To the Editor:
Congratulations both to the author and to COMMENTARY for publishing Midge Decter's excellent article [“The Negro & The New York Schools,” Sept. '64]. . . . It provides a very good summary of the situation and should go a long way to help promote understanding both as to the difficulty of finding solutions and at the same time the vital importance of finding solutions.
Francis Keppel
United States Commissioner
of Education
Washington, D.C.
_____________
To the Editor:
. . . Miss Decter presents a very fine analysis of the situation in New York and, I am sure, one that will contribute to increased understanding of the difficult and complex problem facing the city's public school system.
There is an error in reference to me which I would like to point out. Miss Decter states that I “defined a racially balanced school as one having a student body no more than 50 per cent non-white.” I have never made any such definition. In my letter of June 1963, requesting reports on the racial composition of schools from school systems in the state, I defined for the purposes of the report a racially imbalanced school as one having 50 per cent or more Negro students enrolled. The 50 per cent figure was used as a statistical point of reference to identify those schools from which relevant information was requested, not as a definition of racial imbalance. . . .
James E. Allen, Jr.
Commissioner of Education
Albany, New York