STATEMENT OF WILLIAM G. CARR, EXECUTIVE SECRETARY, NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION

Mr. CARR. Thank you, Senator. I will try to make this brief. You have a number of other witnesses, and I am as anxious for you to hear them as, I am sure, you are.

Senator COOPER. We are, but on the other hand, we want you to take the time you feel is necessary to present the views of the association. It is important.

Mr. CARR. Thank you, sir.

I would state for the record that our association is a voluntary organization of 553,000 members of the teaching profession, and I am here to present the views of the association on the three bills to which you referred this morning, S. 2723, S. 2724, and S. 2856.

I would like to devote most of this statement to the proposed conferences, S. 2723, asking that the discussion of the other two bills be included in the written record of these hearings if time doesn't permit a full oral presentation.

As you know, S. 2723 authorizes a series of State conferences on education which would culminate in a White House conference, and it is designed to carry out a proposal made by President Eisenhower in his state of the Union message on January 7. The very day this message was delivered to Congress, our association wrote to the executive secretary of the 67 educational associati ns that are affiliated with the NEA, and we urged their full cooperation in these conferences. We have had enough replies to be quite sure that this cooperation will be forthcoming.

Some preliminary steps have indeed been taken already, and further action will certainly follow as soon as these conferences receive the approval of the Congress, if they do receive it.

I think I can speak for all segments of the teaching profession in saying that we shall do all we can to make these conferences a success. I believe I can speak generally, too, in saying that we think these conferences, Mr. Chairman, should represent all segments of society. We are not interested in more conferences where school people tell other school people about their own problems. This is a great opportunity to get the industrial worker, the businessman, the farmer, the housewife, the professional man, including the profession of education, together to talk about a problem that is of crucial concern to the safety and the prosperity of our country. These State conferences will be given their capstone under the patronage and the prestige which properly attaches to a conference held under the auspices of the White House itself.

Now, in a recent address in San Francisco Walter Lippmann, speaking to the National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools, pointed out the need for some hard national thinking on our educational needs. He said that as a result of our experience in the last world war, this Nation, has apparently acquired the will to defend itself, but he went on to say this, and I quote:

In education we have not yet acquired that kind of will. But we need to acquire it, and we have no time to lose. We must acquire it in this decade. For if, in the crucial years which are coming, our people remain as unprepared as they are for their responsibilities and their mission, they may not be equal to the challenge, and if they do not succeed, they may never have a second chance in order to try again.

That is the end of the quotation.

I would like to remind you of the chart you saw during the first part of the presentation this morning which seems to me abundantly to support what Mr. Lippmann had to say.

If they had conferences, what would they discuss? Some of the problems are so urgent that in the judgment of our association we should not and we need not wait for conferences before taking some action.

Union message, the needs of education, These needs can be

As I understand the President's state of the purpose of these conferences is to appraise the and I assume this includes the financial needs. summed up very simply in a single proposition: Our schools have more children to educate than they have ever been called upon to do before in our Nation's history, and they have not enough teachers, and they have not enough classrooms.

Now just a few refresher facts on that point. Public-school enrollments have continued to rise at the rate of about a million more children a year since the beginning of the present decade, every year another million-not another million replacement, but another additional million.

Four years ago some of the statisticians thought that there might be slight indications of a downward trend in the birthrate, but that trend did not materialize.

In 1952 we reached 3.9 million births, and there isn't the slightest possibility that enrollments will level off. By 1960 our schools will have to accommodate 40 percent more children than in 1950-51 or 25 percent more children than they are now trying with the help of double shifts and crowded classrooms to keep within their four walls in the current school year.

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, a million children is a great many children, and to take care of them would require the duplication every year of another school system about the size of the entire school system of the State of North Carolina, on every level and in every community and city of the State.

I am trying to say, sir, that we confront a massive problem, one that will require action by every means open to us if we are even to come anywhere near dealing with it.

From the increase in enrollments we have the two well-known results: On the one hand, we must have more teachers if we are going to teach these children under conditions which will bear some resemblance to the instruction of free human beings rather than to the running of a factory assembly line. We aren't preparing enough elementary school teachers to cope with this problem now. We are not even turning out enough to cope with the turnover in the teaching profession which runs as high as 10 percent, due largely to unsatis factory compensation, and as a result, we are using throughout thisNation various makeshifts.

We are putting a trained teacher into a classroom with not 25 children or 30 or 35, but with 40 and 45 and 50 or more children in 1 room, or else we are issuing emergency credentials to persons who are admittedly only partially qualified for this important social responsibility. Under conditions like that, the creative, capable, professionally minded, earnest teacher is frustrated in trying to do a profes

sional job in an impossible situation. But we are not concerned alone for the frustrated teacher; we are concerned for the children.

Now, the other results of this tremendous increase in enrollments since World War II is the shortage of school buildings. Even when school districts and States can get the teachers, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a suitable classroom for them to occupy.

Now, it happens that we can speak with some assurance about this school-building matter because there has just been submitted to Congress a detailed, nationwide report, community by community and State by State, on the shortage of school facilities in this country. This report was prepared by the United States Office of Education as a part of the National School Facilities Survey authorized by title I of Public Law 815 of the 81st Congress. The report is available, and I am sure it will be made a part of the record by your staff or by others.

In rehearsing these facts about enrollments and the shortage of teachers and the rising birth rate and the lack of school facilities, I am aware that I have not told this committee anything new. I am aware that I have been repeating old stuff, but, Mr. Chairman, I don't apologize at all for repeating it, for I consider it the duty, and it is the intention of the teaching profession in this country, to report these facts until action is taken upon them.

The proposed conferences in S. 2723 will not find, in my judgment, any more useful or more reliable facts that we now have at our disposal as a result of the studies approved by Congress or conducted by nongovernmental agencies. Every difficulty in which our public schools now find themselves has been predicted for more than a decade, and its dimensions have been predicted accurately. The schoolhousing shortage has been in the making for over 20 years, and we are now witnessing the inevitable effect on the education of our children of years of continued and sequential neglect throughout the depression of the 1930's and the Second World War.

I consider it essential also to point out that since 1929, roughly in the last quarter century, we have had seven federally sponsored conferences or advisory committees on education, beginning with the National Advisory Committee on Education appointed by President Hoover and continuing through various meetings with the latest midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth called by President Truman in 1950.

While these conferences have been going on, there have been six additional major nongovernmental committees, some of them referred to here this morning, which have studied the educational needs and problems of this Nation. The assembled evidence of these governmental and nongovernmental studies is available in nearly 50 different research volumes and reports covering in the minutest detail the needs and resources of education. These conferences and commissions have, almost without exception, recommended that there is a need for Federal action in the field of educational finance.

Nearly 25 years ago the National Advisory Commission on Education summoned by President Herbert Hoover, said, and I quote:

There are national responsibilities for education which only the Federal Government can adequately meet.

I think our evidence as to what has happened in the last 25 years proves the wisdom of that pronouncement. Again the committee under President Hoover reported to him and to the Congress;

From an early period of our national life the leaders of the American people have recognized our obligation to cooperate in fostering the education of all the people, without regard to State jurisdication.

So why do we need these conferences? Well, it should be evident that our current rate of population growth is posing some long-range problems in education, problems for 1960 and 1965 and 1970 and beyond. We do need urgently to get citizens and educators and Government officials, State, local, and National, together now to study the educational needs of the next decade and to lay the groundwork for meeting them.

Above all, we need to get these conferences to help the general public to be confronted with the facts, but we do not need conferences to find out the facts. We can, and we should, ask these conferences to find some means of making an adequate support of education as a basic ingredient of our national safety the concern of every person, a concern as deep as our concern for the military aspects of national defense, and for such a purpose, for long-range planning and for the alerting of the citizenry, S. 2723 deserves full support, in our judgment, from Congress and from the States.

But at the same time the immediate needs of our schools, the immediate needs that are here now, this afternoon, are so well known and so urgent that in the judgment of our association something more than conferences or committees or studies is called for. No conference can keep another million children from entering our schools each year for the next 5 years; no conference can create additional trained teachers to take care of these young citizens of our country; no conference can put these youngsters under a roof in a safe and sanitary and wholesome school environment.

The United States Government has just spent $3 million under congressional authorization to assist the States and Territories to survey their school facilities, and the report is finished. We have more need, Mr. Chairman, for fact facing than we have for fact finding.

I shall submit a little later to your clerk for reference by the members of the committee our new publication entitled, "Educational Differences Among the States," prepared by our research division from United States Government statistics.

Within a few days I hope to mail every member of this committee a copy of the March 1954 issue of the Journal of Teacher Education. This issue will be devoted entirely to the problems of the teacher shortage State by State. It will include a report on the 1954 prospects which are not good.

Our organization is the only one in the Government or out of it that makes such kinds of studies. I shall send these documents to the members of the committee, realizing full well that you will not have time to read them in detail, but in the earnest hope that through them the members of the committee will become aware of the facts: that we now must face and the facts that we already have available about our national needs in education.

I do not see, for the life of me, how the proposed State and White House conferences can bring out new facts that will be more significant

or more directive as to action. Policies, yes; action, yes; public enlightenment, yes; but more facts-I think we have more important business.

Nor do I see, Mr. Chairman, how the American people and their Representatives in the Congress can conscientiously put education of young people up on the shelf for a year or 2 or 3 or 4 while these conferences get organized and completed and drag out their weary way to a conclusion. There will be another million children, I remind you, who will enroll in our schools next September, an extra million, and still another million the September after that.

I have been talking less than 15 minutes, but in the time since I asked for your attention, another 30 children reached elementary school age. We need 1 more teacher and 1 more classroom already, and every flick of the hand of the clock and every turn of the page of the calendar, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, every 15 minutes, another teacher and another classroom, and this growing need will continue.

With great truth and great wisdom, more than a year ago in his first state of the Union message, the President said, "Our school system demands some prompt, effective help."

The State and National conferences proposed in S. 2723 will be very useful to this end, but they are not, to my mind, the sort of prompt, effective help that our schools need and that our people expect, and so I urge this committee, as the chairman has already indicated was his hope this morning, to give serious and immediate consideration and friendly consideration, not only to these three measures which have been proposed, which we support, but to other pending bills which will give some urgently needed Federal assistance to the States for the construction of public schools.

Mr. Chairman, I had a few words I wanted to say about the second and third bill, the one on the National Advisory Committee and the one on the cooperative research.

Would you like me to go ahead with that? It will take a few minutes more.

Senator COOPER. Yes.

Mr. CARR. If you wish, I can stop for questions on the first part

now.

Briefly, on the National Advisory Committee I would like to give you the following statement from the platform of the National Education Association. I might explain, sir, that our platform is adopted as a policy of the association by a body of about 4,000 delegates elected in the local and State affiliated associations in every part of this country and its overseas territories. These 4,000 people meet for 5 days and hammer out the policy of the association.

What I am about to quote is arrived at in that manner.

The development of education, whether at the local, State, or National level, should be placed above all temporary and partisan political issues and provided with appropriate administrative arrangements to safeguard the integrity of the educational process. The association urges Congress to create a National Board of Education as an independent agency to administer the United States Office of Education. The members of the National Board should be appointed for long overlapping terms by the President with the consent of the Senate.

The association further recommends that the national board should select a professionally qualified commissioner of education, responsible to the board for the conduct of his office and the performance of his duties to serve as its executive officer.