Miss SUSSNA. Unfortunately we do not have funds for research in the sense of hard data; however, we have had informal evaluations. throughout the year by people from the foundations which have supported us and from the colleges in the area. Five colleges in the area sent students to us for training.

Senator MONDALE. You have not had any testing?

Miss SUSSNA. We test achievement of the individual children which has been very rapid. The children with English language handicaps seem to overcome them much more quickly than in other programs. The attitude and achievement of some of our entering children was tested a year ago but post tests have yet to be given.

However, observations of parents, teachers and outside observers are most positive. Even lay visitors have commented on the eagerness to improve knowledge and skills despite the fact that marks are not given to the children as punishment or reward.

Visitors who have taught English as a second language are particularly impressed at the English achievement of our children who speak another language at home. We attribute this achievement in large measure to the fact that we legitimize the home language to the children. A child who in the afternoon finds his superior knowledge of Spanish to be an academic advantage feels prepared and competent to really tackle that other language, English, in the morning. Senator MONDALE. What are the grades involved?

Miss SUSSNA. Nursery and elementary.

Senator MONDALE. Kindergarten through

Miss SUSSNA. Through fourth. We may have a child or two on the fifth grade level. It is a nongraded school.

Senator MONDALE. Roughly that age category?

Miss SUSSNA. Yes. We are very anxious to introduce a junior high school program.

Senator MONDALE. Your basic thrust is, as I understand it, recognizing the positive values and differences in each child.

Miss SUSSNA. Yes.

Senator MONDALE. Your idea is that each child brings strength into the classroom and is to be honored for what he stands for his color, his religion, his cultural system, his own interests?

Miss SUSSNA. Yes.

Senator MONDALE. And that is the basic philosophy of the school? Miss SUSSNA. Yes.

Senator MONDALE. What kind of impact has this experiment had on the public school system in San Francisco? Have you found them moving rapidly in a similar direction?

Miss SUSSNA. No; we have not seen them moving rapidly. We had the debate. Is it more important to put the bodies together or more important to develop attitudes?

Senator MONDALE. Your basic purpose is to try to cause the children to come to know each other?

Miss SUSSNA. Yes; each other and themselves.
Senator MONDALE. And value each other?

Miss SUSSNA. Yes; each other and themselves.

Senator MONDALE. And that is the basic thrust of your school: to teach each other?

Miss SUSSNA. Yes; that is precisely what they do. At the conclusion of each ethnic unit, they write a culmination to teach the others. For example, the black students spent several weeks on a unit on Martin Luther King. At the end of the unit, they put together a culminating program of poetry, song, and narration. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. The black children wrote it, and all of the other children were their guests.

The culmination ended characteristically with the playing of the record of Dr. King's, in which he said: "That day will come when all of God's children, Jew and gentile, Protestant and Catholic, will join hands together." And all the children and adults-all the Chinese, the Latin Americans, and so on-joined hands with the blacks and sang together. There was a very warm feeling of brotherhood.

We would like to be able to make films of such programs. I feel every child in the world would benefit from watching our black children putting on this kind of performance and also experiencing the spirit in which it concluded.

Senator MONDALE. Do you have any black teachers?

Miss SUSSNA. All of our ethnic classes are taught only by the members of those groups. There is great value to the concept of talking among ourselves, about ourselves, and that is one of the reasons for separating into ethnic studies classes.

Senator MONDALE. Pardon me for interrupting, but it is your experience and it is your testimony that integration cannot be just a mere mixing of bodies; it requires great sensitivity and must be designed to instill in each child a sense of his own worth; it must afford a real opportunity for children to come to know each other and value each other.

Miss SUSSNA. Precisely, and if you do that, true integration will come automatically.

Senator MONDALE. It is interesting. I have never heard of any difficulty in integrating children in the elementary level of school who have had this kind of experience; they don't ever seem to have any trouble getting along but rather accept cach other beautifully and quickly.

Miss SUSSNA. We see an effect on the parents, too. Some people say you have to wait for these children to grow up before an impact on the community is felt. I don't think that is true.

I see it very markedly with poor families, families that felt some shame about their identity.

Senator MONDALE. Thank you very much.

Miss SUSSNA. I hope it would be possible for the committee to see the program.

Senator MONDALE. Very exciting.

Senator PELL. Thank you very much. We are very grateful for your being here and for Senator Murphy who suggested that you come. Thank you.

The meeting of the subcommittee is recessed for the day.

(Whereupon, at 12:05 p.m., the subcommittee recessed, to recon vene at the call of the Chair.)

EMERGENCY SCHOOL AID ACT OF 1970

FRIDAY, JULY 10, 1970

U.S. SENATE,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON EDUCATION

OF THE COMMITTEE ON LABOR AND PUBLIC WELFARE,

Washington, D.C. The subcommittee met at 10 a.m., pursuant to call, in room 1114, New Senate Office Building, Senator Claiborne Pell (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Senators Pell (presiding), Yarborough, Kennedy, and Mondale.

Also present: Senator Hughes.

Committee staff member present: Stephen J. Wexler, counsel; Richard D. Smith, associate counsel; and Roy H. Millenson, minority professional staff member.

Senator PELL. The subcommittee will come to order.

The first witness we have scheduled is Mrs. Reyes, but I believe Senator Kennedy wishes to be here when she testifies, so we will now hear from the panel of Mr. Cruz Reynoso, director of the California Rural Legal Assistance, San Francisco, Calif.; Hon. Manuel Ruiz, member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Los Angeles, Calif.; and Dr. Jose A. Cardenas, superintendent of the Edgewood Independent Schools, San Antonio, Tex. Will you gentlemen come forward, please. You are all very kind to come such a long way. We will insert your statements in the record and ask each of you to make extemporaneous remarks. Is one of you acting as chairman of the panel, or shall we start from right to left. In any event would you identify yourselves.

Mr. REYNOSO. Thank you very much. My name is Cruz Reynoso. I am director of the California Rural Legal Assistance, which is headquartered in San Francisco, Calif. If the chairman does not mind, I would like to elect Mr. Ruiz to act as our chairman if that is required later on in the discussion.

Mr. Ruiz. My name is Manuel Ruiz; I am a member of the Civil Rights Commission.

Mr. CARDENAS. I am Jose A. Cardenas, superintendent of schools in the Edgewood School District, San Antonio, Tex.

STATEMENT OF CRUZ REYNOSO, DIRECTOR, CALIFORNIA RURAL LEGAL ASSISTANCE, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF.

Mr. REYNOSO. Mr. Chairman, I am delighted to be here before this committee. I am happy to be here testifying. I am particularly happy that S. 3883 has included the Spanish-surnamed and the Mexican

American as part of those minority-group youngsters who need help pursuant to this bill.

Mr. Chairman, I must confess that that is about all I am happy about pertaining to this bill. If the committee wants to help the Mexican-American youngster in the Southwest and nationally, I believe that major changes must be made in the bill. The bill as it presently is written, I believe, is designed to see that little or no help comes to the Mexican-American youngsters.

Now in the United States we have perhaps about 10 million Spanishsurnamed Americans; perhaps, according to HEW, 2 million Spanishsurnamed youngsters in public schools; so we are talking about an awful lot of people, an awful lot of youngsters to be helped.

Senator PELL. How would they be divided-about half east of the Mississippi and half west?

Mr. REYNOSO. I would estimate that it would be perhaps 65 percent west of the Mississippi; about 55 percent of those are Mexican-American or Mexican, 15 percent or so are Puerto Rican, then we have 5 or 6 percent Cuban, and so on. The greatest number are Mexican-American.

However, in Chicago, for example, we have about 120,000 MexicanAmericans, about 80,000 Puerto Ricans. So I would like to emphasize that we are not talking about a strictly regional problem. This is truly a national problem. There are, as the figures indicate, about half as many Mexican-Americans as there are blacks in this country.

Now, the problem is that we really have racial and ethnic isolation of the Spanish-surnamed. Sometimes we see it by school district, and Dr. Cardenas will speak of that; I have seen this phenomenon particularly in Texas; it is found also in California, where a school district will be 95 percent Mexican-American, and it is tough to talk about integration in that school district as it is tough to talk about integration in Washington, D.C., with the vast number of black students.

In California I have seen, for example, in the city of Calexico; in Texas, in San Antonio, in south Texas, where 80 to 90 percent of the people are Mexican-Americans. Sometimes we have segregation by schools within that district. In California, the figures indicate that about 39 percent of all of the Spanish-surnamed youngsters attend segregated or racially isolated schools. In Texas, the figure is even higher. It is about 65 percent.

So, no matter how we look at it, we have racial and ethnic isolation. But then-and this is very important for the Mexican-American youngster-we have segregation and isolation within a school itself. Thus, for example, in the tracking system-as a youngster I grew up in segregated schools-we find that if you have an ABC system, invariably 90 percent of the youngsters in "C" or dumbbell track, are Mexican-Americans. This is a terrible trauma for those youngsters. It is simply an incident of segregation within that school, either by classrooms or sometimes even within the classroom.

I was visiting south Texas. In one school, they had one section laid aside for the migrant youngsters, who happened to be a hundred percent Mexican-Americans again, segregation within the school.

In California, the California Rural Legal Assistance brought an action attacking the education in mentally retarded classes in Cali

fornia, where we find a disproportionate number of Mexican-American youngsters.

So we have this right down the line. The results are not surprising. In Texas, in 1970, the Mexican-American had reached a level of the 6th grade in education compared to the 11th grade for the Anglo or the non-Mexican-American or nonblack. In California that year, it was eighth grade for Mexican-American and 12th grade for Anglo. The dropout rates in California are higher than any other racial or ethnic group, including the black. In Texas, I understand the figures

are even worse.

With all that as background, where do we stand now in terms of what the law says? This committee, I am sure, is aware of the increasing activity on this kind of segregation in the courts. We in California Rural Legal Assistance, the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, and other groups have begun to attack these problems in the courts. Fortunately, I think, the courts are reacting favorably. Recently we filed a successful desegregation lawsuit in Stockton, Calif. The Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund has been active in the now famous Corpus Christi case and the Sonora case. Perhaps the most important case for us is the Corpus Christi case, where the judge simply said Mexican-American youngsters are entitled to the protection of the 14th amendment, they are entitled to the protection of Brown versus Board of Education, they are entitled to the things that HEW has been saying they are entitled to, that integration can't be merely among Mexican-American and black youngsters.

Again referring to my hometown of El Centro, for example, there is one school, a grammar school, in a town that is about 99-percent black and Mexican-American. The rest of the schools are relatively well integrated. The court has said this is not enough; to mix two minorities is not really meeting with Brown v. Board of Education. You have to have an integration of all those groups.

So the courts have said, and this bill seems to say by including the Spanish-speaking and, by definition, minority youngsters, that the Mexican-American and other minorities are to be helped by this bill. So we come to what bothers me about the bill. As I see it, if the bill is not changed, the Mexican-American youngster will get practically no benefit from this bill. We start out with the philosophy of the bill which, in effect, double-counts those youngsters that are under Federal court order or HEW orders. This means that by double-counting, you give benefit to those school districts where the Federal Government has chosen to be most active. Regrettably, the Federal Government has chosen not to be active with respect to those school districts that have the high concentrations of segregation of Mexican-American youngsters.

Thus, because of the inactivity of the Federal Government on the one hand, this bill chooses further inactivity in terms of helping those youngsters. I think that is a sad commentary on this bill.

Secondly, I think we have to be realistic that practically everything that this bill says ought to be done can presently be done by title I programs. So, unless we are careful, we are going to have a gigantic $1.5 billion title-I-type boondoggle. We have seen in California that unless you are very specific on what you want done, those things don't get done.