The Week

If you can’t figure this one out, we think we can. It’s a problem posed in a New York Times story on integration-by-busing in Los Angeles schools. District Education official Sheldon Erlich is talking. “In general,” he says, “we have two minority students [defined as black and Hispanic] for every Anglo student. If you lose one Anglo kid, it means you’ve reduced the possibility of integrating two minority kids.” The answer seems quite simple. First you list the Anglo students in the Los Angeles system as “minority students”—as in fact they now are—and then integrate one of them for every two majority, which is to say black/Hispanic, kids. This, come to think of it, is what Judge Garrity—the Stakhanovite integrationist in Boston—may be forced to do there on down the line. Boston’s majority of white students has been cut in half since 1974 when Garrity first started to integrate the city schools. There were 59,000 white students in public schools then, there are 29,000 today. And in a city with a black population of 20 per cent, the student enrollment, fall 1977, was 60 to 40 per cent black to white.

Contemplating the proposed Department of Energy budget for 1978—$10.6 billion—Western Crude Oil, Inc., has done a little investigative arithmetic. The money represents a half-million dollars per department employee; $50 for every U.S. citizen; $58 for each foot drilled in 1976; $3.59 for each barrel of domestic crude oil produced that year; 10 cents per gallon for gasoline consumed that year. And it exceeds the 1974 profits of the seven biggest oil companies. You remember, obscene profits.

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If you can’t figure this one out, we think we can. It’s a problem posed in a New York Times story on integration-by-busing in Los Angeles schools. District Education official Sheldon Erlich is talking. “In general,” he says, “we have two minority students [defined as black and Hispanic] for every Anglo student. If you lose one Anglo kid, it means you’ve reduced the possibility of integrating two minority kids.” The answer seems quite simple. First you list the Anglo students in the Los Angeles system as “minority students”—as in fact they now are—and then integrate one of them for every two majority, which is to say black/Hispanic, kids. This, come to think of it, is what Judge Garrity—the Stakhanovite integrationist in Boston—may be forced to do there on down the line. Boston’s majority of white students has been cut in half since 1974 when Garrity first started to integrate the city schools. There were 59,000 white students in public schools then, there are 29,000 today. And in a city with a black population of 20 per cent, the student enrollment, fall 1977, was 60 to 40 per cent black to white.

Contemplating the proposed Department of Energy budget for 1978—$10.6 billion—Western Crude Oil, Inc., has done a little investigative arithmetic. The money represents a half-million dollars per department employee; $50 for every U.S. citizen; $58 for each foot drilled in 1976; $3.59 for each barrel of domestic crude oil produced that year; 10 cents per gallon for gasoline consumed that year. And it exceeds the 1974 profits of the seven biggest oil companies. You remember, obscene profits.