Six practical rules for maintaining a quality school system

By ROBERT McCLORY

President, School Board
No-Name School District
Anywhere, Illinois

Dear Sir:

In response to your recent request for advice about maintaining stability in your troubled educational system, I offer the following detailed and (naturally) confidential prescription based on years of experience in the great city of Chicago. Our approach may not solve all your problems, but it is clear and practical and includes recommendations which can be implemented in most cities with only a few adjustments for local peculiarities. The questions you ask can be reduced, we think, to this: Just how has a very visible northern city the size of Chicago managed to keep 456,000 black, Hispanic and white school children safely separated and in their own neighborhood schools despite pressure from the courts, the interference of state and federal bureaucrats, and a dwindling supply of white students?

Clearly, the challenge has been great, especially with our budgetary problems, the appointment of a brand new school board and the unfair intrusion of the U.S. Justice Department. Yet in 1979 more than 50 percent of our schools had a 90 percent or more black enrollment — a 2 percent increase since 1975. And despite the fact that white students comprise only 18 percent of our enrollment, we have succeeded in maintaining scores of virtually all-white neighborhood schools on our northwest and southwest sides.

Our record, in fact, is so remarkable that the Department of Health, Education and Welfare cited our efforts in a most emphatic way: "Chicago has been found to have the highest level of school segregation among the 10 largest cities in the North and West .... It rated 92 on a scale of 100 (100 defined as 'total segregation'), while the other nine cities averaged 68."

What the Washington bureaucrats so conveniently failed to note is that these schools are attended by students of similar background, ethnic heritage and culture. HEW may call such arrangements separatism, of course, but we call it loyalty to one's roots and opposition to the use of children for social experimentation. Even our celebrated Access to Excellence program — which some feared might disrupt our system — has paled in the shadow of our venerable neighborhood concept, and it has done nothing to break our hallowed traditions in any significant way. But more of that later. The important point is that while formerly great bastions of the neighborhood school concept like Boston, Cleveland and San Francisco have been compelled to shuffle their children needlessly, we in Chicago have not. We are confident that by following these simple rules, you too can preserve the status quo for a time. Eventually, of course, we may all be forced to abandon our large cities as hopelessly unmanageable, but the maintenance of reasonable and responsible race separation in our city schools is at least a temporary hedge against the chaos of racial integration.

Rule 1 Remember Your Mandate. Theoretical notions about equality and equal opportunity are all well and good, and all of us here in Chicago share those ideals. But that won't pay the taxes or the teachers or the light bills. We are servants of the public carrying out their will as efficiently as we can.

The real estate industry is naturally opposed to a fully integrated school system and always has been because it would destroy free enterprise in the housing market and play havoc with house sale patterns established more than 50 years ago. Would white families move out of changing communities if they didn't have assurances that the children could go to all-white schools in the new neighborhood? Probably not. They would stay where they are. And where would our black families, ever seeking to improve their lot in life, go? They would be stuck in the slums. So you see, a totally integrated school system actually stifles mobility and the progress of the underclass up the social ladder — not to mention its depressing effect on the real estate market.

An arbitrarily integrated school system also virtually guarantees that when white families have to move, they will go to the suburbs, not for the lawns and patios so much, but for the all-white middle-class schools. Granted, there has been a significant white flight out of Chicago in the past 10 years anyway — about 400,000 people, in fact. But it would have been worse if we had not vigorously maintained our neighborhood schools — often through the most creative adjustments in school district boundaries.

Quite naturally and practically, business and industry oppose capricious school integration because owners, managers and employees realize a solid bloc of white families is necessary for urban stability. An all-black city is just not compatible with the health of the business community, as the unfortunate examples of Detroit and Gary, Ind., will attest.

And labor unions, too, oppose forced mixing of the races because labor wants to preserve and pass on its hard-won benefits to its members and their descendents, who, in Chicago and most other cities, just happen to be white. A well-established tradition in Chicago even allowed our local unions to control admissions to the Washburn Trade School, even though our Board of Education paid for it. That way the sons of good union men could get valuable training. Besides, race relations in the labor movement haven't been very good in Chicago since the First World War, when industry got into the habit of importing blacks from the South as strikebreakers.

Also, the city government wants to limit race mixing in the schools because such artificial social engineering is politically, educationally and socially explosive. And the first job of our city fathers is to respond to the legitimate wishes of its most responsible and solvent citizens.

I don't think I have to tell you how white parents feel about this subject, at least those who are articulate and willing to take a stand.

In the face of these practical realities, there's no need for liberal guilt pangs as you go about preserving your own neighborhood systems. In our city we have a respected coalition of leaders from every important sector: business, banking, real estate, labor, education. It is called Chicago United, and it has always supported the general thrusts of our Board of Education and sided with its superintendent during trying times. These civic leaders know what the real score is.

Rule 2 The Business of the Schools is Business. We all know that schools should educate children. That goes without saying. But that shouldn't prevent us from seeing some of the other crucial purposes of the system. In Chicago, for example, it subsidizes large, important corporations like Inland Steel by leasing them valuable downtown land owned by the Board of Education — and at a considerable savings to the corporations. The school system provides jobs for contractors, tradesmen and other union craftsmen who earn handsome wages while maintaining some 600 school buildings. It supports thousands of teachers, administrators, planners, specialists and consultants. It also subsidizes great numbers of former principals and teachers, some of whom, frankly, are no longer able to function in the schools, while others are unfortunate victims of community misunderstanding and have to be removed from their posts. It enables the Chicago Teachers' Union to exercise its talents on behalf of its members. It is a vital support for food suppliers, vendors and other purveyors of service who deal in large quantities. And the system is a major customer of the big banks which make regular loans to the Board for its many worthy purposes.

No one, therefore, should be surprised that Board of Education members, all appointed by the mayor, have traditionally included leaders from the institutions of society most concerned. For many years the Board's president was Frank Whiston, one of our most powerful real estate barons, and the vice president was Thomas Murray, the city's ranking labor official.

Today, education is a business which is in serious financial trouble. That is why we must not become too obsessed with learning and social justice as we pursue on objective of improving the business and labor climate in the cities.

Rule 3 Support Your Local Realtors. Realtors are your most important ally, and while they need your help, you simply cannot survive without theirs. If, for example, a maverick realtor starts selling to outsiders in an all-white attendance area, it will upset people, possibly cause panit selling, and throw off classroom balance in the local schools before you are prepared to deal with it. In our city such a realtor will be reminded as forcefully as possible of the ancient policy passed in 1917 by the Chicago Real Estate Board: "Inasmuch as more territory must be provided for Negro residents, it is desired in the interest of all that each block shall be filled solidly (with Negroes) and that further expansion shall be confined to contiguous blocks and that the method of obtaining a single building in scattered blocks be discontinued."

Now while that's direct and to the point, it's also beer declared illegal. Not to worry. Truly dedicated realtors understand the real needs of their customers and can overcome irksome legal barriers. Hence, the geographic spread of black (and more recently, Hispanic) families proceeds to this day in an orderly, controlled fashion. Although realtors and school officials may appear to be pursuing totally different vocations, their goals are highly compatible and their efforts to preserve the neighborhoods complement each other beautifully.

It's important to remember that school officials, inasmuch as they are tax-supported creatures, are more vulnerable to criticism for deliberately creating segregated schools. Almost anyone, for example, can look at an all white school in a racially changing neighborhood and figure out why the attendance boundaries were just "readjusted."

It is helpful in such a case to let the real estate people take the initiatives and responsibility. They aren't public servants and are accustomed to criticism anyway. In Chicago, at least, their commitment to preserving economic stability through controlled segregation is pure enough to make them thick-skinned in the face of mindless attacks from civil libertarians and other dogooders.

Rule 4 Keep the Minority Community Divided. Minorities, of course, are unhappy with the present system and they do a good deal of whining. They complain that all-black schools tend to be inferior in every respect: more crowded, more poorly maintained, less efficiently run, and less likely to educate or motivate than white schools. They even cite figures that suggest that the average kid in a predominantly black school in Chicago is two years or more behind the student in an all-white school and that 41 percent of the black 17-year-olds in the city are functionally illiterate. They act as though someone conspired to make things this way instead of realizing that things are tough all over; and many blacks especially tend to brood over these things to the point of becoming even paranoid.

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Often, trouble can be averted with occasional favors, choice appointments to their leaders, and summit conferences in times of trouble. An important black politician like Chicago's Big Bill Dawson, who controlled a lot of jobs and knew where his authority came from, could single-handedly extinguish brush fires of discontent. So could Ralph Metcalfe before he started reading his own press clippings.

Our biggest crisis occurred in the mid-1960s when the venerable Benjamin Willis, a man of unusual nerve and decisiveness, was the school superintendent. It was a time when Dr. Martin Luther King was arousing blacks all over the nation with his civil rights campaign. Unfortunately for us here, it was a time of heavy demand for black housing. Our friends in the realty business were being forced to expand the borders of black migration at a faster rate than they (or we) anticipated. Whole blocks on the south side were "turning" (as we sometimes put it) almost overnight. To meet this demand, Dr. Willis peifected the use of the mobile school unit, a small, portable classroom which could be plunked down in the playground of a school and remain as long as needed. Dr. Willis, you see, was so firmly committed to the neighborhood concept that he spared no expense in establishing mobile units at black schools even while many classrooms in white schools were left empty. As a matter of fact, our own Board of Education did a study in 1964 which revealed there were 703 empty classrooms in the whole system. But Dr. Willis stood firm in his resolve, stifling the early specter of busing and other disruptive tactics.

Well, word of this got around and pretty soon the black people were calling our mobile classrooms "Willis Wagons" and claiming their whole purpose was to keep black and white children apart. We went through a major uproar with marches into white neighborhoods and boycotts. One year almost 250,000 children stayed home when the schools reopened. And it looked like blacks might grow more troublesome because Dr. Willis, true as ever to his neighborhood principles, courageously ordered the purchase of more mobiles.

Fortunately, we persuaded Bill Dawson to oppose the boycott and that defused the problem. Then we convinced the local NAACP to back off, and soon the whole controversy blew away. It wasn't even necessary to make any concessions. Our most effective argument was that black children, who are so far behind in education already, need all the schooling they can get and a boycott is, therefore, self-destructive. That argument, I should add, is still used by many of our most dedicated principals and veteran teachers with telling effect at parent-teacher meetings.

It is true, unfortunately, that persuasive promoters of integration like the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have stirred up trouble for us over the years. But our favors to more responsible leaders have helped us succeed in keeping blacks — and Latinos too — sufficiently satisfied and pacified that neither Jackson nor anyone else can maintain a level of popular indignation for very long.

Rule 5 Develop Treadmills. The preservation of neighborhood schools in Chicago has depended largely on a creative principle that might be called "the treadmill effect": do a lot of moving, but don't progress. Over and over we have been pressured by outside bureaucrats to move toward a single, thoroughly mixed school system. Yet, after 19 years of such meddling and harassment we have managed to maintain the racial and ethnic purity of our schools. That, I submit, is no mean achievement.

Consider a few examples. In 1961, Southside parents filed a federal suit, charging that we were gerrymandering local district boundaries to promote racial isolation. The case bounced around the courts and never came to trial after the Board of Education agreed to appoint an expert study commission. No one today recalls what it recommended, who was on it, or if it ever met. (Commissions, by the way, are classic treadmills. They burn immense amounts of time and energy, while insuring that nothing happens.)

In 1963, a local court ordered the Board to implement a voluntary high school transfer plan which would have disrupted several all-white schools. Dr. Willis said he could not in good conscience carry out that plan and prepared to resign. This news created such a ruckus, with everyone debating Willis' merits and demerits, that no one noticed when the transfer plan was quietly scrapped.

In 1965, the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare actually froze $30 million in Chicago school funds because of a civil rights complaint. Mayor Richard J. Daley (God rest his soul) flew to Washington and met personally with President Lyndon Johnson. Not only was the money thawed out but the complaint was buried and the old readjustment of boundaries continued.

When the Illinois Board of Education ruled in 1976 that our city schools were nowhere near an acceptable level of integration, the Board of Education pondered for eight months before even agreeing to do anything. The state pressure continued and so a 39-member citywide advisory committee was empaneled. (Advisory committees are even better as treadmills than commissions are, of course, because they aren't even supposed to do anything but advise.) It spent eight more months developing a system-wide program which would have included much busing (yes, busing) and a mandatory backup provision if a voluntary program failed. It was blatantly ridiculous and unacceptable, so our superintendent, Joseph Hannon, waited four more months and then dissolved the advisory committee and shredded its plan.

Then Hannon, a suave man with Kennedy-like charisma, unveiled Access to Excellence, one of the grandest treadmills ever conceived. It sounded good since it involved in its first school year (1978-79) 47,000 children (almost 10 percent of the school system) in integrated programs without any busing or mandatory components.

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The genius of the plan lay in its definitions of integration, which insured maintainence of the status quo. White classes were considered "integrated" if they just once visited an "academic interest center" such as the Art Institute, the Lincoln Park Zoo or Midway Airport at the same time that black students were present. Even more ambitious Access programs also avoided unnecessary mixing. In many cases white students who spent part of their day in a black school arrived at a different time, studied in separate classes and left by a separate exit. Impressed with Hannon's project, the state board relaxed and life returned to normal until HEW in early 1979 became upset again, rejected Access to Excellence, and threatened to take the Chicago Board of Education to trial at last.

The treadmill was becoming precarious at this point because HEW was headed by Patricia Harris, a black woman, and because the city was no longer under the guidance of Mayor Daley. So there was an understandable degree of alarm in late 1979 when Mrs. Harris sent the Chicago case to the Justice Department for prosecution.

Not to worry. Our past experience and inertia got us off that hook. In September 1980, the Justice Department and the Board of Education agreed to a pact which requires Chicago school officials to develop a workable desegregation plan by next spring. Terms of the pact are vague and general and far less demanding, in fact, than the sort of tough talk coming from Mrs. Harris in 1979.

So it goes. With time, you too will discover that treadmills can be perfected to the point that a person who appears to be walking forward is actually moving backwards. It may be the only way to preserve the old values.

Rule 6 Keep Your Hand on the Wheel. It should be evident from the Chicago experience that pressure to upset a school system never lasts very long. Hence, decisive decision makers should push ahead with their plans, despite any talk about mandatory backups, the freezing of funds or federal lawsuits. For example, right now we are forging ahead with a wide variety of interesting projects. We recently opened two high schools very close to one another in the near north side, both of which will help preserve the historic racial differences of that community. Lincoln Park College Prep is geared for whites, while the Near North Career Magnet High School (conveniently located near the Cabrini-Green housing project) is accommodating blacks. Out on the west side, instead of erecting a large integrated high school for the whites, blacks and Hispanics living nearby, we have arranged for three small schools, one for each group. The Collins High School already houses blacks; the Juarez High School is occupied by Mexicans; and the brand new Richard J. Daley High will educate the white students.

We are living in especially tense times these days because our maverick mayor, Jane Byrne, has appointed a brand new school board, heavily loaded with radical I integrationists who don't understand our principles, our history, and the economic benefits of the neighborhood concept. Mayor Byrne's naive appointments pose the danger that the majority of the Board of Education might be committed to sweeping, district-wide integration. Some of them seem to regard education as the schools' only purpose. Accordingly, there is fear about what sort of plan they will present to the Justice Department next spring.

Not to worry. These fears are unfounded. Firmly entrenched at our Board of Education headquarters downtown is that great mass of planners, specialists and consultants known affectionately as "the staff." It is we who will hold the fort. Many of us trace our educational philosophy back to Ben Willis. Some of us were actually hired by Dr. Ben, are safely working in key jobs in the heart of the bureaucracy, and have been true to the principles Ben stood for through the administrations of all his successors as superintendent.

To put it bluntly, it's not all that important what the city's new Board of Education wants or thinks it wants. We folks on the staff are the implementors. It is we who will check the population figures, make the projections, calculate the scores, and draw the maps. We haven't worked here this long for nothing. We're steeped in the principles I've shared with you here. We wrote them, in fact, and we'll never betray them.

I wish you well in your efforts.

Very truly yours,

Gerald Mander
Executive Associate Assistant
to the Assistant Associate Director,
Demographic Division
Chicago Board of Education

P.S. Here are a few cautions to add to the principles:

— Constantly speak of the dwindling percentage of white students. Do not use actual numbers since they can be misleading. In Chicago, for example, we have more white students today in our schools than there are total students in Boston or in most other cities.

— Do not be lulled into complacency by the apparent conservative drift in the nation. There are still enough rabid proponents of irresponsible integration around to make our task challenging for many years.

Finally, let us hear how you are doing. It may be that you have learned something about preserving our cherished institution, the neighborhood school, that we don't know about in Chicago. But I doubt it.

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