Big-City Answers

Washington, D.C., last week closed the books on a school year that made respectable progress in answers to the big-city public school headache: how to turn out ever-brighter graduates from incoming students whose average cultural level drops as the proportion of underprivileged Negroes rises. With a student body now 88% Negro, Superintendent Carl Hansen, 59, has mixed innovation and firmness effectively on a big scale. Some of the methods:

>A system of four "tracks"--basic, general, college-prep and honors--finds for every student a place that matches his ability, although it differs from "ability grouping" as practiced experimentally elsewhere in that it fixes curricula firmly beginning with the fourth grade and allows little choice of courses. Kids are permitted to jump up a track or so, if capable. Keeping classwork commensurate with abilities seems to decrease the incentive to quit school: Washington's dropout rate has declined to 36%, from 52% when Hansen took over seven years ago.

> An Amidon Plan (piloted at a Washington school by that name) outlines what material teachers must cover.

> Twilight Schools let tough boys who disturb regular classes as they near the dropout age of 16 go instead to small all-male classes from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m., getting on such personal terms with teachers that sometimes they play basketball with them after class. Explains Coordinator Robert Belt: "The boys don't have audiences to show off how disruptive they might be--there are no girls." Three-fifths of the 180 boys enrolled in two such pilot schools are to return to normal classes in the fall and remain in school past 16.

> An Extended-Day Program allows students and their parents in three junior highs to attend voluntary courses at night. Their interests determine the classes offered, which range from sewing to remedial math and business-school English. Teachers hoped to get 100 volunteers, were startled when 500 turned out at each school.

> A School for Pregnant Girls gives them consultation by nurses, psychologists and doctors, and teaches them how to care for themselves and a baby while keeping up on academic subjects. After a six-week absence, they return to regular classes, but not in their original schools. Of 141 girls enrolled last year, 117 continued their studies. Said one: "I've learned that what I've done is not a crime, but a mixture of shame, love and happiness."

>A School to Aid Youth (so named to form the acronym STAY) teaches students who leave school to work but want to earn a diploma in night classes. Of 205 students who volunteered, a surprising 70% are from the top two tracks of the school system. "A dropout student is not necessarily a dumb student," says Project Director William Carpenter. "He is usually bored, maladjusted, has problems with his family, or needs money."

Hansen sends teams of researchers into the streets to find dropouts, learn why they quit, try to lure them back. Of 1,300 located in one survey, 509 were talked into returning. Each accompanied by a parent, 150 prekindergarten children attend Saturday classes to help prepare for school. Twenty college students prepare for teaching careers by working with 100 potentially delinquent elementary school pupils. An Urban Service Corps recruits 1,000 adult volunteers, including such Government wives as Mrs. Robert McNamara and Mrs. Francis Keppel, to tutor children, take them to historical sites, advise parents.

While Hansen carries on his innovations, the system labors under the serious handicaps of a limited budget imposed by a parsimonious Congress and dutiful district commissioners. Many of the buildings are rundown and ratinfested; one-third of the teachers are "temporaries." Critics also find considerable fault with Hansen's rule. The Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy, an aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King, protests that the four-track system "hardens class lines" and unfairly labels pupils on the basis of tests that "do not measure intelligence but the child's proficiency with middle-class symbols."

Hansen responds with the fact that 56% of his high school graduates now go on to institutions of higher learning. "We are showing," he says, "that given a reasonable chance, the Negro will learn and will achieve."

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