ustxtxb_obs_1968_03_01_50_00007-00000_000.pdf

Four votes were taken. The first deleted the local option provision from the ‘Bendiner resolution, by 49-45. By 63-49 the Bendiner resolution was turned down. The Galbraith resolution then was taken up. By 66-41 the board defeated a motion to remove the statement that the minority has liberty of conscience. The Galbraith resolution then was passed, 65-47. Otto Mullinax, Dallas labor lawyer, was the only Texan voting on the board. He supported the Galbraith resolution, abstained in voting on the Bendiner statement, and opposed removal of the “liberty of conscience” portion of the Gal braith resolution. San Antonio Cong. Henry B. Gonzalez, the only other Texan on the ADA board, did not attend the meeting. He afterwards resigned from ADA in protest of its endorsing McCarthy, saying “The ADA has, consciously or not, made President Johnson appear a sinister, mistrustworthy man, undeserving of the support of thinking Democrats. This is not true ….” Others who since have resigned from ADA include Keyserling; John P. Roche, special consultant to the president; and three union leaders, I. W. Abel of the United Steelworkers, Louis Stulberg of the Ladies Garment Workers, and Joseph A. Beirne of the Communications Workers. Nine other labor union officials who hold board positions evidently will remain with ADA, including the Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther. The Nen , York Times has reported that four vice-presidents and 15 board members who opposed endorsement have indicated they will stay on with the organization. Galbraith told the Times that Roche’s leaving ADA is comparable “to the loss of Carmine DeSapio from the Democratic Party.” In the aftermath of the vote it \(ION/eloped that Vice President Humphrey had let his ADA membership drop un winning election in 1964. G.O. A PERSONAL VIEW Dallas’ Oligarchy and Fateful ’68 Dallas It is 1968. A political year. A pivotal year. A crucial year for the Dallas oligarchy, though they don’t know it yet. This will be the year when powerful new ideas in education get their chance for the first time. The city will have a new superintendent of public schools, actually chosen by the board of education, a rare occurrence in this town. When aging autocrat Dr. W. T. White’s contract as superintendent was extended beyond normal retirement a few years ago, the decision was tnade in private by a cluster of city fathers, unrelated to the board, unanswerable to any electorate, some of whom didn’t even live in Dallas, but rather in the rich c en t e r suburban towns of Highland Park and University Park, where the schools are said to be excellent and exclusive. Their children were not at stake; therefore other, more mercantile considerations prevailed, and Dr. White was retained. Dr. Nolan Estes, the new superintendent-elect, will bring to Dallas vital experience in the US Office of Education, as well as a PhD from Harvard and post-doctoral work at Columbia, alien baggage in this traditional territory of anti-intellectualism, evangelism, the self-made man, and mistrust of the federal government. Reclemptively, Estes was burn in Texas and attended at various times the Universities of Corpus Chisti, Tex., and Baylor. No doubt this native-son aura helped hesitant board members to accept his progressive outlook on education. Nonetheless certain ones un the board are said to have reassured themselves about Estes with questions to him such as, “Are you a liberal?” “Are you a conservative?” Do you drink?” The final vote was 5-4 with Dr. Emmett Conrad, Dr. Marvin Berkeley, and Mrs. Henri Bromberg \(a persistently Wheat and Dr. Percy Luecke to vote with them against a more conservative man from Texas A&M. Mrs. Clark is an Observer contributing editor. DR. WHITE will fight till his final day in office to implant his policies too deep for eradication. A current controversy centers around the honors program leading to advanced placement. Students are invited to join this program on the basis of high IQ, willingness to work, and established record of high achievement. The latter two criteria are plainly subjective measures; many persons have felt that the standards have been used Lee Clark by school officials to bar Negroes from the program. The honors program requies a given number of students of the same age in any specific school. If this number is not available, which is often the case, the few students at other schools who might qualify, even under such subjective criteria, are not permitted to transfer to join an honors group. When Dr. Norman Kaplan, immediate past president of the League for Educaanti-establishment group of citizens who are trying to upgrade the standards of public schools, appeared at a meeting of the school board to protest this policy of no-transfer-unde-any-circumstances and to demand more objectively provable qualifications for the honors program, he was accused after the meeting by Assistant Supt. Dr. Frank Williams of “meddling” in school affairs. “I could shake you for what you said,” the Dallas Times Herald reported Williams blurted to Kaplan. The official further allowed that the honors program was not going to be used as a cover-up for getting Negro students into all the high schools of the city. Larry Howell, editorial page writer for the Dallas Morning News, ran a column defending the school administration’s position, saying that any unprejudiced look at a map of Dallas schools shows that most students invited to join the honors program come from medium-to-high income areas, where the educational level in each household is generally high. Since few honors students come from Negro areas \(that is, few are inivited to particicern ourselves about a program there. And, after all, if there are a few bright. students in one of these schools, but not enough of them for an honors program, a special tutoring service is available to them. Howell stressed that participation in an honors program is not a gifted student’s inalienable right. He must, let’s remember, be invited to join on the basis of ability, interest, industry, and a few othe laudable traits. And the map shows where those traits abound. Dr. White also suggests that qualified students in schools with no honors program can take special classes at Crozier Tech, a downtown technical and vocational high school long sneered at in white-collar Dallas for its blue-collar character. Tech is a school whose faculty is better qualified to prepare students for office and factory work than to groom future collegians. It hardly seems the place, either psychologically or educationally, to send high-aptitude students who long for intellectual achievement. It is in running the public schools, more than in any other aspect of life here, that Dallas’ establishment faces its most vigorous, open challenge to its supeauthority in this critical year of 1968. No doubt LEAD, which just last year hired able, energetic Jo Fay Godbey, former president of the League of Women Voters, to work as executive director, will field quality candidates in April’s school board election. Three posts open on the board will be the arena for a deadly confrontation between LEAD and the establishment which has long made high educational achievement a consideration secondary to low property taxes. It’s not surprising March 1, 1968 7