Word: slum
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...skylarks down the scruffy street, the colored slum kid in the Northern city, headed for the public school. He wears a white shirt with a bow tie, and a good warm windbreaker. His smile is toothy, his epithets vile. He is eight, and can't read much. His teacher, a man with a heart of case-hardened gold, sometimes thinks of him as a "little bastard," but the boy has good intelligence and intentions. Such, in many variations, is the "disadvantaged" child, and he and his like now comprise one-third of all pupils in the nation...
...want to grow up to be any dumb guy," said one Manhattan slum kid recently. Such children know adults who cannot even read the want ads, and sense the despair of unskilled teen-agers loitering on streets where drink, dope or death is the only exit. Yet as other Americans reach new heights of affluence and aspiration, slum kids are made to feel all the more worthless by their poverty and the color of their skin. Often, dinner is a hamburger served in a paper bag; books are nonexistent; home is a rooming house so transient that in a recent...
...Post Office." IQ tests use middle-class references that the slum child does not understand; his low score then plunks him into the slow group. He is repelled from reading by fatuous primers about "nice" children who seem laughable even in the suburbs, let alone in Harlem. Harried principals stand ready to expel him; guidance counselors are reluctant to encourage him too much. "Be realistic," they say. "Do what you can do. Try the post office...
...variety of pioneering ways, New York has tried to fight its problems. George Washington High School's three-year Demonstration Guidance Project freed teachers for intense work with slum kids, and turned many of the pupils into honors graduates and earnest collegians. The famed Higher Horizons program, a strong dose of culture and counseling, offers a measure of hope and confidence to 65,000 children in 76 schools. The city has poured extra cash and supplies into 274 schools that have a concentration of problems. It has brought in hundreds of bilingual Puerto Rican teachers to ease Puerto Rican...
...part, improving big city "slum schools" will depend on widening employment opportunities and ending segregated housing, but there is much that educators can do to help now. Through its Graduate School of Education--which regularly cooperates with local school systems--the University could send experts to various "problem" schools in the North and South to improve curricula and classroom methods, and to provide special help for students with educational deficiencies. Harvard could undoubtedly attract foundation money for pilot projects in slum schools, similar to New York City's "Higher Horizons" program. And such an Ed School venture has ample precedent...