1961 US Commission on Civil Rights Report Book 2 - University of ...

8. Problems and Programs
... we have to do a lot more for some children just to give them
the same chance to learn.'
CALVIN F. GROSS, Superintendent of Schools, Pittsburgh, Pa.
Desegregation focuses attention on the gap between the scholastic
achievement of the average white and the average Negro student.
Educators and lay citizens alike have expressed fear that educational
standards in the schools may suffer in the process.
At the <strong>Commission</strong>'s Nashville conference in March 1959, superintendents
of large school systems in the border States that had desegregated
completely in 1954 and 1955 testified that these fears were not
justified. 1 Standards, they said, need not be lowered as a result of
desegregation, but it may be necessary to find some way of coping with
the wider spread between individual achievement when white and
Negro children are brought together. Experience has shown not only
a gap in scholastic achievement between the average white and the
average Negro pupil, but that the gap widens as pupils progress in school.
Educators have observed that it may represent as much as i l /z to 2 school
years by the time children reach the high school grades. 2
Believing that our most urgent domestic issue is how to improve public
schools while adjusting them to constitutional demands, the <strong>Commission</strong>
has devoted special attention to needs of all children, but particularly
of those from families that have suffered educational handicaps
because of their minority-group status. Whether these handicaps are
the result of segregation in the schools, economic and cultural deprivation,
or some other cause, is immaterial. They exist.
The <strong>Commission</strong>'s mandate from Congress is not only to study and
collect information with regard to denials of equal protection but to
make recommendations to the President and Congress. 8 No other agency
of the Federal Government has concerned itself with the educational
problems inherent in the transition from a segregated to a nondiscriminatory
school system; it therefore seemed desirable for the <strong>Commission</strong> to
do so. Programs and ideas from different parts of the Nation have been
assembled and are presented here without any attempt at evaluation.
Some are elaborate and costly; others are not. Some are officially
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