tional special needs of children for which these programs were designed. Is that a fair statement?

Miss ERST. That is a very fine one. I will go along with that very much.

Mr. PUCINSKI. We are delighted to have you here. I am sure glad you are in Illinois working for us.

Miss ERST. Thank you.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Thank you, Miss Erst.
Chairman PERKINS. Mr. Ford.

Mr. FORD. I would like to yield.

Chairman PERKINS. Mr. Brademas, do you have any questions? Mr. BRADEMAS. No, only that I want to comment from a neighboring State to the next Senator from Illinois. I want to commend you on the fine statement you have made and tell you how fortunate you are to have such a champion of schools for American children in Congressman Pucinski.

Miss ERST. Thank you.

Chairman PERKINS. Thank you very much.

The next witnesses are representatives from the Indiana Education Association of Teachers. Congressman Brademas who is one of the outstanding men in the Congress and a great educational leader will introduce you gentlemen at this point.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to take this opportunity to say how pleased I am to see spokesmen from schools of my district here, Mr. Hirschinger and Mr. Bianchi. We look forward to hearing from them.

I know there is new leadership in the Indiana State Teachers Association and I look forward to meeting the successor to Mr. Wyatt who has done so much for the schools of our State.

I would ask you just one question, if I may, at the outset, even before you have testified. As you gentlemen both know, the chief State school officer of the State of Indiana, John Laughlin, the superintendent of State public instruction, is from South Bend and is himself a former school teacher.

Superintendent Laughlin urged a few weeks ago that the State of Indiana eventually assume 75 percent of the operating costs of local public schools. I wonder if you could give us any comments you may have on Mr. Laughlin's suggestion with an eye toward the relationship between increased State assistance to elementary and secondary schools, the Serrano and other recent decisions in State and Federal courts with respect to the impact of the 14th amendment and property taxes, and an appropriate role for the Federal Government in supporting elementary and secondary schools?

I think you are aware of the important interrelationships of those various factors. Would you care to address yourself to those questions? STATEMENT OF JIM HIRSCHINGER, INDIANA STATE TEACHERS

ASSOCIATION

Mr. HIRSCHINGER. In regard to State Superintendent Laughlin's statement in the paper regarding the 75 percent State aid, personally

I feel this would put the funding of schools out of proportion as much as it is right now.

Right now we are funding schools far too heavily at the local level. I believe 75 percent State aid would put far too much pressure at the State level. I would personally favor a more equitable distribution.

I would like to think in terms of perhaps 50 percent coming from the State, 25 percent as the local portion along with the 25 percent Federal portion, with local and State control so that the control of the schools still remains in the local communities. Bill, would you like to add to that?

Mr. BIANCHI. Basically, if I understand what John is talking about, he is not necessarily saying 75 percent of that money would come only from the State sources. It would be regulated through the State which would mean there would be an alliance with the Federal Government to allow that funding to come in. I can't say that isn't appropriate for an amount of dollars on a State basis as long as you are going to have the assistance of the Federal Government.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Just one final question, Mr. Chairman, because I don't want to hold the witnesses up from making their own statements. What comment do you have to make on the relationship between appropriations and authorizations as far as Federal aid to schools is concerned? What I particularly have in mind is title I of ESEA. Mr. HIRSCHINGER. If I understand your question, Congressman, the authorizations are fine. The appropriations have not been enough. We need to have more money appropriated to meet the funding that is authorized.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Have you found title I effective educationally speaking in your experience in Indiana schools?

Mr. HIRSCHINGER. Very much so.

Mr. BRADEMAS. In what way?

Mr. HIRSCHINGER. It has reached children and provided educational programs for children in these target areas with below income levels and who are educably retarded. They would not otherwise have been reached by any program that could have been offered at the local and State level. The local and State levels are not providing funds for these programs and the Federal input in the title I area has been vastly important to provide this type of program for these children.

Mr. BRADEMAS. I thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I would ask unanimous consent following this colloquy that I have had with the two witnesses from Indiana that there be inserted in the record the text of several articles from a fall 1971 issue of the Notre Dame Journal of Education?

Chairman PERKINS. Without objection, it is so ordered. (The document to be furnished follows:)

Urban Education*

WHITNEY M. YOUNG, JR.

Late Executive Director of the National Urban League,

New York, New York

The following article contains excerpts from Whitney M. Young's last book ·Beyond Racism. Mr. Young had agreed to do an article on urban education for the Notre Dame JOURNAL OF EDUCATION but his unfortunate death prevented it. We have reprinted these excerpts dealing with urban education because of the valuable insights the late Whitney M. Young, Jr., provided regarding this important but perplexing problem.

America's educational system was created not only to provide people with the skills needed by our society but also to transmit to young people society's values and beliefs. If we accept the fact that racism is one of our most cherished values, then the schools have succeeded admirably, for they, more than any other institution, have perpetuated racism and destroyed countless black children in the process.

Black children actually fall farther behind the longer they stay in school. Black sixth-graders are two and a half years behind white sixth-graders; by the time they have become seniors in high school the gap has grown to three and a half years. Educators like to think that this is the fault of the children, but the Head Start program has proved otherwise. Black three- and four-year-olds who got early schooling in the program actually did get a "head start," but once they fell into the clutches of the school system they lost their lead over youngsters who didn't get preschool training and proceeded on the treadmill of failure that awaits promising black children in our system of miseducation.

There are plenty of reasons for the failure of the schools to educate black youngsters, but all of them come down to the same basic racism that poisons the rest of American life. School districts refusing to implement the fifteen-yearold Supreme Court ruling that declared segregated schools unconstitutional set an example of lawlessness in a defense of racism.

Integration works. It is as valuable for white youngsters as it is for black. In a world that is three quarters nonwhite, no white parent can afford the luxury of limiting his child's experience to all-white schools, classmates, and friends. Integrated schools work for black children, too. Studies show that their achievement is higher there than it is in all-black schools. That's because schools with majority white enrollments are favored by school boards and communities alike. They get the resources and the interest denied ghetto schools that are stigmatized

From Beyond Racism by Whitney M. Young, Jr. Copyright 1969 by Whitney M. Young, Jr. Used with permission of McGraw-Hill Book Company.

as "inferior" and whose children

and their parents are held in contempt.

But despite repeated demonstrations of the value of integrated schools, districts, North and South, go to extraordinary lengths to keep them segregated. Cincinnati, for example, bused children from an overcrowded black school past several predominately white schools to another nearly all-black school five and a half miles away. Federal investigators found that more than four out of five Cleveland schoolchildren go to schools that are over 95 per cent or more white or over 95 per cent Negro. Enforcement of the Supreme Court's ruling has been all but nonexistent, thanks to Congressional opposition, local resistance, and the lack of funds for enforcement. As the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights put it, "Racial isolation in the schools. . . is intense whether the cities are large or small, whether the proportion of Negro enrollment is large or small, whether they are located in the North or South."

So we are left with segregated schools and predominately black schools that are as unequal as they are separate. Black students get the worst schools, the least-trained teachers, and the worst equipment. Thirty Detroit ghetto schools were built in the administration of President Grant - a hundred years ago. Ghetto schools are not only older, they are also overcrowded. Over half of Chicago's predominately black high schools have enrollments more than 50 per cent above capacity, but less than a sixth of the predominately white high schools are that full. In city after city, thirty-five and forty black kids are crammed into each classroom in rotting buildings, while excess seating capacity goes unused in all-white schools elsewhere.

Black schools lack the facilities to teach children skills needed in today's technological world. Barely half of Washington's ghetto elementary schools have libraries. The Coleman Report of the U.S. Office of Education says that Negro pupils "... have less access to physics, chemistry and language laboratories; there are fewer books per pupil in their libraries; the textbooks are less often in sufficient supply."

From some of the textbooks I've seen, perhaps that lack isn't such a bad one after all. Our children—all of them, white and black-are being poisoned by textbooks that are either unrealistic or outright racist. History texts, especially, have wounded black children and lied to white kids with racist fantasies of a past that never was. This example comes from a book, The Growth of the American Republic, published in 1940 by two of the most famous historians of our time, Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager:

As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the South from its "peculiar institution." The majority of the slaves were adequately fed, well cared for, and apparently happy. . . . Although brought to America by force, the incurably optimistic Negro soon became attached to the country, and devoted to his "white folks."

Books such as this helped produce a nation of racists who believe that whites are superior to blacks. Small wonder Americans are shocked by the anger and pain that well up from the ghetto's devoted "Sambos." When books take a

more positive approach to the black people in our history, it is usually the "safe" black man whose life is taught-Booker T. Washington, who urged Negroes to reach an accommodation with White America, rather than Frederick Douglass or W. E. B. DuBois, who fought segregation and insisted on equal rights.

Racism is not confined to academic subjects. Black kids are crammed into vocational schools that are supposed to prepare them for skilled jobs, but don't. Outmoded equipment is used to teach skills that are becoming outmoded themselves. These schools are disaster areas, hothouses of frustration. The black dropout rate in ghetto schools is in the neighborhood of 50 per cent.

The massive amount of money needed to make these schools function is nowhere in sight. Cleveland spends $578 per pupil during the school year, suburban Cuyahoga Heights $1344. The Great Cities Program for School Improvement, made up of sixteen of the largest urban school districts in the country, stated: "Big city schools generally have two-thirds or less to spend per pupil than do the schools in the adjacent suburbs." White America's scarce educational resources are funneled into schools that contain white children, and the black children-for whom education is the only road out of poverty-get the leavings.

The disparity in resources even results in gnawing hunger for black children. Six million children qualify for free school lunches, but only a third get them. One St. Louis school has a thousand children from welfare families, but only a dozen get free lunches. The rest go hungry. Some of this hunger is caused by lack of facilities to prepare food in the ancient buildings that serve ghetto students. In Detroit, seventy-eight of the seventy-nine schools that have no lunch program because of lack of facilities are in the ghetto. Not one of Cleveland's elementary schools has its own lunch program.

Ghetto schools get the most inexperienced teachers and have the highest turnover rates. The average turnover in New York City teaching staffs is about 10 per cent; in East Harlem it is 20 to 25 per cent. In forty nearly all-black or Puerto Rican schools, half the teachers had less than three years' experience, double the rate for white schools. The slum child needs a host of special services as well as good teachers, but the average slum school has only forty professional staff members per thousand students; the suburban schools have seventy per thousand.

All of these facts and statistics measure the failure of White America to educate black youth, but the most pernicious element in the destruction of our children is the contempt in which they are held by the educational establishment. Black kids fail because they are expected to fail and because the whole system of American education is designed to encourage their failure.

Teaching staffs are often made up of people whose attitudes combine fear with ill-concealed contempt. Teachers are not immune to the racism of the society of which they are a part. If they expected their students to succeed and if they imparted to black students a sense of worth and dignity, those children would succeed. Ghetto children have to overcome not only the poverty and despair of the slums, but also systematic destruction of their ability to learn, a destruction that is fostered by the hostility of many of their own teachers and counselors.

79-836 - 72 - 6