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“JUDGE-MADE LAW IN EDUCATION A Washington, D.C. federal judge, James Skelly Wright of the US.. Circuit Court of Appeals, has ordered the District of Columbia Board of Education to discontinue the so-called “track system” in its schools. (The track system consists of assigning students according to ability. This is just about the “farthest out” thing that a judge has yet done even in this era of some pretty weird decisions. What the judge is saying is that no stu dent should be permitted to move ahead in accordance with his ability. This is a denial of equality of opportunity, for the very word “opportunity” implies that some people will be able to make more of it than others Thomas Jefferson, who hoped that our educational system would permit some “brands to be rescued from the burning,” would have been horrified by Judge Wright's reasoning. If a court can tell a board of education that it cannot let good students move ahead at their own pace, it could order such things as the elimination of apti tude tests, report cards, the separa tion of first graders into “blue” and “red reading teams, the introduc tion of Spanish or French into the third grade for pupils with linguis tic abilities, and a lot of other things which are designed to sti mulate a competitive attitude to ward developing excellence. What has happened to the Wash ington public school system is a national tragedy. The D.C. princi pal, Carl Hansen, is a first-rate man who has been victimized by events over which he has had no control. Hansa, who hungers for excellence, started a special school some years ago in southwest Washington. Known as the Amidon School, this special institution was open to students outside its im mediate area. It was completely desegregated, with whites and Negroes getting the benefit of first-rate teaching in the basic ele ments of the three R's. I sat in some of the early classes and mar velled at the progress of the kids, both black and white. It should have become a pilot school for the whole nation. The Amidon experiment, how ever, has been vitiated by a deci sion to deprive the school of its special status. And the Washington, D.C., white middle class hasn't helped Carl Hansen to push for excellence throughout the entire D.C. school system, as he has tried to do. White children in the Wash ington area now go to suburban schools or to private schools. And the District of Columbia is left with de facto school segregation, with Negro children making up ninety-three percent of the school population. Critics of the D.C. school “track system argue that the lower tracks have become dumping grounds for students who come into the schools from cultural backgrounds that do not stimulate them to make any special effort to learn. And the tired, dispirited Washington teach ers are accused of making no effort to pull the pupils in the lower tracks out of their indifference. Since the critics are at least partially right, Judge James Skelly Wright's observation that the Washington, D.C., school aptitude tests are “standardized primarily on white, middle class children is understandable. The Judge argues that the aptitude tests force Ne groes into tracks which offer them reduced curricula and make their chances of escape from poor edu cation “remote.” But to say that a track system is badly operated is one thing, and to order a board of education to abolish it is another. Judges who are learned in the law are not necessarily learned in educational techniques. If Washington has poor or dispirited teachers, it should get some better ones. If its school population is “culturally deprived,” more money should be appropriated for a “project head start” type or program. There should be an up grading of attention and effort in the lower tracks, not a return to the old fallacy of “progressive edu cation,” which held that it was only “democratic” to throw all the kids together and to teach them at a pace dictated by the needs of the lower IQs. (Copyright, 1967, King Features Syndicate, Inc.)
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Mount Pleasant News
Mount Pleasant, Iowa, US
Sat, Jul 01, 1967
Page 1
Full Page
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Willem D.
USA 19 Sep 2026
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