Alternative Schools: Melting Pot to Mosaic

In the controversy over busing, integrationist blacks and angry whites agree on one thing: North and South, big-city public schools are terrible. Blacks want their children to escape from the schools' exasperating syndrome of failure and disorder; whites fear that their children will have to suffer from it. For the past several years, small numbers of both black and white parents have founded new private "alternatives"--the so-called street academies and the free schools (TIME, April 26, 1971). Now a few public schools are trying to create some alternatives of their own within the system, using wings of existing buildings, storefronts and lofts to house small subschools, each with a different educational emphasis. The intent is to break up the impersonal mob scene that many schools have become, and to give students choices--even if it sometimes means letting them choose racial separation.

Cities as diverse as Minneapolis, Philadelphia, New York and Stockton, Calif., have set up public alternative schools during the past two years. But the trend has gone farthest in Berkeley, Calif., which now has 18 such schools at all levels and plans to add six more next fall. TIME Correspondent Christopher Cory visited some of them recently. His report:

Berkeley needed new educational ideas as badly as any city. Though it is known for breathtaking hills and its University of California campus, the hills overlook a slough of industrial plants and dilapidated housing. Whites in the Berkeley schools are a 44% minority, with blacks making up 45% of the students and Asians and Chicanos accounting for most of the rest. In 1968, Berkeley became the first city with more than 100,000 people to integrate its schools voluntarily by busing both whites and blacks (38% of the pupils ride to school). But Berkeley's integration brought demands from minority groups for more attention to their particular learning problems and more emphasis on their cultures. At the same time, many of Berkeley's middle-class white kids were in open rebellion against what they considered stultifying school rules and courses.

For both groups, "the melting pot never melted," says Larry Wells, coordinator of the alternative schools. Instead of trying to submerge diversity, Berkeley is now trying to encourage it, replacing the image of a melting pot with that of a mosaic.

In five grade schools and junior highs, existing buildings are divided into traditional and more venturesome learning groups from which parents can choose, and one freewheeling elementary school spin-off meets in a rented mansion. All the groups are integrated, although some schools more than others stress subjects especially relevant to blacks and Chicanos. At the high school level there are still more distinct educational choices.

Berkeley High is a six-block-square complex of buildings holding 3,000 students. For approximately 1,800 of them, the conventional curriculum of courses--and a rich fare of electives--is fine. But 1,200 students have chosen to enter the more cohesive atmosphere of one or another of the six alternative high schools that are housed within the big complex.

Community High, for example, is earnestly disorganized. There long-haired boys and girls help screen prospective teachers, call staff members by their first names, and get phys. ed. credit for karate. Both blacks and whites take courses in "Soul in Cinema" and transcendental meditation. The School of Performing Arts is heavy on theater, music and dance; more traditional aims are the focus in an alternative school called On Target, which leans to science courses and technical careers, and Model School A, which offers an interdisciplinary liberal arts curriculum. All the alternative schools offer some version of basic English, math, science and social studies; the students are also free to sign up for any course they want in the main high school.

Most of the alternative high schools are kept integrated by aggressive recruiting and informal quotas (Community High, for example, has 65 Third World students and 120 whites, with a white waiting list of 75). The Agora School aims specifically at fostering an appreciation of racial differences and keeps its staff and student body exactly one-quarter each white, black, Chicano and Asian. But three other alternative schools that meet away from Berkeley High are less concerned about integration.

Blacks Only. The Marcus Garvey Institute, housed in a former factory, is devoted to "taking care of business," chiefly for black students, including some who are on the verge of dropping out. Graded, seminar-type classes offer "Black Economic Development," emphasize basic math and reading. Whites are welcome, the staff insists, but since blacks assumed control this fall, whites have dropped to 12 in the enrollment of 60. Going even farther, Black House accepts only blacks, and Casa de la Raza takes only Chicanos.

Such schools smack of resegregation to Berkeleyites who have fought for integration, and in the next few months the Health, Education and Welfare Department's Office for Civil Rights is expected to tell Berkeley formally what officials have been suggesting for months: namely, that the separatist schools may be violating federal policy. In answer, Coordinator Larry Wells, who is black, argues that voluntary separation is far different from forced segregation, and that it may well be transitional. "Our concern is to help kids compete in an integrated society," he says, "but we want them to compete on a basis of parity. One segment of black and Chicano students needs additional support and strength to really feel equal." Berkeley officials are optimistic that they can satisfy federal guidelines in the months of negotiations that will follow official notification by making minor changes, like opening the separatist schools to any whites who are willing to immerse themselves in the heavily racial atmosphere.

More than just race is at stake, for the issue touches upon the central problem in all the proposals for decentralizing the nation's large institutions. from auto plants to city governments. Self-determination easily becomes narrow parochialism. In Berkeley, principals of the conventional schools that accredit the small units worry that the alternative schools may become too haphazard to remain worthy of their diplomas. The small schools' volatile independence, on the other hand, is often precisely what makes them useful as escape valves.

When a group of students or faculty members in a conventional Berkeley school become dissatisfied with the way things are going, their complaints have sometimes led to walkouts and protest marches. In the small units, similar complaints get quick action, partly because changes need not be watered down in long political wrangles. When a teacher in a standard high school catches a student cutting class, the misdemeanor must be processed by several layers of bureaucracy. In a small alternative school, a teacher who spots a truant can often deal with him on the spot. Bob Wilson, a kinetic black photographer who directs the Marcus Garvey Institute, is convinced that only a small unit permits him to be both as tough and demonstrative as the kids he is trying to reach. He notes, "In a regular school, if I grab a kid by the lapels and start duking him, all hell breaks loose. If I go up and hug a chick, I'm going to be considered some kind of sex pervert. Here I do both."

Asleep and Awake. Often it works. Administrators and students agree that the small units have so far suffered very little from drug abuse, vandalism or racial clashes. No conclusive academic test results are in yet, but many students are newly enthusiastic about their courses. Danny Wilcox, a black junior, recalls: "In Berkeley High, if I went to a history class, the only thing I liked about it was that I could go to sleep." His chronic truancy ended in an arrest for assaulting a police officer. Now he is enrolled in the Agora. "I'm studying black oral tradition now," says Danny, "and hey, I didn't even know that existed, but that's how black people kept their history." He comes to class regularly and has a B-plus average.

Public minischools are not likely to work in every system, for they are hard to manage well and may turn out to be more expensive than large units. Berkeley's original subschools began with modest grants from the Ford and Carnegie foundations; the system now has a 21-year, $3.5 million grant from a new federal experimental schools program that provides $200 extra for each child in a subschool--on top of an average per-pupil expenditure of $1,675, one of the highest in the nation. Still, placing everyone in regular schools has hardly been a resounding success. For school systems that must adapt to the diverse interests and tempos of different racial and cultural groups, the concept of voluntary alternative schools may well be one of the most creative ideas yet.

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