Uniting Forces to Improve Education.

This article examines the need for improving education in the U.S. A certain quiet may seem to have settled over the educational scene during the summer months. No spate of headlines or broadcasts, at least, has reflected any barrage of criticism. According to the journal "Southern School News" for August 1956 the continuation of school segregation was not, in Tennessee, an issue as prominent politically as first predicted. Meanwhile, in Texas continued school segregation was a dominant issue of primary elections, though the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held in the Mansfield school case that local opinion was not of itself a sufficient reason for denying African American children the right to enroll in an all-white school. Schools and school people have their character shaped, their values enhanced or thwarted, however, by the nature of local opinion, as has been made abundantly clear in Clinton and in Mansfield. The order of a federal judge to bring an end to segregation in the public schools of Charlottesville, Virginia, in the fall of 1956 was no more effective in getting immediate action than was the determination of the Catholic Bishop in New Orleans to end segregation in parochial schools at the same time.