Word: school
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...South's anti-integration schemes is the "private school plan." The idea: to close all the public schools, thus diverting the U.S. Supreme Court's desegregation order. The next step is setting up private schools by giving state tuition grants to all school-age children (though not necessarily Negroes). Already the plan has been made possible by new laws in six states-Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Virginia. Other states are considering it. What few seem to be considering is the consequences...
Last week the first sober study of consequences was published by the hard-headed Southern Regional Council. The authors: Education Professors Donald Ross Green and Warren E. Gauerke of Atlanta's Emory University. In an objective, 40-page pamphlet (If the Schools Are Closed . . .) they dismantle the private school plan completely. What the scheme amounts to, they prove, is something akin to amputating a broken leg and giving the patient a matchstick to hobble...
Paws in the Till. For Georgia alone, Green and Gauerke report, the dollar costs would be astronomical-at least double or triple present budgets. Georgia now spends only $265 a year per public school pupil (U.S. median: $332). But it still provides all the services typical of a public system-free books and transportation, library supervision, an expanding guidance and testing program, adult and vocational education, special teachers for handicapped children. In contrast to Atlanta's private schools, which spend an average $625 per pupil (and in some cases charge extra for books, food, buses), the public schools cost...
Under the private school plan, all this would end abruptly-a critical loss of social services throughout Georgia. The private "system" would be strictly on its own, with only tuition grants for support. It could not possibly take over the public system's job. It could not buy enough school buildings from the state, because of reversion clauses specified by the original land donors; it could not begin to pay for new buildings. It could not keep teachers in the state during the changeover, or raise salaries high enough to attract new ones, or curb grafters with paws...
Crackpots in the Classroom. Money is "only the beginning of the tale." Academic standards would fall. Tuition-grant schools could not hope to offer quality or variety of courses. Example: Little Rock's recently closed private Raney High School (TIME, Aug. 17), which offered less than 25% as many courses to its segregationist students as did the public Central High School, had no music, art, general mathematics or foreign languages. Nor would a wave of fly-by-night tuition-grant schools (most unaccredited) be subject to responsible supervision; fanatics and crackpots could easily control budgets...