The majority of high school students have vocational education needs and inerests which can best be met in the comprehensive high school.

In this range we have been increasing our efforts and focusing a great deal f attention.

The other smaller group needing the most intensive service and the most reative programming of all is the group for whom least has been attempted. They are the dropouts or those who never really get much of a start.

I should like to call your attention to a special project being developed in Cleveand now to attack the problems of the dropout.

We are preparing to open a job development and training center in a large actory building donated to the Cleveland Public Schools by the General Electric Company. The program in this center puts together under one roof, in a ghetto, school-factory which offers simultaneously

-paid employment from the first day of enrollment

-basic and remedial education

-training in job skills.

The most important feature of this concept is immediate employment in industryponsored production shops located in the center.

We have been very much encouraged by the interest and commitment of Cleveand area business and industry in this project. The General Electric Company and the Ohio Bell Telephone Company are the first two businesses to join the >rogram. Announcement of other participating companies will be made shortly. This concept is explained in Appendix C of this statement.

This project seems to be an exemplary project as envisioned in Title I part B of the Partnership for Learning and Earning Act of 1968 (S. 3099)

Importance of Partnership for Learning and Earning Act of 1968

This bill represents a much needed effort to coordinate and strengthen vocaional education programs in American schools.

In relation to this bill, I hope that the Congress will consider certain pressing needs which must be met if we are to reduce the "seriously high level of youth nemployment."

I would recommend consideration of the following:

1. Special provisions to assure support for vocational education programs serving students of greatest need. The most useful measure of need is unemployment among youth. The programs that most deserve support are those located in areas of greatest youth unemployment. There is no question that the urban inner-city areas have the most intensive and extensive unemployment problems. 2. A greatly increased level of financial support. Vocational education properly conducted is costly. But the consequences of inadequate support are much more costly. The education of the students who enter immediate employment is no less important than the education of the minority who go on to college. The inner-city student who goes to work deserves to have just as much invested in his education as his most favored suburban contemporary who is preparing for a prestigious college. Not only is an increased level of financial support necessary to provide for the types of students who presently enroll in vocational education programs, but additional support is also required to enable the necessary expansion of vocational education programs so that they can serve a wider range of students.

3. Provision to guard against proliferation in control and administration of vocational education programs. Nothing can dissipate resources more or insure confusion and delay more than spreading the responsibility for control and administration too widely. What we need are the shortest and most direct possible lines of control.

In conclusion I should like to reemphasize the urgent national need to establish new priorities in our consideration of vocational education.

The movement and rapid change in the productive economy of this nation have left behind too many people, the most crucial masses of whom are to be found in our cities.

The crisis in the great urban centers is the most serious domestic issue which this nation has faced in the twentieth century.

Basic to the solution of this crisis is solving the inter-related problems of unemployment, underdevelopment, poverty, and despair.

Vocational education creatively planned and sensitively administered will play a key role in any attack on these problems.

Let us not miss this present opportunity. There may not be another one.

Mr. BRIGGS. Thank you.

I am superintendent of Cleveland, which is one of the big and one of the cities that is in big trouble in the United States at moment.

It is one where we have heavy unemployment, where we have b numbers of "Help Wanted" signs out, and where our newspa show column after column of "Help Wanted" while at the same ti we have never had as heavy unemployment in our city as wel today.

Senator MORSE. Never?

Mr. BRIGGS. Never.

Senator MORSE. You never have?

Mr. BRIGGS. No, sir. If you are going to take a look at a city, have to see it after 6 at night, when the people who make their 15. there and who represent the so-called power structure have left.

Starting at 3 o'clock every afternoon in Cleveland, 333,004 pe hit the highways to leave our city. About 7 o'clock the next mor they start coming in.

It is that city-when it is denuded of people of influence, peop education, and people of affluence-that I have to look at, the city has to be taken care of, a city of high unemployment. Whe national unemployment average is around 3 percent, in the inn the unemployment average is around 15 percent, but of out-ofyouth, 58 percent of our out-of-school youth in Cleveland to is: : unemployed. This is tragic.

The Cleveland schools still have as their No. 1 problem the drop as is true of all of the other big cities. We are losing 4,000 teenage year who are dropping out of school.

When you remember that a high school covers 4 years, this is e lent to 16,000 high school students we lose out of every high school p In some of our inner city high schools, this dropout rate is as as 50 percent.

The crisis in Cleveland also includes adults whose occupatic. potential has been decreased because they are functionally illiter We have 50,000 such adults in Cleveland; 45 percent of all of them adults above 21 years of age in Cleveland have not gone beyond eighth grade.

Now, in this city we have seen our ADC rolls rise since 1955. In * city schools, the increase has been 500 percent, and today in the city t Cleveland in our public schools one-fifth of all our children are co from homes that are recipients in one manner or another of re 32,000 of our 152,000 children are from such homes.

In our city, 29 percent of all of the children in the State of Ohio" from ADC homes in the city of Cleveland. This creates a real probe While we have only 7 percent of the total student population in ** State, we have 29 percent of the ADC children. We get for vot education 912 percent of the total Federal moneys that come State of Ohio, and yet you see here we have this high unemployr and high-dependency factor.

We feel that some new priorities are needed in education, and concentrating on them in Cleveland. We feel that the time has co

ur great cities that we give the same kind of attention to the child of e city as two generations ago we gave to the boy on the farm. We are 1 familiar with the great job that was done in vocational education, gricultural education on the farms of America. I was the recipient of me of that education myself as a farm boy. I know its quality and I now its effectiveness.

I think that the time has come that we give this same kind of conntrated attention to the problems of the urban child. We are now tempting to develop in every one of our inner city high schools a rogram for high schools with only two doors, one goes directly to bs, the other to college.

We are eliminating most of the general education program in our ner city high schools.

In 1964 there were no approved vocational educational units in our gh schools in Cleveland except our two trade schools. Today there e 109. But this is not yet 50 percent of the number that we should ive. We should double this next year and then double it again the ar after.

We have attempted to see what could be done with business and inistry in placing the children from the seven inner city high schools at are graduating. While the statistics are not clear, but it would pear that we have seldom placed more than 25 percent of these aduates in the inner city on jobs. Of those who graduated last spring om our inner city high schools, of our seven inner city high schools, e were able to place on jobs 96 percent of those who wanted jobs her than those who went to military service, or girls who were ing married or going to college.

As of the first of March of this year, of those who graduated in anuary or February, we placed 86 percent of that group on jobs. his is a very fine testimony that this unemployment cycle can be oken, if the school will concentrate on it.

The programs in Cleveland that are effective in employment are hools' neighborhood youth program. We have 1,600 youngsters in aining there. We were especially pleased with the manpower traing center that was established in 1965, one of the largest in the United ates. We have actually trained 6,000 hard-core unemployed adults the manpower centers, in approximately 300 short-term courses. Of the ones that we have trained in the manpower centers, most of ese people have stayed on jobs.

We have 75 advisory committees with about 600 business-labordustrial leaders who are advising our vocational people.

We were very pleased with the involvement occurring there. What I am saying really is that we have attempted and are attemptg. at every level of education in our secondary schools, to attempt find the kinds of programs that students can effectively use. One hat we are most proud of, we hope to open in a very few weeks a new ictory school. We have taken over a large factory on the edge of the netto. It is a donation by the General Electric Corp. to the Cleveland oard of Education of 220,000 square feet of floorspace. In the front f this factory we will run a school with basic education components eing offered. Then we will sublease the back parts of the factory on e five floors to industry in Cleveland where they will be running

production lines. The students will be working a half day in the fa tory and a half day will be getting their basic educational needs filled These youngsters will be drawing a salary from the first day they enter This is aimed at those young people we have been losing, the 4,00 dropouts a year that we have not been serving.

I believe that it is important that we have a real partnership for learning, and this act that you are considering in this committee one that I think will strengthen vocational education.

I would like to just mention three things in this respect.

The special provisions to assure support of vocational education pro grams should be directed at serving essentially the students of greates need, and here we are talking about those students in the heart of the city where unemployment is the heaviest, where poverty is the greatest I would suggest that the 25-percent factor of new money, if at a possible, should be stepped up to an earlier date than what the act or the bill calls for.

I would like to see in the near future a greatly increased level of financial support to the vocational programs in our cities, because her is where the great need of today exists.

I have been superintendent of schools in many kinds of communities. I started out in the rural community. I have seen all kinds of school organizations. I have been with all kinds of school organiza tions. But I have never seen need before the way I see it today in the heart of the big city.

Third, I would suggest that if at all possible we avoid the prolifera tion of control of administration of vocational education programs I like to think that the partnership that I have been able to see in the last few years between the Federal Government and the local gover ment is a wholesome one, and the more direct the route can be betweer the Federal source of funds and the local expenditure of funds, the better.

In conclusion, I would like to reemphasize here the national need to establish new priorities in our consideration of vocational education the movement and rapid change of our productive economy in the Nation have left behind too many people, the most crucial mass of whom are to be found in the cities.

These are poor people, these are for the most part uneducated people, and they are people without jobs.

ˋ

The crisis in our urban centers today represents perhaps the most serious domestic crisis that this Nationa has seen in this 20th century I would like to close by saying, Senator Morse, that we have enjored i a fine partnership between the Federal Government and the locs government. I must be one who is a practitioner of education who mus say that the relationship we have had with our departments of eduation here at the national level has been a wholesome and a good ote and a productive one.

I thank you for the opportunity of appearing before this committee Senator MORSE. Mr. Briggs, I mean what I now say. We have had more powerful testimony in all these hearings in support of the need for expanding vocational education programs than that which yo have given this afternoon. You will be hearing me discuss your test mony for some time in the future as I take this bill through the committee and through the Senate.

Your prepared statement is exceedingly important, a document conaining argument and data that I certainly need.

I have looked over the appendix, the Training of Day Students, vhich is doing a marvelous job in the Cleveland public schools. I an't put it in the record because it is pictorial, but I am going to have t as an appendix on file when I take the bill through the markup stage. As you have testified, appendix B, which deals with your inner city program, points out that 94 percent of the people trained get jobs. You have done all this under existing authorities. Do you see any eason why you couldn't duplicate this inner city high school placement program in every city in this country, if there was a desire to do so? Mr. BRIGGS. I think it could be very easily duplicated, and this is one of the greatest success stories in American education, that is, geting the youngsters on the job. We went to industry and we got the lean of the personnel people in our city from industry. We brought im into our shop. He knows every industrialist in the greater Cleveand area.

Then we gave him a special counselor in each inner city high school, and he trained these counselors. Then the high schools became the focal point where industry would come in for a day at a time and hold its interviews with these youngsters, and they hired as many of them as they could, and as this indicates, it was 94 percent. But after printing it actually went up as high as 96 percent of this group actually rot permanently Cleveland jobs. It is a great success story. It only cost $100,000 a year in the city of Cleveland. This is our total cost. We took it out of title I money of the Elementary and Secondary Eduation Act.

Senator MORSE. I am not too far wrong when I say that it seems to me that much of the problem in the inner city program, involves the matter of dissemination of information on what can be done. When the school systems realize what can be done, they might get the Cleveland idea, shall I call it, extended. I will do the best I can, in considering the bill, to disseminate these results. You have already heard me in regard to the financial problem. I do not know what we are going to do about that except to encourage the maximum amounts to be appropriated and see how much we can get.

Mr. Annison is administrative assistant to Dr. Briggs. He is going to comment on higher education.

Mr. ANNISON. No, sir, this will be on the same vocational education. Mr. Alva Dittrick, the executive vice president of the Greater Cities asked me to extend his apologies to the committee and appear in his place and present the highlights of his testimony. It will be very brief. Mr. Dittrick asked me to present to the committee the concern for the one-sixth of the pupils who attend schools in this country in the six major cities and represent the same kind of a profile that Dr. Briggs presented for Cleveland.

(The prepared statement of Mr. Dittrick follows:)

PREPARED STATEMENT OF ALVA R. DITTRICK, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, THE RESEARCH COUNCIL of the GREAT CITIES PROGRAM FOR SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT

Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee on Education, we are grateful for the opportunity to discuss with you critical needs in vocational education. I am Alva R. Dittrick, Executive Vice President of the Research Council of the