Report Card

P: In St. Louis last week, officials happily announced that the city's 14,000 public high-school students had had their first experience with desegregation. Incidents reported: none.

P: If all goes according to plan, said Lieut. General Hubert Harmon last week, cadets of the new Air Force Academy will be the "best-dressed and sharpest-looking men ever to be in the uniform of the U.S. military service." The proposed designer of their new uniform: Hollywood's master of spectacle, Cecil B. DeMille.

P: In the Washington (D.C.) Star, Chairman Samuel Burr Jr. of American University's department of education had a few sharp words to say on the subject of competition in the modern public school. After all, said he, "only the best football players are members of the varsity squad . . . There is competition for the cast of the annual play ... It seems that quite a different view of the natural desire to excel applies in the English, algebra, history and chemistry classes . . . We have exalted the average man. We have made it appear that the middle of the scale is the appropriate place for Americans to stand."

P: Election of the week: Charles H. Silver, 66, Manhattan's tireless toastmaster and backer of good causes, by his fellow board members, as New York City's president of the Board of Education. Born in Rumania, Silver was brought to Manhattan's East Side slums before he was three, at 15 went to work as an office boy at the" American Woolen Co. for $2.50 a week, rose to become vice president at more than $100,000 a year. A man who has been known to raise as much as $2,000,000 at a single banquet ("I always eat at home first"), he has had a career that equals anything in Horatio Alger. He has turned down the chance to run for mayor, comptroller, president of the city council, president of the borough of Manhattan, and lieutenant governor; he has served as president, vice president, overseer, trustee, director, or board member of everything from the Urban League and the Jewish Theological Seminary to Beth Israel Hospital, the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation, and Yeshiva University. Now, though he never went to college, Charles Silver will be senior trustee to the largest (900,000 pupiisj school system in the world.

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