Quality education for all is most likely to come through educational parks which bring together in one place all the students of a large area. Because of the economics of large-scale operation, the educational park will make practical a multiplicity of teaching specialists and superb facilities. Involving students from a wide area attracted by the superior opportunities, such a plan will guarantee school integration even before housing is desegregated.
The educational park is likely to be the next great structure for education. Funds should come from the federal government, which must move from supporting the fringes of education to supporting the basics -- the teachers and the facilities with which they work. The federal government should begin to provide building grants to local school district and groups of districts so that educational parks can be constructed. Building grants should go to localities -- cities and suburbs -- which locate schools so as to promote integration. The arbitrary lines of government should not serve to balkanize America into white and black schools and communities.
The location of new school buildings affects the long-term prospects of education. In the short run, schools in ghetto areas must be improved. Authentic efforts to upgrade them must be pursued. But the drive for immediate improvements in segregated schools should not retard progress toward integrated education later. New schools should be planned so as to fit into some aspect of an educational park. Even during this period, while metropolitan districts are being remade by change and growth, partial integration can occur if neighborhood schools participate during part of the school day in joint and meaningful activities. Max Wolff, the father of the educational park idea, has suggested ways of using existing buildings and temporary structures to produce some of the effects of the educational park.
The United States is far from providing each child with as much education as he can use. Our school system still primarily functions as a system of exclusion. For the oldest generation of Negroes the time for effective educational remedies is probably already past; but there is an enormous reservoir of talent among Negro and other poor youth. This society has to develop that talent. The unrealized capacities of many of our youth are an indictment of our society's lack of concern for justice and its proclivity for wasting human resources. As with so much else in this potentially great society, injustice and waste go together and endanger stability.
Employment
Economic expansion cannot alone do the job of improving the employment situation of Negroes. It provides the base for improvement but other things must be constructed upon it, especially if the tragic situation of youth is to be solved. In a booming economy Negro youth are afflicted with unemployment as though in an economic crisis. They are the explosive outsiders of the American expansion.
The insistence on educational certificates and credentials for skilled and semiskilled jobs is keeping Negroes out of both the private business sector and government employment. Negro exclusion is not the purpose of the insistence upon credentials, but it is its inevitable consequence today. The orientation of personnel offices should be "Jobs First, Training Later." Unfortunately, the job policy of the federal programs has largely been the reverse, with the result that people are being trained for nonexistent jobs.
"Training" becomes a way of avoiding the issue of employment, for it does not ask the employer to change his polices and job structures. Instead of training for uncertain jobs, the policy of the government should be to subsidize American business to employ individuals whose education is limited. This policy may be considered a bribe by some, but it is a step consonant with reality. We require a vast expansion of present programs of on-the-job training in which training costs are absorbed by the government; at another level, employers could be granted reduced taxes if they employed difficult-to-place workers. (Many states have "merit" reductions in unemployment taxes for employers with a good record of sustained employment; why not a "merit" reward for hiring the difficult-to-place? In some European countries employers are required to have a certain percentage of physically handicapped persons in their labor force; why not a similar requirement here for the difficult-to-place?)
The big, new, attractive thrust of Negro employment is in the nonprofessional services. A high percentage of these jobs is in public employment. The human-services -- medical attention, social services, neighborhood amenities of various kinds -- are in scarce supply in this country, especially in localities of poverty. The traditional way of providing manpower for these jobs -- degree-granting programs -- cannot fill all the niches that are opening up. The traditional job requirements are a barrier to attaining an adequate supply of personnel, especially if the number of jobs expands to meet the existing need.
The expansion of the human services can be the missing industry that will soak up the unemployment that persists in the United States. Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz has talked about the missing industry that would change the employment scene in America. The expansion of human services is that industry -- it is labor intensive, requiring manpower immediately rather than heavy capital investment as in construction or other fields; it fills a great need not met by private enterprise; it involves labor that can be trained and developed on the job.
The growth of the human services should be rapid. It should be developed in a manner insuring that the jobs generated will not primarily be for professionals with college and postgraduate diplomas but for people from the neighborhoods who can perform important functions for their neighbors. As with private enterprise, rigid credentials have monopolized the entry routes into human services employment. But, as Frank Riessman and Arthur Pearl have argued in their book, New Careers for the Poor, less educated people can do many of the tasks now performed by the highly educated as well as many other new and necessary tasks.
Universities adapting to the new needs of the day must learn how to develop the abilities of people who have had trouble with school in their youth and have not earned their credentials. They should be trained on the job, get university credit for their experience, learn in relevant courses and develop a liberal-arts knowledge that is built around their concerns. We need what S. M. Miller has called "second-chance universities." A democratic educational system requires multiple doors.
The Freedom Budget of A. P. Randolph is important because it provides a basis for common action with labor and other groups in utilizing the economic growth of this nation to benefit the poor as well as the rich. It raises the possibility of rebuilding America so that private affluence is not accompanied by public squalor of slums and distress.
The Freedom Budget, the expansion of private employment and nonprofessional opportunities cannot, however, provide full employment for Negroes. Many youths are not listed as unemployed because in despair they have left the labor market completely. They are psychologically disabled and cannot be rescued by conventional employment. They need special work places here their irregularity as workers can be accepted until they have restored their habits of discipline. The jobs should nevertheless be jobs and understood as such, not given the false label of "training".
Among the employed, where discrimination continues to operate, discrepancies in pay between Negroes and whites is ubiquitous. This discrepancy occurs because (1) Negroes are paid less for the same job; (2) a heavier proportion of Negroes work in the low-wage South; and (3) a smaller percentage of Negroes are in high-wage jobs. The first could be eliminated by more effective policing of fair employment practices. The second is partly changing as Negroes leave the South, though more important would be effective unionization of Southern plants. The third requires strong effort of government and private employers and schools and colleges to develop upgrading practices which give Negroes a chance at the better jobs.
Rights
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