Word: berkeleys
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...
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...