “the enormous educational problem of upgrading large numbers of educationally handicapped children” by a variety of devices: Squads of psychiatrists, platoons of remedial-reading instructors, a “four-track” system, and the like. And if one spends enough money, and has enough pupils and buildings to permit some shuffling around among schools, and pays salaries high enough to keep some of the most competent teachers in the country, one can accomplish a good deal. But how many rural counties in the South, where the total school population may number only 2000 or 2500, can possibly apply the drastic remedies found necessary in Washington?
Consider the schools of Washington, D. C. The capital is the showcase of the nation in terms of desegregation. If genuinely “mixed” schools are to work anywhere, they should work best in the District of Columbia, where every factor combines to produce the most favorable opportunity: The political climate of a Federal administration anxious to achieve integration, the immense resources of a lavish school budget, the cultural amenities freely available to all children as an adjunct to learning, the absence of racial discrimination in employment, the untypically high incomes and job status of many Negro families. It is entirely reasonable to assume that pupils in the Washington schools, as a group, should not be merely average, or slightly above average; they should in fact lead the entire country. Moreover, it seems a fair assumption that the exodus of white families from the District has tended to leave behind those white children who in general are less able mentally and more nearly on the Negro’s cultural level. If Negro pupils are to show up well anywhere, they should show up well here. The facts indicate nothing of the kind.
The District of Columbia desegregated its schools in September 1954, following the Supreme Court’s opinion the preceding May. In October 1955, after a year of experience with desegregation, the Stanford Advanced Reading and Arithmetic Tests were given to some 4600 eighth-grade pupils in the Washington public schools—1600 white pupils and 3000 Negro pupils. The findings in Washington almost exactly paralleled the findings in Virginia: Two-thirds of the Negro children were found to be reading at the sixth-grade level or below (21 per cent of the Negro eighth-graders, indeed, were reading at the fifth-grade level, and 22 per cent were reading at the fourth-grade level). Only 12 per cent of the white eighth-graders were at the sixth-grade level or below, and 54 per cent of the white pupils were at the tenth-grade level or above.
Shocked officials of the District of Columbia plunged headlong into remedial programs. Their herculean labors have been reported widely and sympathetically. At once, the four-track system was devised, and pupils systematically were assigned to (1) an honors program, (2) a general college-preparatory program, (3) a program for pupils not planning to go to college, and (4) a remedial basic curriculum for slow-learning pupils. One effect was to achieve a very substantial resegregation, for the great bulk of those on tracks 1 and 2 turned out to be white pupils, and the great bulk of those on tracks 3 and 4 turned out to be Negro pupils. The resegregation process was helped along materially by Washington’s younger white families, who fled the District by the thousands. In 1950, Washington’s schools were almost evenly balanced, 50-50, in white and colored enrollment; ten years later, white pupils constituted 20 per cent, Negro pupils 80 per cent, of the enrollment. Remedial classes for slow learners, in which teaching specialists work with groups averaging no more than eighteen per class, have been swiftly stepped up; there were seventy-four such classes in 1954; the number grew to 225 in the 1959-60 session. The reading-clinic staff increased from twelve to thirty-two in that period of time, and a special Division of Pupil Appraisal more than doubled with the addition of a dozen school psychologists, clinical psychologists, and psychiatric social workers. New batteries of achievement tests were administered every year.
At the close of the school year in 1959, five full years after racial discrimination had been obliterated from the Washington schools, Dr. Hansen released some figures on how things were going. To the integrationist Washington Post, reporting happily on the data, things were going marvelously well: “District pupils’ performance on standardized tests this year topped last year’s scores in 15 of the 27 subjects tested, School Superintendent Carl F. Hansen reported yesterday.” The cheery tone of the Post’s story was somewhat belied by the glum figures themselves. Washington’s sixth-graders had managed to achieve median scores in spelling, language, and arithmetical computation exactly matching—no more—the national norms for these three sixth-grade tests. Medians on the other twenty-four tests were below national norms, in some instances by as much as a full year. Ninth-graders who should have scored a median of 9.4 (ninth year, fourth month) in computation and paragraph meaning scored 8.3 and 8.4 respectively. Dr. Hansen’s report on tests at the third-grade and fifth-grade levels has special interest:
| National | District Median Scores | |||||
| Grade | Subject | Norm | 55-56 | 56-57 | 57-58 | 58-59 |
| 3 | Paragraph meaning | 3.5 | 2.3 | 2.5 | 2.9 | 3.1 |
| 3 | Word meaning | 3.5 | 2.5 | 2.6 | 3.1 | 3.1 |
| 3 | Spelling | 3.5 | 2.5 | 3.0 | 3.1 | 3.2 |
| 3 | Arith. reasoning | 3.5 | 2.4 | 2.8 | 2.8 | 3.2 |
| 3 | Arith. computation | 3.5 | 2.6 | 2.7 | 2.9 | 3.2 |
| 5 | Paragraph meaning | 5.1 | 3.8 | 4.1 | 4.3 | 4.2 |
| 5 | Word meaning | 5.1 | 4.1 | 4.5 | 4.6 | 4.4 |
| 5 | Language | 5.1 | 4.2 | 4.5 | 4.6 | 4.4 |
| 5 | Spelling | 5.1 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.8 | 4.5 |
| 5 | Arith. reasoning | 5.1 | 4.2 | 4.5 | 4.6 | 4.5 |
| 5 | Arith. computation | 5.1 | 3.9 | 4.1 | 4.6 | 4.1 |
It should not escape notice that the Washington children whose median scores are shown in the foregoing table never had known a day of legally segregated schooling. The Negro pupils here tested never had suffered the school discrimination likely to affect their hearts and minds in a fashion never to be undone. These pupils, on the contrary, had had the benefit of all the special attention that could be given them by a school administration frantically eager to demonstrate the glories of integration. No resource of guidance and special teaching, no visual aid or teaching technique had been denied them. Yet there are the scores: Not a single test in Washington’s third and fifth grades produced a median equal to the national norm. The fifth-graders, backsliding, did not even equal fifth-grade scores the preceding year.
It is perhaps needless to dwell further upon the findings of intelligence and achievement tests beyond commenting briefly upon some of the flimsy efforts the equalitarians make to discredit them. One objection is that the Negro child has no “motivation” to do well on them; but at the younger age levels especially, this is pure conjecture. It also is complained that frequently the tests are administered to Negro children by white examiners, and that an essential rapport thereby is denied them; but this was not true of the tests in Washington, and it has not been true of many other investigations. The most frequent objection is that tests tend to compare white and colored children of unequal social and economic background; but abundant evidence is available of investigations in which subjects have been “paired” by every imaginable criterion, and almost without exception these tests show the same lamentable contrasts in white and Negro scores.
Otto Klineberg has attempted to dismiss all the findings: “Until and unless the same education is given to both races, comparisons will be unfair.” But it manifestly is impossible to give the same education to any two groups. All that one can do is to provide the same textbooks, the same teaching aids, teachers with the same degree of education, and physical facilities generally comparable—but even then, identity of total educational opportunity could not possibly be achieved. The various tests now being administered in school systems across the country are as fair and objective as competent psychologists and educators can make them; and the bleak, undeniable fact, confirmed repeatedly in school districts both North and South, is that colored children regularly score at lower levels than the white children of their communities. Thoughtful students of the difficult problem before the South will comprehend what the evidence means in terms of the real and practical obstacles to welding together white and Negro schools in rural areas below the Potomac.
Other very real difficulties merit reflection also. The disputations of social scientists cannot be considered in a vacuum, nor the findings of achievement tests treated as so many punched cards for an IBM machine. These are children we are concerned with, white and Negro alike, and the fact is (I do not argue the goodness or badness of the fact; I merely cite its existence) that white and Negro children in the South have many quite different educational requirements. The essentially dual and separate society of the South cannot be dissolved overnight by court decree. For years to come in the South, the practice of law and medicine, the handling of banking and finance, the sale of stocks and bonds, the management of large retail and wholesale enterprises, and the administration of commerce and government will continue to be overwhelmingly restricted to white persons. This is not to say that many able Negroes are not engaged in these fields now; they are, and their number is increasing, but they are conspicuous exceptions. In rural areas especially, where professional and business opportunities naturally are severely limited, the realities of adult opportunity are even more striking.