have been assigned to guidance work on a part-time basis. A person in this position, conscientious though he may be, can hardly be said to be doing counseling at all, since this work requires specialized knowledge and skills that are not in the repertory of the average teacher. It is true that many efforts to improve this situation are being made. Inservice training programs for teacher-counselors have been set up in many schools. Many individual teacher-counselors have sought out summer courses in fields related to counseling. In a large and growing number of States, special certification procedures for counseling positions have been brought into existence, so that only teachers with a certain amount of basic training can be considered to be "counselors." These measures have improved the situation to some degree, but not enough. The problem of so-called counseling programs staffed largely or entirely by noncounselors, persists.

One particular inadequacy to be found in existing guidance programs is in the use of time set aside for counseling. The qualitative and quantitative inadequacies we have been discussing lead directly to such faulty distributions of time.

A teacher with no special training for counseling, allowed one or two periods a day for this activity, may spend most of his time checking attendance records and talking briefly to students who have been absent. This is, of course, useful work, but it does not serve the purpose counseling should be serving-namely, to stimulate individual students to their optimum development. On the other hand, a welltrained counselor, if he has 500 or more students under his jurisdiction, may discover that he is spending all of his time on problem casesthe slow learner, the potential delinquent, the socially inept. This is counseling, by most definitions, but like the attendance checking, it does not meet the need we have been considering to encourage each student to make the best possible use of his potentialities. Wherever caseloads are too heavy, attention is likely to be focused on those students with serious disabilities. Someone has to be concerned about such people, and helping them is a time-consuming business. Schools need trained counselors, and they need them in sufficient numbers so that their services can be available to all students, the gifted and the average as well as the retarded and maladjusted.

There is still another kind of inadequacy that shows up when one scrutinizes the present state of guidance services in American high schools. The geographical distribution is extremely uneven. Some States have almost no organized guidance programs at all. A large proportion of the trained guidance workers we now have are to be found in a small proportion of the States. Some of this unevenness is inevitable in an educational system so completely decentralized as is

the American system. In the last analysis, it is the local school boards who decide whether or not they want guidance services in their high schools. The less they know about guidance, the more likely they are to be completely unaware that it has any contribution to make. At the opposite extreme, the schools that have first-rate guidance programs can demonstrate their value to the community they serve. Thus they tend to get increasing support. In this way strong programs tend to become stronger while minimal or weak programs remain weak or become even weaker. Because the conservation of talent is so important to the whole nation, this inequality concerns us all.

This then is the situation we face with regard to guidance services in the schools. They are offered in too few places and are seriously understaffed. Many of the counselors have little or no training. It is this challenge that title V of the National Defense Education Act is designed to meet.

CHAPTER 2

The Guidance Provisions of the National Defense Education Act of 1958

T IS THE OPINION of many educators that the National Defense Education Act of 1958 will go down in history as one of the major landmarks in the development of American education. Its aim is to facilitate in a number of ways the identification and development of talented students. It provides for loans to undergraduates and fellowships for graduate students; for the strengthening of instruction in science, mathematics, and foreign languages; for research in the utilization of television and related media in education; and for area vocational education programs, as well as for increasing the amount and quality of guidance services in high schools.

Because of the emphasis on the development of individual talents, the guidance provisions of the act are really the critical provisions, as was pointed out by Dr. Homer Babbidge, Jr., Assistant Commissioner for Higher Education, at a conference of directors of Counseling and Guidance Training Institutes in March, 1959. The availability of guidance services is implied in all of the act's titles. Thus, before a student can make use of the loans available to him under title II, he must have decided to obtain a college education. Such different provisions, as the strengthening of foreign-language programs and the use of television in teaching, all presuppose that students with aptitude for advanced education will have placed themselves in the educational situations where the improved techniques are to be used.

Title V, Guidance, Counseling, and Testing: Identification and Encouragement of Able Students, consists of two parts: V(A) and (B). (The full statement of the parts of the act having to do with. counseling and guidance will be found in app. A.) Title V(A) provides (in the language of the act) "grants to State educational agencies to assist them to establish and maintain programs of testing and counseling." In accordance with the well-established policy that Federal funds should be used in a manner that will stimulate and supplement local educational activities, the funds allocated under

551713 0-60- -3

11

title V(A) are being disbursed to States on a matching basis. Thus the extent of the increase in guidance services in many parts of the country is much greater than the increase covered by the title V(A) budget alone. The increase in guidance activities in the States has been very noticeable even during the first year of the program.

It is interesting to note that about 80 percent of the funds granted were used for purposes related to counseling, and only 8 percent for testing. Guidance staff members were added to State education departments. Conferences were held. Bulletins on implementation of guidance programs and on test interpretation were issued. Workshops on the use of tests for the identification of talents were set up. Arrangements were made for supervision at the local level and for advisory committees. Money granted to the States was passed on to local school systems to enable them to add counselors or to increase the amount of time devoted to counseling, and to add clerical help in order to free counselors' time for actual counseling. Increased public awareness of guidance, and better cooperation between local school administrators and State agencies were frequent results of the first year's activities.

All of these programs were of such a nature as to make the need for trained counselors even more acute than it had been before. Title V (B) is the provision that the framers of the legislation worked out to help meet this need. It directed the U.S. Commissioner of Education to arrange by contracts with institutions of higher education for operation by them of Counseling and Guidance Training Institutes, either short-term or regular session, for the purpose of giving secondary school counselors and teachers in secondary schools about to enter counseling the training they needed most. In order that such training might be really intensive, provision was made for the payment of stipends to institute enrollees so that they could devote full time to the task of increasing their own knowledge and skill.

The central purpose of the institute program is to improve the quality and increase the number of secondary school counselors who can identify and work with the academically able student. Those who wrote this law and those to whom responsibility for carrying out its provisions was delegated considered it to be important that this increase and upgrading of personnel take place in all parts of the country, and as rapidly as possible. This purpose constituted a solid framework around which the details of policy were organized.

It is apparent, as one considers the act as a whole and title V as a part of it, that definite limits are set up for this particular program. In the first place, the institutes are for training secondary school personnel only. Counselors and research workers who have studied the

occupational choice process place increasing emphasis on the elementary school years. The extension of guidance services into the elementary schools is a sound objective, but it must be realized that funds allocated for institutes cannot be used to further it. In the second place, the benefits of title V (B) are explicitly restricted to persons already engaged in the practice of counseling in secondary schools and to those teachers in such schools about to enter counseling. Every college or university that offers a graduate program in guidance has regular students who would be worthy recipients of financial assistance. To enable them to pursue their studies is certainly a valid aim, but title V (B) funds cannot be used for other than institute enrollees. In the third place, this particular title, like the act as a whole, is concerned primarily with the academically able student. Some counselors may not find this emphasis congenial. Their values lead them to insist on the worth of every human being, whatever his level of ability, and their practice in the past has often consisted largely of service to the slow learner and the misfit. The Office of Education would certainly not disagree with the general principle that every individual is important, but all laws do not provide assistance to all people. It is the student with college-level abilities that NDEA legislation is designed to help.

In addition to these limitations arising from the purpose and specific provisions of the law, there is a very real limitation of funds available for the support of Counseling and Guidance Training Institutes. The law specifies a maximum of $6,250,000 for fiscal 1959, and $7,250,000 for each of the 3 succeeding fiscal years. The amount actually allocated for the 1959 institutes program, however, was $3,400,000. Of this amount $2,248,319 was obligated for summer institutes and $1,139,670 for regular session institutes. Two and a quarter million dollars does not seem like a large sum when it must cover stipends for the enrollees and their dependents as well as the expenses of the training program itself. Only a limited number of Counseling and Guidance Training Institutes could be supported. Not everything to improve guidance in the high schools could be done. Here, as in many other areas of human endeavor, limits need not constrict one's view, but may actually facilitate creative thinking.

The fact that funds are limited reminds all who administer Federal projects of this kind that it is necessary to consider very seriously the possible consequences of Federal participation in an educational enterprise so completely decentralized. Federal programs must not replace or compete with those that are locally supported, or the total educational fabric may be weakened rather than strengthened in the process. Rather, it seems desirable that a special program be planned