If we were to go ahead on the same basis, again projecting it to 1960, instead of having a shortage of some 340,000 classrooms as at the present time, which it is estimated would cost approximately 10 to 12 billion dollars to construct, we would be 407,000 classrooms short in our public schools by 1960, so that our problem becomes one of increasing the construction of classrooms as rapidly as we can and as extensively as possible.

The point that I would call to your attention is that a good many of the communities are finding that, having gone ahead and provided increased classrooms, they are now faced with a ceiling on bonded indebtedness or a tax limit, or something of that sort, which is beyond them locally and calls for State action in order to provide more resources if they are going to go ahead with their desired building. Now, I would like to turn, if I may, to the problem as itSenator COOPER. May I ask a question?

Dr. BROWNELL. Certainly.

Senator COOPER. The figure of 37 million-does that apply to high school, elementary schools, or does it include college students?

Dr. BROWNELL. This includes elementary school, high school, and college the 37 million.

Senator COOPER. Do you know what the figure is for high school and elementary school?

Dr. BROWNELL. Let's see. For elementary, it is about 25 million, I believe, at the present time.

Secretary HOBBY. It is 25 million for elementary and high school. Dr. BROWNELL. Yes.

Senator COOPER. Do you have any questions?

Senator HILL. No; not right now, thanks.

Dr. BROWNELL. This next chart deals with the problem of the teacher shortage that we have at the present time, each one of these columns again representing the number of teachers that are needed for our elementary schools.

The dark part of the bar indicates the number of experienced qualified teachers, the white part the newly qualified teachers that are entering the profession, and the red part indicates a shortage of qualified teachers that we have at the present time in our elementary schools.

I think one of the particular things I would like to call to attention is the fact that we are losing teachers more rapidly than we are gaining them, that more teachers are retiring, leaving the profession, for various reasons, than are actually being produced by our teachereducation institutions.

So, if we look ahead again, following the enrollment increase, to 1960, we see we would have in 1960 fewer experienced, qualified teachers than we have at the present time for our elementary schools, and that the shortage would be greater than it is today. We would be faced by a further problem of filling that shortage by even more overcrowding, by using more teachers who have not met full certification requirements, or by securing people who have been out of teaching for a considerable period of time to come back and do teaching, by making better use of the teachers that we have, through school district reorganization that would eliminate many of these small schools that now take the full time of a teacher for maybe half a dozen or 10 children, whereas by further consolidation they could work with

a larger number of pupils, by getting more teachers to stay longer in teaching, which would make a very considerable difference in the problem, or by finding ways to enroll more teachers and get them into preparation for elementary schoolteaching.

I think that these charts, as indicated, point out the fact that our problem is not a crisis in education that can be met by a single dramatic move, either on the part of the locality, States, or the National Government, but that it is a long-range problem in which we have to plan a step-by-step program to meet the educational needs of the country.

Now, I would like to turn, if I may, to some of the problems in a little different way.

These next two charts call attention to present waste of manpower, of needed, trained manpower.

The first chart deals with the problem of functional illiteracy, which means individuals who have less than 5 years of school.

The States that are indicated in black, 5 States, have somewhere between 12 and 18 percent of the young people 25 to 34 years of age that have less than 5 years of schooling.

The States in gray have 4 to 12 percent of their population in that age group with less than 5 years of schooling, and the rest of the States have under 4 percent.

Now, superimposed on the map are these figures which represent the percentage of rejection of Korean war selective service men because of the fact that they failed the Armed Forces qualifications test, which most of you recall is a test which is primarily checking on their school ability-reading, arithmetic, things of that sort.

Now, the 9 States highest in the rejections are shown there. They range from 35 to 58 percent of the draftees being rejected on this Armed Forces qualification test.

The national average is 19.2 percent.

The particular point that I have called to your attention is the relationship of the small amount of schooling to the waste of trained manpower and potential trained manpower, not only for the selective service, but for other areas of leadership that we need, and the fact that this throws a heavier burden on all the rest of the country as a result.

Now, this is another way of showing much the same point. It is a followup study of the children who were in the 5th grade in 1943; that is, the 10-year-olds in 1943. For every thousand that were in the 5th grade in 1943, if you follow them on through, year by year, you will find that by the end of the 8th grade 200 of them have dropped out, that approximately another 200 of them had dropped out about the end of the 10th grade, and another 100 by the end of the 12th grade, so that out of the thousand pupils in the 5th grade in 1943, only 505 of them graduated.

If it were only the least able ones that dropped out, the problem would be serious enough, but it wouldn't call attention to the fact that a great many of the dropouts are capable people, capable of training for positions calling for well-prepared individuals, and as a result of dropping out, they are not able to provide service to their country.

These six charts point up some of the major problems that we see in the field of education.

Senator COOPER. Do you want to ask a question at this time?
Senator HILL. No.

Senator COOPER. Senator Upton.

Senator UPTON. No questions, Mr. Chairman.

Senator COOPER. Mrs. Hobby.

Secretary HOBBY. Mr. Chairman, the administration's proposals are important steps toward the solution of the problems which Dr. Brownell has outlined.

The first of these proposals, embodied in S. 2723, provides for State and White House conferences on education which aim to bring about greater citizen action to meet our educational challenges.

In his state of the Union message, President Eisenhower said:

I hope that this year a conference on education will be held in each State, culminating in a national conference. From these conferences on education, every level of government-from the Federal Government to each local school boardshould gain the information with which to attack this serious problem.

He reiterated these views in his budget message of January 21, 1954. S. 2723 would authorize a series of study-action conferences on education in the States and Territories. It would bring citizens and educators together to consider educational problems, to mobilize for their solution and to prepare for the White House Conference.

To assist States to collect the needed facts and to hold meetings, S. 2723 would authorize an appropriation of $12 million dollars to be allotted to the States on the basis of their respective populations. No State, however, would receive an allotment of less than $10,000. Few States, Mr. Chairman, would have available the funds to prepare materials, to conduct the conferences and to follow up with the reports and materials for the White House Conference.

Following the State conferences, the President would call the White House Conference on Education to be composed of interested laymen and educators from all parts of the Nation.

The purpose of this Conference would be

To bring into sharp focus the national implications of the results of the State conferences.

To stimulate greater citizen understanding and support for meeting the educational needs of a free country.

The second administration bill, Mr. Chairman, is S. 2724, to establish a National Advisory Committee on Education.

In his budget message of January 21, 1954, President Eisenhower recommended such a committee in the following terms:

An Advisory Committee on Education in the Office of the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare should be established by law. This recommendation carries forward an objective of the reorganization plan under which the Department was created last year. This Committee, composed of lay citizens, would identify educational problems of national concern to be studied by the Office of Education or by experts outside the Government, and would advise on action needed in the light of these studies.

S. 2724 would establish a 9-member, lay committee with 3-year overlapping terms. The Commissioner of Education would serve ex officio as a nonvoting member of the Committee. The Committee would recommend to the Secretary

The initiation of task forces to study problems of national concern;

Appropriate action indicated by such studies and would report of the progress being made in carrying out its recommendations.

Funds would be appropriated to the extent determined by the Congress.

The third bill, S. 2856, "to establish a cooperative research program," we believe, represents an extremely useful complement to the two proposals mentioned. It would carry out the President's budget message recommendation:

*** that legislation be enacted which will enable the Office of Education to join its resources with those of State and local agencies, universities, and other educational organizations for the conduct of cooperative research, surveys, and demonstration projects.

The purpose of this research program is to strengthen educational research services and facilities by authorizing cooperative research arrangements between the Federal Government and various other agencies, institutions, and organizations concerned with the problems of American education.

At the present time the Office of Education is not specifically authorized to enter into projects involving the joint expenditure of funds for these purposes.

Cooperative research arrangements of the sort proposed in S. 2856 have shown great returns-notably in the field of public health-for each Federal dollar spent. We are convinced that such arrangements can make equally valuable contributions in the field of education where the need for research is great.

One important advantage of the approach proposed in S. 2856 is that, while increasing and improving the research services available, the bill would not add substantially to the research staff of the Office of Education.

Funds to carry out the purposes of the bill would be authorized to the extent determined by the Congress. We believe this program should begin modestly, perhaps at an appropriation level of $100,000 for the Federal portion of the program for the first year.

With your permission, Mr. Chairman, I should like to ask Dr. Brownell to discuss these three bills in further detail.

Senator COOPER. Dr. Brownell.

Dr. BROWNELL. Mr. Chairman, I should like to call attention to the first bill that has to do with the State and White House conferences and give a little of the reasoning back of it.

During recent years citizen interest in the problems of education has increased a great deal. There are several indexes that might be pointed to. One is a doubling in the enrollment in the parent-teacher associations and I think more notably the fact that citizen advisory groups, locally, that were some 1,000 in 1950 have now increased to better than 8,000.

Now, what has happened is that as citizens have seen the educational problems in the local community, they have gotten together in informal groups, where it is easy to get together. Several people can get together in somebody's house and start discussion of the problem. They can get in touch with the local educational authorities and they can add to their numbers, and you soon have a citizens' group that becomes an action committee.

Now, as they have gone ahead, solving their local problems, they run into the fact that some of their problems call for action at the State level rather than at the local level. I mentioned such things as the problem of redistricting, where local school officials decide

what they ought to do is merge with some nearby district or have some other kind of redistricting, and they find the State laws are very difficult and actually may penalize them if they do. That calls for State legislative action.

Then there are the problems of limitations on bonded indebtedness, where they find very frequently that the assessed valuation practices limit them in this way: If they increase their assessed valuation from the basis on which it has been carried on over a period of years since the depression, they then find themselves having to carry a heavier part of the county or State tax, so that if they, on their own initiative increase their assessed valuation in order to have more money available for bonding purposes under State laws, they are doing that at a considerable sacrifice. This calls for united action on a statewide basis.

Then, too, they find there are other types of problems, such as the fact that part of their teacher-shortage situation is due to inadequate facilities for training teachers, and that calls for State action.

These facts led us to believe that one of the things that was necessary in order to get action on these problems that have been presented was to make it possible for the States to develop these action programs. Now, it is much easier for people in the local community to get together when it is on a statewide basis; and, so, it is proposed that there be money made available to the States so that interested representative citizens can be brought together with educators to carefully plan, just as they have in their local communities, to get at the facts, prepare them, to develop plans of action, and then to bring together a larger representative group of citizens and educators to study the data, study the proposed plans of action and mobilize their resources for an attack, which should be both an immediate and a sustained attack upon their educational problems.

Then that would be followed by the White House conference on education, which would have a somewhat different purpose and, yet, it would be a follow-through on the State conferences, in that it would emphasize naturally the importance of education to national wellbeing.

It would, in addition, show what some of the States are doing as a result of the material that had been gathered in these State conferences; it would indicate the citizen attitude in regard to what they can and what they cannot do, and help to show the long-range efforts that are needed for meeting our educational problems.

Now, I want to make it clear that I don't assume, none of us assume, that these State conferences and White House conference are going to solve the educational problems; but we believe it is an important part of this attack to speed up the efforts of the States and the local communities and to mobilize for the long-range effort that is necessary for this big educational problem.

Now, if I may, unless there are some questions on that at this time-Do you want me to go to the next bill?

Senator COOPER. I think you can go to the next chart.

Dr. BROWNELL. All right. Thank you.

The next chart is to simply indicate further the information about this proposal on the Advisory Committee on Education.

We recognize that there are a great many problems in the field of education on which we have limited research studies at the present