Now, how is one to organize a viable public school--a completely desegregated school--under such conditions as these? If one is the superintendent of schools in the District of Columbia, one can cope with what Dr. Carl F. Hansen has described as “the enormous educational problem of upgrading large numbers of educationally handicapped children” by a variety of devices: Squads of psychiatrists, platoons of remedial-reading instructors, a “four-track” system, and the like. And if one spends enough money, and has enough pupils and buildings to permit some shuffling around among schools, and pays salaries high enough to keep some of the most competent teachers in the country, one can accomplish a good deal. But how many rural counties in the South, where the _total_ school population may number only 2000 or 2500, can possibly apply the drastic remedies found necessary in Washington? Consider the schools of Washington, D. C. The capital is the showcase of the nation in terms of desegregation. If genuinely “mixed” schools are to work anywhere, they should work best in the District of Columbia, where every factor combines to produce the most favorable opportunity: The political climate of a Federal administration anxious to achieve integration, the immense resources of a lavish school budget, the cultural amenities freely available to all children as an adjunct to learning, the absence of racial discrimination in employment, the untypically high incomes and job status of many Negro families. It is entirely reasonable to assume that pupils in the Washington schools, as a group, should not be merely average, or slightly above average; they should in fact lead the entire country. Moreover, it seems a fair assumption that the exodus of white families from the District has tended to leave behind those white children who in general are less able mentally and more nearly on the Negro’s cultural level. If Negro pupils are to show up well anywhere, they should show up well here. The facts indicate nothing of the kind. The District of Columbia desegregated its schools in September 1954, following the Supreme Court’s opinion the preceding May. In October 1955, after a year of experience with desegregation, the Stanford Advanced Reading and Arithmetic Tests were given to some 4600 eighth-grade pupils in the Washington public schools--1600 white pupils and 3000 Negro pupils. The findings in Washington almost exactly paralleled the findings in Virginia: Two-thirds of the Negro children were found to be reading at the sixth-grade level _or below_ (21 per cent of the Negro eighth-graders, indeed, were reading at the fifth-grade level, and 22 per cent were reading at the fourth-grade level). Only 12 per cent of the white eighth-graders were at the sixth-grade level or below, and 54 per cent of the white pupils were at the tenth-grade level or above.