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Show Joan Sin gait fake tribune Schools Fail to Integrate Cliieanos Chicago Tribune Ovei shadowed and obscured by decades of efforts to improve schooling for black children is an even tougher and potentially more critical educational and social time bomb: The schools have failed to be the Americanizing melting pot and economic escalator for Mexican American youngsters that they have traditionally been for other immigrant and ethnic groups A decade of intense efforts, supjiortcd by billions of extra federal and state dollars, has failed to push Mexican American children to educational parity w'th white youngsters And we may well be running out of to and perhaps, will ideas, time, money make ma'.tei s better. 18, 1979 Friday Morning, May Section Quarter Century After Brown, Dedication to Cause Required A quarter of a century has passed since the Warren Court, probably the most humanistically and liberally oriented U.S. Supreme Court of this century, ruled, without dissent, that segregated schools are Brl been made, some of ses. Progress has it substantial. Still, the road leading to a color blind America remains noticeably strewn with racially biased stumbling blocks. To add urgency to the problem, continued Mexican immigration and high fertility rate are expected to make Mexican American children the largest minority in our schools well before the end of the century. The melancholy facts are regretfully reported in a new book, Mexican Americans in School, a Decade of Change, by Thomas P. Carter and Robert A. Segura, published by the College Board. Among the bleak conclusions: "No scientific evidence demonstrates that federally-funde- d bilingual projects reach their objective of improved achievement, attainment, or attitude among Mexican Americans with limited English-speakinability. Remedial Activity as a compensatory and Desegregation remedial activity is failing. Integration and enrichment are not being realized. There is no firm evidence that either compensatory-remedia- l programs or improvements in the school have had positive results " g inherently unequal. - society. The 1954 decision is viewed by many observers as also being the catalyst for the womens rights movement that attacked the other blatant form of segregation in America. But Brown has not in the intervening years proven the ultimate panacea for the nations racial illnes Many Chicanos become psychological dropThey appear to outs, says the report. withdraw mentally from the school. The cause is not certain: it may be the result of cultural conflict, irrelevant curricular content, or the student's increasing awareness of the futility of school. The withdrawal is characterized by boredom, failure to work, inattentiveness, and discipline problems Few Prepared often follows Actual drop-ou-t (or push-oupsychological withdrawal. Only Native Americans have fewer years of schooling than Mexican Americans. Few Chicanos graduate from high school academically prepared for college. College enrollment is about half the Mexican representation in the population and a Mexican American is far less likely to graduate than a white or a black. Theres no one explanation for why Juanito can't read, is poorly motivated, and flees the school early to assume the low social status traditional for his group, the book points out. But chiefly, it cites (1) the diverse Mexican American subculture and socialization that often conflicts sharply with middle class norms and expectations pushed by the school; (2) failure of the schools to find successful ways to teach class children; and (3) the general inequality and lack of opportunity given minority groups. A total social situation causes the Mexican American tendency to achieve poorly and to drop out early, the book emphasizes t) Primarily because of past racially restrictive housing practices in many On May 17,- 1954, the courts localities many of Americas schools decision in Brown v. Board of remain either predominantly white or Education struck down as unconstitupredominantly black. Busing, a device hotly disputed with blacks and tional laws requiring racially segreoverdecision The schools. whites arrayed on both sides, has only gated turned the doctrine of separate but to a relatively small degree been equal, that had since 1896 permitted successful in relieving single-rac- e segregated educational facilities to dominated classrooms. exist under the equal protection Lest this bleak note diminish the requirements of the Fourteenth essential luster of Brown it must be Amendment. hastily added that the decisions Next to the Emancipation Proclano person may be primary thurst mation Brown was called the most discriminated against because of the has survived 25 important document in the tortured color of their skin history of black progress in the years of aggressive efforts to subvert United States. that ultimate truth. Attempts to end The decision, however, was more runi the decision by pupil assignment than a means of ridding America of laws, withdrawal of funds to integratsegregated schools. It provided the ing schools, easing of compulsory impetus of the entire civil rights attendance laws, closing of schools, movement of the 60s. It .led to outright intimidation of black stuenactment of considerable civil dents and their parents, threats of rights legislation, federal and state, economic reprisals and loss of jobs and, occasionally, deliberate and that has worked to reduce segregation in housing, the work place, the planned violence, have all proven courts and justice system, transpor- failures in halting progress. tation and, generally, in all of AmeriThat sort of retrospect, should can racially The loll of failure is massive and discouraging, according to Carter and Segura Despite some small improvements in the last decade, Mexican Americans still lag behind other groups academically. They have a lower grade point average than whites. They fail to learn to read as well as other groups, and the academic gap increases with the years of schooling, especially after 4lh grade. non-whit- e, combine with renew ed and perserver-in- g dedication to a great and fundamental cause to assure that on May 17 , 2004, 50 years after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education, America can celebrate a truly Golden Anniversary of a nation finally rid of the last vestiges of racial strife and inequality. non-midd- le Cultural Deprivation Compensatory education, based on theories of cultural deprivation, is just another way to blame the child for the schools failure to teach, Carter and Segura argue. Programs to remodel Chicano children including bilingual education are therefore doomed to fail and government to finance them will dwindle as failure becomes obvious. What will help? The book has only a few, remedial education, quality hazy ideas: eliminating practices that discourage Chicano children, radical innovations of vague nature, finding extrins'c rewards like money to motivate children to stay in school. But the book suggests, The school continues to attempt the impossible. Acting alone, the school cannot change culturally induced behavior patterns any more than it can modify society in general ... Because the school may have done all it can, significant improvement may have to await radical changes in the system. In other words, it's going to be a lot harder than we wanted to believe. socio-econom- ic iT7? San-T.m- es (Copyright) Jack W. Germond and Jules Witctner A Definite Worry In 1973 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched Sky lab, a space workshop for astronauts made from spare parts left over from the Apollo moon landing program. Now, as NASA knew it would some day when it was launched, Skylab is about to come back to Earth in bits and pieces. And, judging from the latest information from NASA, that is about all the experts at the space agency know with certainty. These people are reluctant to precisely predict the date; just somewhere between June 20 and July 4 current best guess is July 2. And they have equally scant knowledge of where. As Richard G. Smith, a deputy associate administrator of NASA told John J. Fialka of the Washington Star, This is going to be a random, truly random The best NASA can do, he said, is guess which orbit will be the spacecrafts last. That guess means that the impact will be somewhere on a 15,000-mil- e orbit around the earth. When Skylab the earths denser atmosphere and breaks apart it will distribute itself, in about 500 pieces of varying size, along what NASA calls a debris footprint. Spdce agency experts, along with being uncertain about when and where this footprint will come to earth, arent very positive about its size. They best guess it will cover an area 100 miles wide and 4,000 miles long. Thats a swath from Los Angeles to New York City and out into the Atlantic. A grand total of 400, 00C square miles. re-entr- y. re-ente- rs Rationing Effort Lacked Leadership Skylab was falling. Then Americans were told the chances of being struck by a part of the dying space station were about the same as being hit by a meteorite. That was reassuring. After all, we never knew anyone who had been hit by a meteorite. But just the mathematical possibility of having 38 parts of the worlds largest space station falling on Utah creates a definite worry. Chicago Tribune WASHINGTON It is almost an indictable offense to say anything in defense of the House of Representatives, but the raging dispute one-side- Bernstein on Words By Theodore M. Bernstein ADDITIONAL POSSESSIONS. One news article said, Commander Brant, a lawyer with 11 years service in the Navy, declined to comment. Another said, He had had three hours sleep and innumerable telephone calls 11 years during the night. Those phrases should be service and three hours sleep in the possessive case or more aptly, since there is no real possession involved, the genitive case. Therefore they should be 11 years serrendered with apostrophes: vice and three hours' sleep. WORD ODDITIES. There are two words apostrophe" in English. The one we have been talking about came about through confusion with the one we have not been talking about. That one, from the Greek base "apostrophe, a turning away, referred to a putting aside of an address to a crowd to seak to one person. The punctuation word also had the meaning of turning away, but in the sense of omitting a letter or letters from a word Duis between President Carter and the House over d as it may gasoline rationing is not as appear. The president's angry reaction when the House rejected his plan by such an impressive margin is understandable. There is no question that many of those votes against the rationing proposal were cast out of the most narrow and parochial political concerns. A Political Weakness But the political reality is not that simple. The defection of those 106 Democrats who voted against the plan can be traced, at least in part, to a political weakness of Jimmy Carter his failure to make it far more compelling to be on the president's side than to yield to potential constituent pressure. In a case such as this one, presidential leadership in Congress might be exerted in several ways, none of them apparently available to Carter at this juncture. First, a president should be able to enlist support on such an issue simply on the basis of political allegiance. If only half of those Democratic defectors had felt some pressure to support their president, the rationing plan would have carried. But more than two years into his term, it is clear that few Democrats in either house regard Jimmy Carter as their President that is, one to whom they owe some special allegiance and in whose success or failure they have a stake. Secondly, a president can carry a vote such as the one on gasoline rationing if he has enough political clout of his own to make it sensible, and safe, to follow him. This is simply a question of credibility, usually as measured in the opinion surveys. Thus, if Carter enjoyed a higher standing now, particularly for competence in the energy area, it would be easier for a congressman worried about his campaign next year to justify a vote for the rationing plan as support for the President or at least as going along with the acknowledged expert on the subject. In Carters case, there is no such imperative. On the contrary, the crude political pressure lies in the other direction. Finally, a president might carry such a vote if he inspired a little healthy fear in his party colleagues in Congress. That is always a lever that everyone in politics understands. But Jimmy Carter has spent two years turning the other cheek, so it is probably too late now to start playing Lyndon Johnson. A story told by a prominent Senate Democrat makes the point. It seems that when Carter was prepared to announce the normalization of relations with China, he invited a group of Democratic leaders to the White House for a special briefing. But when he revealed the great news, he received not a word of praise but instead querulous carping about the particulars of the decision. I had the feeling, said this Democrat, that it would have been the same if he had walked into that room and said, 'Im going to announce the Second Coming. Its going to happen pt ? oclock next Tuesday afternoon, in the Rose Garden. Someone would have said, 'Why 2 oclock? or Tuesday's a bad news day' or How come the Rose Garden? Difficult Times This is the measure of the president's political problem in trying to deal with Congress in running the country during extraordinarily difficult times. They don't know him well enough to feel any special allegiance to him ; he is not some old ally with whom they have fought political battles in the past. They dont respect him politically because they see no evidence that his standing with the voters is something that can rub off on them. And they dont fear him because they doubt he has the will or the ability to retaliate against them in ways they would understand. So it is easy enough for the president to accuse members of the House of political timidity. And unquestionably, there is some substance in that accusation. But the essence of political leadership is convincing those you arc supposed to lead to do the right thing" even if there are obvious political (Copyright! ri.-k- S. Broiler Liberal Tunis Heads in Canadas Political Circles de The Washington Post The most excituig, impornew political figure on the horizon is a craggy, forbidding MONTREAL tant and hopeful Canadian A NASA spokesman repeats earlier assurances there is little or no danger of being hit and injured by parts of Skylab, because it is likely (hat a given area of 100 square miles within the damage pathway would be hit with only one piece of Skylab. Thats what he says. But those 500 pieces of Skylab dumped into a 400,000 square mile area mean an average of one piece per 800 square miles. And if the crosses "footprint Utah, it is mathematically possible that 38 of those parts will find a final resting place somewhere in the state. Today we arent as complacent as when NASA first announced that de W HU U1U v ll(4ut llio formidable energy and intelligence in partisan politics until 1970. He is Claude Rvnn, th? Io?dpr of the Liberal party in the province of Quebec, and you will be haring a good deal more about him in the months ahead. -- Mr- - Brwi,r Ryan is no media-er- a candidate. His shock of gray hail, bushy eyes eyebrows, and deep set, make him an easy figure for the cartoonists to . dark-ringe- d caricature. As the longtime editor - publisher of a Freiu h language Montreal newspaper, Le Devoir, with a small but influential audience, he often tried readers' patience wilh the intricacy of his commentaries. z j The same is true of his political speeches, including the one I heard him give the other day to a conference of ethnic - Canadians here. It was every bit as complex as a Jimmy Carter energy oration, and just atxiut as inspiring. But Ryan, unlike Carter, is earning a reputation as a tough and effective politician. Earlier this month, in the first two special elections for the provincial assembly held since his takeover as Liberal leader, the Liberals rouled the separatist Parts Quebecois of Premier Rene Levesque. Ryan nimseii won one of the open seats, gaining a place as opposition leader. As Ryan pointed out in an interview after his speech, Levesque's PQ party came to power in 1976 with only 41 percent of the popular votes, against tb opposition of a demoralized and disgraced provinci.il Liberal party and Union National, a minor party which grabled almost 20 percent of the votes In this month's special elections. Ryan and the second Liberal candidate held down the PQ vote, and virtually eliminated the Union National to win handsome vu tones Significantly, it was Ryan and his partner "separatism was the issue before the voters, while the PQ candidates tried to fight the election on the general record of the provincial government. Ryan is clearly opposed to Levesques plan for a sovereign Quebec, but he seeks, typically, a more complex change in Quebecs status within the Canadian confederation. While leaving many of the details to be hammered out at a platform convention preceding the referendum this fall, Ryan outlined his third option" in the speecti ana interview here. It envisages leaving defense, foreign policy, monetary and trade questions to the federal government, while providing language rights for cultural minorities throughout the confederation, and protecting Quebec against what By an calls arbitrary changes in federal laws aifeeting the province." who insisted that While defending Quebecs right to reaffirm the primacy of French by its own legislation, he criticizes the PQs controversial language law as arbitrary and unrealistic. "We cannot have an island of absolute French purity here," he said. We are part of the economic, political and cultural context of North America Ryan argues that Icvesque's stress on cultural homogeneity for French - speaking Canada reflects a totalitarian subordination of individual erights to group norms. Ryan himself is criticized as a rather authoritarian person. A profile of Ryan in the May issue of Report." the valuable journal of Canadian public affairs, published here by Tim and Caroline Crecry, says, "He runs the party the same way he ran his newspaper. What Ryan says goes. But he has earned his influence by hard work. For 17 years, before taking up journalism, Ryan was the workhorse secretary of Catholic Action, the catchall organization of the churchs social action groups When that kind of energy is matched with an intellect as disciplined as Ryan's, the impact is considerable. If Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a longtime friend and frequent rival, is defeated in next week's federal election, as the polls now predict, Ryan would be the most important Liberal leader in Canada, and a rival for Levesque as French Canada's most important sxkcsman. (copyright) |
