they have mastered the language sufficiently, have learned American behavioral customs sufficiently, and have sublimated their own behavioral customs sufficiently to permit them to function in American society with a minimum of difficulty (Gordon, 1964, p. 63). It is at this level of assimilation that American public schools have served to facilitate the assimilation of immigrant groups in the United States.
While American public schools have functioned to facili tate the assimilation of immigrant groups at the basic level of the meaning of the term, they have also served as institutional devices to preclude meaningful assimilation on a broader scale. The neighborhood school concept, w
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