that Black children can interpret an African proverb — “ The monkey watching the man shave, one day slit his own throat” — when they cannot interpret the comparable “White” proverb — that is, Don’t throw pearls before swine.” Even asking a child to estimate quantities can be unfair, Williams reported. Black children do better on such tests if they’re allowed to work with RC bottles instead of the laboratory beakers that usually are used. The IQ test questions that IQ test critics dislike the most are those that ask children to make judgments about what they would do in different situations. These questions can hardly even be said to have “ correct” answers, because the acceptable answers, according to IQ test makers, are those that would be given by most people. According to Williams, “ That means the test rewards for thinking like everybody else.” One question of this type is, “What would you do if you were sent to buy a loaf of bread and the grocer said he did not have anymore?” The acceptable answer is that you would go to another store. But Williams says that a ghetto child should go straight home, not wander around the neighborhood looking for bread. Another such question is, “What would you do if you lost one of your friend’s balls?” The acceptable answer is that you would replace the loss. However, a Black child is likely to answer, “ I’d take him to the hospital.” The most famous of these questions is the “ fight item” — IQ test critics’ favorite example of “ cultural bias” in the exams. The test asks, “What is the thing to do if a fellow (girl) much smaller than yourself starts to fight with you?” The acceptable answer is that you wouldn’t fight back. However, this answer reflects “ white values,” while in the ghetto Black children learn to fight back when attacked. Black children aged 6 and 7 “ miss” this question more than twice as often as white children do. It is no wonder that the system overlooks the potential of Black students and tracks them into slow classes,, remedial courses and athletic programs. In a broader sense, the idea that integrated education is any better than the pre-Brown segregated system has come under attack. In a recent article in The Oregonian, Professor Bell emphasized that “ the desegregation movement has been premised on the idea that ‘green follows white,’ that the money in the public schools follows the white students, and Blacks must enroll their children with white children in order to get the quality education the school system will provide the whites. “ The strategy seemed a viable approach, but experience over the years indicates that to the extent school officials gave the needs of white students priority, they continued to do so even in desegregated schools. Extra money for special programs with better, higher-paid teachers tends to follow white students into special, upper-track classes even within integrated schools, where most Blacks are trapped in lower, generally ineffective and less expensive, course offerings.” Closer to* home, Board member Herb Cawthorne pinpointed another important flaw in the integrationist concept of education in a recent Portland Skanner article. “A difficult idea for most white people to understand is that Black citizens do not have the depth of advocacy from principals and staff which the whites enjoy. In the Portland Public Schools, everything is dominated by and is more responsive to the concerns of white parents. In contrast to staff and principals in majority white schools, those in majority Black schools seem to painstakingly avoid advocacy on behalf of the parents who are frustrated or angry. “ Perhaps, as is often suggested, they would be earmarked as ‘too liberal’ or as divisive or not team oriented. The word has traveled down: “ Keep your mouth shut.” Consequently, too many of them maintain a conspicuous silence. “ I do not mean to infer that these principals and staff are ineffective administrators and educators; most of them deeply care about the day-to- day functions of teaching children. I do suggest, however, that survival, career potential and common practice dictate that they adhere to the restrictions. “ Let me illustrate this with a fresh example. Recently, the Board of Education held a hearing in the Madison Cluster. The community there was upset, legitimately, by an action which transferred funds from a middle school project at Gregory Heights to a school in North Portland. “ The contrast, as compared to the desegregation hearings, was striking. “ In support of parental concerns, district administrators spoke with undaunted candor. One high official criticized the judgment of Dr. Blanchard, our superintendent, claiming that the superintendent gave the board faulty advice. Another administrator told the board it must work ceaseThe instrument o f the integrationist dream has been busing, and nothing has divided this country more bitterly in the past two and a half decades than busing. lessly to heal the breach of confidence. Finally, the Gregory Heights principal, with strong emotional and educational commitment, clearly enumerated the concerns his constituent parents had voiced. “ The contradiction is expressed in a nutshell: In terms of advocacy on behalf of parents, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander. “ For the most part, white principals and staff accept what they know parents believe to be a bad situation. They accept it without challenge. They know that should they challenge the administration or the board on grounds of obvious contradiction in the treatment of children based on race, they would be instantly earmarked for a difficult time. These principals and staff are not less qualified, less committed, or less interested. They do have a sense of survival. They are caught in the vise of institutional racism. As soon as they are transferred to a school with a predominantly white enrollment, they will be allowed the right and privilege of advocating for parental concerns without the subtle but effective pressures to the contrary. “ If Black parents were more involved in the selection of the principals and staff coming into predominantly Black schools, they would feel more compelled to speak up for our community. If they speak up, our concerned parents can be heard. We will not have to struggle so hard. We will not have to boycott and demonstrate so often. Through the channels available to others, Black parents could get their message to the administration and the board.” If the inheritors of the Brown decision have devised a system that is fatally flawed, they have also overlooked what was good about the “ separate but equal” days. As Oregonian staff writer Linda Williams pointed out, “ It is no accident that the chief spokesman of the BUF, Ron Herndon, received his early education in a segregated Black school system typical in the South until about 10 years ago. “ The problems with that system have been well documented, but the problems were the result of a lack of resources from without, not a lack of strengths from within. Among the strengths of that system was that it produced people like Herndon. Reed College gave him legitimacy in the white world. “ The Black system in the South was responsive to the Black community. It provided a measure of insulation for children from personal contacts with racism. It assured a continuation of Black America’s rich heritage and made Black children believe they had a future. “ The system did not start from the premise that Blacks could not learn. A Black child did not have to possess great intellectual abilities, or be able to run, jump, sing or dance to get attention. Being Black and ordinary was not a stigma. “ The system demanded maximum effort because sloth was a mortal sin, and the rewards were expected to be the improvement of the entire race. It did not use the fact that children came to school hungry and from broken homes as excuses for not educating them. Given its limitations, the system’s achievements were remarkable.” The instrument of the liberal integrationist dream has been forced busing, and nothing has divided this country more bitterly in the past two and a half decades than busing. Witness the explosions from Little Rock in 1954 to Boston in the mid-seventies, that have been etched into our nation’s soul. Whatever the motives of the proponents of forced busing to achieve integration, the effect has been to deepen racial animosities and prevent, rather than promote, educational opportunities for everyone, Black and white. In all these cases busing polarized the poor whites and Blacks into opposing armed camps. Most of the establishment do-gooders who advocated busing lived in the suburbs or could afford to send their children to private schools. The lower classes were stuck in the blackboard jungles. For both races, learning became secondary to survival. In his book, Tribes o f America, Paul Cowan points out that whites have suffered as much as Blacks in telling of South Boston High School. “When Barbara Quinion was a little girl her father, a postal clerk, and her mother, a waitress, loved to tell her glorious Southie sagas. They’d describe the snowball fights and the egg fights between the boys and the girls, the times they fooled their music teacher by rolling a piano down the stairs, the annual Class Day, where kids would make lasting impressions by imitating Elvis or Bill Haley and the Comets. Barbara’s first day at Southie was the first day of busing. She wanted to go up there anyway, but the boycott was on and her parents told her to stay home. Like most of her friends, she observed the boycott until the Thanksgiving recess^ It was hard for her to make up all that lost classwork when she returned. She seethed inwardly every day, for she believed the teachers gave the Black kids all the breaks. She spent much of her time fighting the invaders. She had to, she said, for the pride of Southie. But those battles terrified her. She couldn’t concentrate in school, or see any point in studying when she got home. Her fear and confusion turned into outright pain when she was left back that spring. She returned to Southie the next September, but it was a world she’d never imagined — no one went to the football games; cops were swarming all over the school building; outside, you weren’t even allowed to pick up a snowball for fear that a fight that began innocently would trigger a race riot. “ It was like being in a cage,” she says. Depressed, she started playing hooky. She and Maureen would hang out at the sub shop for days at a time, flirting with the customers and countermen, arranging “ times” that would prove their corner had kids who knew how to party better than any other kids in South Boston. That spring Barbara was left behind again. Maureen had already quit school. Barbara decided to drop out, too. Barbara says that dozens of her classmates quit with her — kids who might have been on the football or hockey teams or in the band before the advent of busing. Some of the boys found jobs at the American Brush Company or Gillette. Some are still looking for work. At first she figured she’d get hired as a secretary with no trouble at all. But soon, “ I realized I couldn’t type or file the way they wanted. When they asked me where I’d been employed before, I had to tell them the truth . . . nowhere.” She still goes downtown to look for work once or twice a week, but without much hope. “ I feel like a flunky, a bum,” she says. The Black United Front’s stand for community control and against busing challenges the most basic tenets of white liberal thinking about education. Particularly it challenges white control of the system, and Blanchard’s firing represents the ascendency of this viewpoint. Perhaps it is this loss of control — coupled with the racism that often tinges the outlook of the white and powerful, no matter who they are — that accounts for the ferocity of the reaction of Hazen and Company. The elite have always tried to keep races and classes divided — the better to maintain their own hegemony — and the new wave of thinking among Portland’s Blacks threatens these divisions. Symbolic of the harmony that the BUF’s plan could engender, Board member Sarah Newhall received a call from Bob Nixon of the Longshoremen’s Union following the vote to fire Blanchard. Nixon told Newhall that he and 1,000 men behind him were in support of the Board’s decision, and that they had been trying to get rid of Blanchard and his busing policies for 10 years. In an interview, Ms. Newhall expressed concern that the Board would get blown out of the water before ever having a chance to implement their substantive changes. She hoped that the Front would see that this was the best board they were going to get and that they needed to work quietly behind the scenes to implement many more far-sighted educational policies. It would appear, however, that the unyielding pressure of the Black United Front has wrought the changes that have occurred so far. For the Black community the stakes are too high to compromise future generations. Anyone who is concerned with a progressive direction for education in Portland would do well to examine the Front’s position. We are at a crossroads now . . . down one path lies a unique opportunity to provide quality education for children of all races and classes. Down the other lie the broken dreams that recently found expression in the streets of Miami. The choice is ours. 7
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