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A CONCERNED PARENT

KATZ

can a Black or Puerto Rican child excel in a test where conditions for passing are absent? The educational hierarchy says they are not educable. Accordingly, they are not taught the subjects or acquainted with the material--if taught they have insufficient practice, and inferior guidance or none by guidance experts. They are not exposed to the same guidance in quality or quantity. As a matter of fact, many Black parents have justifiably a low opinion of all guidance personnel.
Why should Black parents be satisfied when they know one teacher can cripple the mind and crush the spirit of at least thirty children a year! From kindergarten to sixth grade that one teacher has "murdered the soul" of at least two hundred children! Why should Black parents accommodate to an educational system where the quality of teaching in New York's Benjamin Franklin High School has reached the level where only 300 students achieve diplomas out of a total enrollment of 3,000 pupils? Where is the "professionalism" of a teaching staff that permits the highest-scoring basketball player in the history of the high school to spend four years at the school, give him a diploma, and he cannot read! (New York Post.)
These are a few of the many reasons for the school boycott at Public School 125 in New York City which began March 13, 1967, and lasted for nine days. The ethnic composition was about 83 per ient [[cent]] Black and Puerto Rican. In all such schools in New York City the white children are given "Preferential Treatment" and Black parents are expected to like it.
There is another important fact that the nation should know about Public School 125. This school, Black parents learned in the spring of 1966, was a Campus School of Columbia Teachers College and had been so for ten years. Students teachers came to this school for training and experience.
What did this venerable institution do to help Black children? One needs a sense of history to understand the record of the Columbia Establishment towards the Blacks in general and the Harlem community in particular. When the Columbia Establishment asserts (as it did recently in a New York Times article) that it wants to help develop the Harlem community, one can only imagine the result would be the destruction of Harlem, the snatching of its social and cultural institotions [[institutions]], hospitals, clinics, Schomburg Collection, grabbing the land, and restricting it "for whites only."
The racist attitude of the Columbia Establishment toward Blacks began in 1870 on the eve of Reconstruction in the South. The

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