aides and enriched remedial classes, the Teacher Corps is a necessary complement to that program. It taps a vast reservoir of talent from all over the country to be channeled to the areas of greatest need. The fact is that schools in poor areas face the almost impossible task of attracting and retaining good teaching staff. As teachers originally assigned to schools in disadvantaged areas acquire seniority, they all too often transfer to other schools with better working conditions and a student body easier to teach. The Teacher Corps through its nationwide recruitment of college graduates commits teacher-interns to at least 2 years of service in schools with 50 percent or better of the student population coming from low-income families. In fact, the Teacher Corps has recruited such dedicated people that a recent National Education Association survey pointed out 81 percent of the volunteers planned to continue teaching children in poverty schools. After recruiting this raw talent, the Teacher Corps in cooperation with State educational agencies and universities made arrangements for preservice training. The experienced teacher volunteers worked alongside the college graduates in developing and refining their knowledge of how to reach and teach the poor child.

When preservice training was completed, 277 teams under the continued guidance of 268 team leaders were ready for action in the field.

During the past school year, these Teacher Corps members have been at work in 275 schools in 111 school districts located in 29 States, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Each team has served only at the request of a local school system. Nine hundred and forty-five of the members are teacher-interns receiving advanced training at 50 colleges and universities. They spend part of every week working in an elementary or secondary school and part at a nearby university working toward their Master's degree. The interns come from a wide variety of background-some volunteered immediately after completing college others worked for a few years first. They include Peace Corps Volunteers, secretaries, VISTA workers, writers, artists, and others. More than 75 percent majored in subject fields other than education.

The team leaders represent a different facet of the Corps. For the most part, they were nominated for the Corps by their principals and superintendents because they were the most talented teachers in their own schools. They are certified, usually have a Master's degree, and have taught in slum schools for about 5 years. The responsibility for the Corps' steady progress depends on them. The team leaders' classrooms are often used as learning laboratories for interns and for any regular teachers who wish to observe. They supervise three to ten teacherinterns. During both preservice and inservice training it is their job to share the lessons they have learned from previous years of teaching youngsters from deprived areas.

Among the school systems that requested Teacher Corps teams are 20 of the Nation's 25 largest cities: New York, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, New Orleans, Cleveland, San Diego, Buffalo, Memphis, and others. Corps members are also teaching in the rural schools of Appalachia and the Ozarks, and in the Spanishspeaking communities of Florida, California, and the Southwest. They are working with the children of migrant laborers, Indians, and Spanish-American immigrants. Seventy percent of the teams are engaged in preschool and elementary school projects; the remainder deals with secondary school children.

The Teacher Corps is this country's first, full-scale teacher internship program. The two-year combined preservice and inservice program incorporates year round academic instruction with practical classroom experience. It develops a competency and interest on the part of trainees which gives them the incentive to continue teaching and reinforces the conviction that the disadvantaged can be educated.

The Teacher Corps program is also generating new insights into teacher preparation. The most recent report of the National Advisory Council on the Education of the Disadvantaged dated April 20, stated that—

"Of the 11 universities visited, 6 had modified their courses to include some special material on the education of disadvantaged children. Ten were reported as having the enthusiastic support of the university faculties associated with them for the training programs."

The report also stated: "The practical experience of Corpsmembers is providing useful substance for the university seminars and is having a beneficial effect on other courses."

These changes have been brought about because colleges and universities are introducing into the regular teacher education programs promising innovations learned in the Teacher Corps training centers.

Concerning these training programs, let me again quote from the Advisory Council Report:

"The National Teacher Corps has proved itself a useful weapon in the attack on the disadvantages under which all too many American children labor. The direct effect on the children with whom the Corpsmembers work would be justification enough to continue that work. But the Corps will quite clearly have other effects as well. The most significant of these may very well be its influence on the capacity of the educational systems of the universities to reach those children who have been most grievously neglected."

Let me emphasize that the distinctive characteristic of the Teacher Corps is that the training programs are diverse and are developed along with service aspects so as to be truly responsive to local needs. The resources of the community and the particular needs of its schools are brought to bear on the kinds of teacher training programs which the Corpsmembers are receiving.

I have touched on some of the educational reasons which I believe make the Teacher Corps at present a unique program worthy of expansion. We are proposing, in addition, a number of amendments-based on practical experiencewhich we believe will strengthen the program in the future.

First, we think it appropriate that the Teacher Corps program be placed in title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The Teacher Corps was enacted with the mandate to supplement teaching staffs in poverty schools and to train new teachers for the disadvantaged. Only schools having concentrations of children from low-income families are eligible for Teacher Corps projects. In this respect the Teacher Corps is directed to the same schools as title I. Teacher Corps teams have been at work this year in title I schools, providing an added resource to assist teachers in poverty schools.

Second, we have learned from this first year of experience that service and training are motives for those interested in the Teacher Corps. The appeal is not financial. Because teacher-interns are trainees and are not full-fledged members of the teaching staff we are requesting a change in the compensation rates for teacher-trainees. The present graduate fellowship programs of the Office of Education provide a weekly stipend plus an allowance for each dependent. The amendment would provide compensation to Teacher Corps interns on a similar basis. They would receive payment of $75 per week plus $15 per dependent or the lowest salary scale of a district, whichever is the lower. Inasmuch as teacher-interns are, in fact, trainees and are not carrying out the full responsibilities of regular teachers, it seems more appropriate to compensate them on the same basis as other students working toward their Master's degrees in education.

Third, to reinforce the tradition of local control, and, thus, to encourage further the diversity of projects that we feel is so vital to the Corps' success we are requesting that State approval be required for a local educational agency's request for Corps members and for the training program offered by an institution or university. We are also amending the "Local Control" section to clarify the local school district's absolute right to decide what Corps members are assigned to their schools.

Fourth, we have proposed amendments to allow Teacher Corps members to serve wherever they are needed. At present, Teacher Corps teams can only serve in schools administered by local educational agencies. The amendments would permit Teacher Corps members to be assigned to migrant groups, and to schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Fifth, we have requested authority to allow the Commissioner of Education to accept gifts on behalf of the Teacher Corps, in the same way that the Peace Corps and VISTA are authorized to accept gifts.

Finally, we are asking that the program be extended three years with a tripling of the program next school year.

But even with the tripling of the program, the Teacher Corps will not solve the teacher shortage nor will it find all the solutions to the problem of educating the disadvantaged. But it will help. It is already having a healthy influence on teacher education programs in our institutions of higher education. It will bring new people into poverty schools who otherwise would not have prepared for a career in education. It will offer these schools supplementary personnel during the two-year training period, and many will be interested in continuing to teach disadvantaged children who would not have made that commitment without the Teacher Corps experience. It will reduce the burden upon the regular classroom teacher. It will provide an apprentice teacher who can give youngsters the

individual instruction and attention they need. And, the Teacher Corps will provide a new source of superbly trained teachers to those schools which need them the most but have the least.

Finally, I support the statement of President Meredith Wilson who chairs the Advisory Council to whose reports I have so often referred:

"The National Teacher Corps is too badly needed and too promising to be either discontinued or treated as a temporary stopgap. Of all present investments of public effort, few are likely to yield so large a return."

If it meets with the pleasure of the Committee, Mr. Chairman, I would like at this time to ask Mr. Richard Graham to elaborate upon the operation of the Teacher Corps and its first year in action.

Senator KENNEDY of New York. Let me congratulate you on your testimony, Mr. Sullivan. I agree heartily with your statement of your sentiments.

Mr. SULLIVAN. Thank you, sir.

Senator KENNEDY of New York. Dr. Graham, Mr. Graham.

STATEMENT OF RICHARD GRAHAM, DIRECTOR, TEACHER CORPS, OFFICE OF EDUCATION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND WELFARE

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. Chairman, I have a prepared statement which I hope

Senator KENNEDY of New York. Which we will place in the record following your testimony.

Mr. GRAHAM. The events of yesterday make it necessary to change that and I will have a very brief moment here for some remarks.

You have called upon the young people of this Nation to serve where they are needed most in the innercities and with the rural poor and these young people feel they are being abandoned now.

You have provided needed help to our schools, and they now fear that it is being withdrawn. You have asked the schools to plan, and they are now prevented from planning. You have asked our universities to develop training for teachers that will prepare them to go into these innercity schools to serve the children of the poor as few teachers have been prepared for that job. It now appears that the means to provide such teacher training will be withdrawn.

I have indicated a national awareness for the needs of our cities, and you have created a program that by every honest test has met these needs beyond all expectations.

By the testimony of school superintendents and principals, by State school officers and educational associations, by school boards and the National Congress of PTS's, the American Federation of Teachers, and the NEA, this program has done its job. These programs are locally conceived and locally directed. They must have State approval. They embrace young people in large part locally recruited, and entirely locally selected. These local programs are hailed North and South without a single mention of Federal control.

The State superintendent of Mississippi says this is a program that does a job for many in his State.

The superintendent of schools in Hattiesburg, Miss., says:

The National Teacher Corps has been most successful and helpful to this school system. We have complete control of the program from the selection of personnel to the defining and assigning duties and responsibilities

And that kind of statement you get from Laurel, Miss., and Columbia, Miss., and Atlanta, Ga., and Sumter, S.C., and Center Ridge, Ark., and Memphis, Tenn., and New Orleans. These people have written to say this has done a job the way they want it in their own communities.

You have gathered together in the schools and in the universities across this Nation people of good will and ability to do a job of providing good education where education is failing, that is a gift of the young, of the children of this Nation.

You have developed a program that demands of its teacher interns and you are getting it. It is a program for education. It is the best answer to the despair of the cities, the long hot summers, and the crime and delinquency. But there is a fear now in these people that what you have done is going to end now. They can't see what is going to happen next, and for the thousands of young people who are now serving or have asked to serve, and you will get as many as you need if you call, they will respond, but their hope is being replaced now, their hope, with a defeatism, and their enthusiasm with a kind of bitterness.

Now, the Senate-House conference committee on the supplemental appropriation yesterday reported out $3.8 million to continue the work of this first group of Corps members and to enroll 1,200 new Corps members to train them this summer. But this appropriation is contingent on authorizing legislation. There was, is, such authorization in this Elementary and Secondary Education Act, but the House yesterday asked that the Teachers Corps remain in the Higher Education Act. Those members of the Conference of the House who sponsored this legislation said they would support the Teachers Corps in the Higher Education Act. But no one knows when the Higher Education Act will be passed.

We ask that the Teachers Corps legislation be extended now inst as fast as possible so that a great number of dedicated people may carry on their work this summer with the funds that will be appropriated for that purpose. I thank you, sir.

(The prepared statement of Mr. Graham follows:)

PREPARED STATEMENT OF RICHARD GRAHAM, DIRECTOR, TEACHER CORPS. OFFICE OF EDUCATION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND WELFARE

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, I am honored to appear before you to tell how the Teacher Corps has fared in its first year.

The Teacher Corps was created to help poor children in the core of the large cities, in small towns whose industrial base has been shot out from under them or never existed, on Indian reservations where pride and prejudice have kept youngsters hungry and apart and ignorant, in immigrant and migrant villages where the shifting of supply and demand dictates the course of life.

But how do you teach a sullen, hungry child who doesn't care to learn? and how do you begin to break through to him in schools which many teaching interns back from Peace Corps duty abroad have told me are far worse than anything they saw in foreign countries?

It's a tough job to break through the guard of youngsters who have lived in slums all their lives, to get them not only to learn but to want to learn. "The real thing," says one of our veteran team leaders, "is when a kid comes up to you at the beginning of the year and says: 'You're not going to teach me anything because I don't want to learn, and when, at the end of the year, he has learned." To accomplish this takes special skills and special training. Such special training-training for teachers in poverty neighborhoods-is a job few individual schools or universities can do alone, for none of us knows a great deal about how this should be done. But we our universities and schools-are learning.

The job of the Teacher Corps is to help make this learning possible and to help universities and schools extend the skills we are learning to new teachers so that the 8 million children of poverty in this country can look forward to more than they have had before. This year the Teacher Corps touched a quarter of a million children in the schools and communities of the inner cities and the rural poor.

Often schools that most need specially trained teachers can least afford to hire them, let alone establish training programs of their own. School superintendent after school superintendent from big and little systems across the country have told us that only Federal funds make the program financially feasible for their poorer schools:

From Fannindel Schools in Ladonia, Texas: "My school's finances could not have made possible the services of these teachers except for the Teacher Corps." From a member of the school board of Macy, Nebrasks: "To get qualified people to come to us just for the money is pretty hard for us to do because of the fact that we have a limited amount of money and for us to go out and try to recruit the teacher, the type of people we need, it would cost us a lot of money we could not afford."

From the Los Angeles area: "Dr. Siemer from Jurupa stated the districts do not have financial resources to do the job. Mr. Dickey, superintendent of Willowbrook, stated often the districts with the greatest need are least able to finance programs to take care of that need.

Mr. Hodes, assistant superintendent at Enterprise, stated our district has been operating on a deficit budget for the last 5 years. If the Federal Government would subsidize farms, oil depletion, and so on, why can't human beings in urban areas be subsidized?

Dr. Seaton said we need the quality offered by a National Teacher Corps intern program. It is difficult to compete in the open market for teachers . . ."

In the past few weeks, we have received our first tangible progress reports from the field on how well we are doing that job. I would like to summarize for you what some of these reports say about the Teacher Corps.

A recent NEA survey of superintendents and principals working with Teacher Corps teams found that 91 percent of all superintendents and 84 percent of the principals want more. The average request is for three times more Corpsmen than are now available.

A Southern Education Report teacher education survey in April showed that close to 97 percent of colleges and universities surveyed believe that teachereducation schools have a special responsibility to help improve the education of the disadvantaged. But only 16 percent have changed their methods of training such teachers in the past five years, and only 41 percent plan to do so in the foreseeable future. About half of the 16 percent that have made changes have Teacher Corps programs.

The superintendent of Hattiesburg Public Schools in Mississippi had this to say about his Teacher Corps teams:

"The values of such a program are many but I would like to mention some of the outstanding ones. First-providng additional teaching personnel to a regular faculty which in turn gives more individual help to children in disadvantaged areas. Second-providing a teacher-training, on-the-job program to better train young teacher interns to work with children who are in need of more than just regular school help. Third-the additional services to the schools that the seventeen Corps members have provided are too numerous to mention, but these range from providing leadership in establishing a new reading program to teaching music, and art and working with parents in a counseling situation where parents and students are involved in seeking better solutions to problems.

"Every principal in our twelve elementary schools has requested a team for next school session."

A Miami (Florida) principal told us :

"I only have one fear with regard to the young interns of the Teacher Corps. that with their energy and talent and their special training they will soon leave the classroom. Some school system will try to make adminstrators out of them. And they are needed so desperately in the classroom."

The Assistant Superintendent of Enterprise City Schools in Compton, California wrote us:

"I have worked with many educational programs, and this is the shinning light. As for the Corpsmen, their idealism has been rekindled in us old cynics. They're so committed they've recommitted some of us—how do you like that?" And the principal of a school in Memphis, Tennessee told us :