Integration: What's a Neighborhood?

A neighborhood school is a school in a neighborhood—but what's a neighborhood? In Chicago, which has the most sharply segregated school system of any major Northern city, a panel of experts issued a report criticizing the traditional neighborhood school for preventing integration. They urged the school board to create bigger neighborhoods that would include several schools and by open enrollment give Negro students an opportunity to attend previously all-white schools. Would this destroy the neighborhood? No, said the experts; it would simply "enlarge" the neighborhood.

In Little Rock, Ark., it isn't enlarging the neighborhood that's called for; it's letting Negro children go to neighborhood schools. As it is, some of the city's 7,000 Negro students must pay their way on city buses and ride past white schools to get to the nearest all-Negro schools. Although all grades in Little Rock schools will be tokenly desegregated in September, so far less than 2% of Negroes go to previously all-white schools.