The Pittsburgh Philosophy

School integration, as every big-city educator knows, is not just a matter of folding Negro students in with white ones. The whites have got to stick around--and many of them don't. In 25 years, the proportion of Negro children in the public schools has jumped from 9% to 51% in Chicago, from 8% to 47% in New York, from 14% to 54% in Philadelphia, and from 39% to 90% in Washington. In Pittsburgh the Negro school population has more than doubled since World War II--and Pittsburgh is responding with a creative new program designed to raise the standard of education so high that the whites will want to stay and the Negroes will get the kind of training they need to take an equal place in society.

The experiment is still too new for hard statistics of success or failure. But it is being watched with growing interest in practically every metropolis north of the Mason-Dixon line, and in Washington with such hope that its administrator has the honor of being the only school superintendent on President Johnson's task force on education.

Sydney P. Marland Jr., 51, came to Pittsburgh's 77,000-pupil school system from such relatively vest-pocket operations as Darien, Conn, and Winnetka, Ill. Since September 1963, Marland has demonstrated that this did not di minish his ability to think big. The chief elements of his Pittsburgh plan: -- TEAM TEACHING. As in other schools, a group of half a dozen or more teachers work together with a large group of children. "But team teaching is more a spirit than a thing," says Marland. He finds that since teachers can be more creative, teaching in slum areas becomes more interesting and exciting, which boosts student motivation and community involvement. By the end of this academic year, team teaching will be fully operative in 46 of Pittsburgh's 84 elementary schools, involving 30,000 pupils--the largest team-teaching project in the nation.

-- JOB TRAINING--with a twist. Vocational, technical and junior-executive education is more in demand than ever; yet the grubby old vocational school is dying, and good riddance. "Ambitious parents felt that for their children to identify with vocational courses was to perpetuate the laborer, anti-intellectual concept," Marland notes. Pittsburgh's contribution is job training given in comprehensive high schools, along with a respectable helping of academic courses. With the cooperation of local businessmen, the system has thoroughly modernized job-training equipment, and the proportion of students taking such courses has risen from 6% in 1963 to 43% now.

-- PREPRIMARY EDUCATION. Two years before the "Head Start" program was conceived, Pittsburgh was one of a handful of communities experimenting with uplifting preschoolers. Operated largely with Ford Foundation funds, the program now accommodates about 1,300 students, aged three and four, on an eleven-month program basis. Pre-primary classes are now run without federal funds, but as federal money becomes available this year, the program will double, using space made available through the purchase of prefabricated classrooms.

-- ADVANCED CLASSES. The Pittsburgh Scholars Program, now in its second year, has enabled roughly 650 pupils in the eighth and ninth grades to take a high-powered set of college-prep courses. A vigorous, five-year program of study, the Scholars Program is utilizing new courses created by university scholars in cooperation with the school system. Marland says that "the program is one way in which we provide students with the means to stretch for excellence by bringing together exceptional students, exceptional teachers and a very demanding curriculum."

Superintendent Marland is cautious about making claims for Pittsburgh's dramatic drive for educational excel lence. "We can't prove through conventional means that our work is paying off," he says. "We can't prove that Johnny can read better. We can prove that he behaves better, that he enjoys school more, that his attitude is better, that he is reading more library books. We are satisfied we are on the right road, and we will stay on it and continue to invest heavily."

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