At the close of the school year in 1959, five full years after racial discrimination had been obliterated from the Washington schools, Dr. Hansen released some figures on how things were going. To the integrationist Washington _Post_, reporting happily on the data, things were going marvelously well: “District pupils’ performance on standardized tests this year topped last year’s scores in 15 of the 27 subjects tested, School Superintendent Carl F. Hansen reported yesterday.” The cheery tone of the _Post’s_ story was somewhat belied by the glum figures themselves. Washington’s sixth-graders had managed to achieve median scores in spelling, language, and arithmetical computation exactly matching--no more--the national norms for these three sixth-grade tests. Medians on the other twenty-four tests were below national norms, in some instances by as much as a full year. Ninth-graders who should have scored a median of 9.4 (ninth year, fourth month) in computation and paragraph meaning scored 8.3 and 8.4 respectively. Dr. Hansen’s report on tests at the third-grade and fifth-grade levels has special interest:
_National _District Median Scores_ _Grade_ _Subject_ Norm_ _55-56_ _56-57_ _57-58_ _58-59_ 3 Paragraph meaning 3.5 2.3 2.5 2.9 3.1 3 Word meaning 3.5 2.5 2.6 3.1 3.1 3 Spelling 3.5 2.5 3.0 3.1 3.2 3 Arith. reasoning 3.5 2.4 2.8 2.8 3.2 3 Arith. computation 3.5 2.6 2.7 2.9 3.2 5 Paragraph meaning 5.1 3.8 4.1 4.3 4.2 5 Word meaning 5.1 4.1 4.5 4.6 4.4 5 Language 5.1 4.2 4.5 4.6 4.4 5 Spelling 5.1 4.2 4.3 4.8 4.5 5 Arith. reasoning 5.1 4.2 4.5 4.6 4.5 5 Arith. computation 5.1 3.9 4.1 4.6 4.1
It should not escape notice that the Washington children whose median scores are shown in the foregoing table never had known a day of legally segregated schooling. The Negro pupils here tested never had suffered the school discrimination likely to affect their hearts and minds in a fashion never to be undone. These pupils, on the contrary, had had the benefit of all the special attention that could be given them by a school administration frantically eager to demonstrate the glories of integration. No resource of guidance and special teaching, no visual aid or teaching technique had been denied them. Yet there are the scores: Not a single test in Washington’s third and fifth grades produced a median equal to the national norm. The fifth-graders, backsliding, did not even equal fifth-grade scores the preceding year.