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In recent decades the Federal Government has entered the field of education in a variety of ways-the public schools built by the WPA in the 1930's, the tuition-payment program of the GI bill, and the grants-in-aid and the underwriting of research programs at many of our colleges and universities. In none of these has the Federal Government encroached upon the control of local authorities.

The threat of Federal control is a myth, and the fear of it is spun from fantasy and a misreading of our history.

The question, therefore, is not whether or not we shall have Federal control, but whether we shall have Federal aid, and, if so, how much,: what direction it will take, and how best to utilize it in a coherent manner to lift our public school system to the level that a thriving democracy demands and one that our young people deserve.

Senate bill No. 2 offers a significant contribution in alleviating two of the most critical problems in the educational scene-the inadequacy of teachers' salaries and the shortage of classroom space.

Let me refer first to the long-range problem of the shortage of classroom space. The figure of 142,000, representing our present classroom shortage, has been repeated so frequently in recent discussions that we are likely to overlook the more enduring features of our problem.

For example, from 1780 to 1955 our population grew from 40 million to 165 million. During this same period, while our general popula tion increased 4 times, our public school population increased approximately 80 times.

Under our present rate of population development the bulge of the future will press even more heavily on our already burdened facilities. The elementary school enrollment of 22 million of last year will rise to about 34 million by 1960-61. By 1969 our high schools will be flooded with 50 to 70 percent more students than they can now handle. By 1975 our colleges and universities will face a doubling and, in some cases, a tripling of enrollment. Now these are only the bare bones of statistics that comprise one aspect of the problem. There are others.

For one, there is the problem borne of the mobility of our society. We are a people on the go; 34 million of us change our address every year, and there are long-term currents of movement to the North and West. Thus, the effects of education offered in a given school may be registered in a State far removed from where the education was acquired.

The quality of education in the United States is therefore a national issue rather than a merely local one. And yet it is the only national problem that we have not attempted to solve on a national basis.

Let us turn now to a consideration of the shortage and recruitment of teachers. It is authoritatively estimated that in order to maintain the present student-teacher ratio between one-third and one-half of all 4-year college graduates would have to enter schoolteaching in the next decade. Since only one out of five college graduates customarily enters schoolteaching, one can appreciate the magnitude of the problem involved.

Not only is the number of teachers inadequate but the preparation of many of the present teachers is in need of improvement. According to the National Education Association, 33 percent of our elementary schoolteachers do not hold A.B. degrees, and more than 21 percent of all public schoolteachers have less than 4 years of college.

A similar condition prevails, according to the NEA, at the college and university level, with the holders of doctor's degrees among full-time teachers having decreased by 25 percent since 1953-54.

The reasons are apparent. Business, industry, and government are outbidding the teaching profession for the talents of many of its best qualified and most able men and women. Nor is it small wonder when one observes that the average State salary of classroom teachers ranges from a high of $6,400 to a low of $3,070 per year, while in my own State of West Virginia the beginning salary for a teacher with a master's degree is $3,060.

I stop for just a moment. This is not a comparison for the purpose of disparagement of work well done by men and women regardless of their profession or business. But we have today in this room members of a union within the framework of the AFL-CIO.

If I were to ask a raising of the hands, Mr. Chairman, of the people in this room this morning who are in industry as employees, as to how many of them receive $3,060 or less a year, no hands would be raised. If I were to ask how many receive less than $3,070 per year, no hands would be raised.

I bring this point out this morning with vigor only to indicate that I have, during the past few months, found in schools of West Virginia teachers leaving their posts of duty, frankly, to drive the school buses, to carry the children to the very schools where the teachers cannot teach but leave the professions for which they have been trained and move into other areas of activity.

This is a serious matter. I remember in one school last fall I found the typewriters were dusty and those which were covered standing idle. There was no instructor of business in that high school because that teacher, believe it or not, had gone from teaching into a position in business itself.

I found in the same school the home economics department empty. The teacher of home economics, skilled and trained for this work, had gone into private industry.

Admittedly, we cannot reward, and I do not believe the American teacher expects to be rewarded with the chauffeur and summer homes that we are told some of his and her Russian counterparts have at present. But we can and we must reward our teachers with salaries more consistent with their professional status and their dedication of purpose.

The necessity of many of our teachers to have part-time supplementary jobs is, to put it in its mildest terms, incnsistent with the responsibility that a democratic society has placed upon them. Our teachers' salaries can and must be raised immediately and substantially if we are to attract able young men and women and retain those we have.

According to the Rockefeller report, we spent in 1955 a total of just under $14 billion for public and private education at all levels, slightly more than we spent last year on alcohol and cosmetics in the United States. Against a gross national product of $391 billion for that year, our expenditures for formal education amounted to 3.6 percent. The same source estimates that by 1967 the increased demands that I referred to earlier will require an expenditure of $30 billion, or 5 percent of an estimated gross national product of $600 billion.

Such a sharp rise in expenditures calls for a determined departure from traditional methods of school financing. Historically, Americans have preferred to finance their school at the local and State levels. But there has already been a shift of responsibility from the local to the State levels. In 1930 under 17 percent of the cost was borne by the State; in 1954 this had more than doubled to over 37 percent.

However, local and State tax systems in many instances are not adequate to the task, partly because they depend so heavily on the real property tax, which everywhere lags behind rising incomes and the increased cost of education, and partly because local and State governments are reluctant to raise taxes and thereby place their communities in an unfavorable competitive position with other States.

The problem is especially acute in such a State as West Virginia and some of the Southern States where great inequalities exist in the income of different school districts. The same condition prevails on a higher level in terms of the difference between the States in percapita income and the relative proportion of the tax dollar spent on education.

West Virginia, for example, with a per capita income in 1957 of only $1,480 was spending $218 a year for every child in school. From the total State revenues of $285,996,653 the schools received over 36 percent, leaving less than two-thirds of every tax dollar for all the other State governmental services combined. Thus, if we were to try to match the per capita dollar expenditures of such States as New York or California we would more than exhaust our total revenue on schools alone.

According to figures compiled by the National Educational Association, the average per pupil expenditure among the individual States ranges from a high of $535 a year to a low of $164, with a national average of $340 per pupil.

This gross disparity in expenditure between our richest and our poorest States can be rectified only with Federal aid. For, to illustrate again by reference to my own State of West Virginia, even with proposed new tax levies and a statewide reappraisal of property, our school revenue per pupil would still be more than $60 below the national average and approximately $175 below that of New York State.

Mr. Chairman, I reiterate, these inequities can be redressed only with Federal assistance. Let us not be deluded by the ideas of a century ago, ideas which at that time had some validity. For we are no longer a loose federation of quasi-independent States. We are a nation of highly mobile people, a nation in which the welfare of one section is inextricably involved with that of all. And, as a nation, we have only one future, a future that will in substantial measure be determined by the degree of our devotion to the cause of strengthening our system of public education.

None of us is so naive as to believe that money alone will solve a deep-seated and pervasive cultural problem such as this. But the extent to which we will apply our financial resources is, in part, a measure of our purpose in other respects as well. It is not encouraging, therefore, to note that we spend almost as much on alcohol and cosmetics and more than twice as much on advertising as we do on education.

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Such a disparity would indicate that as a society we are in need of a fundamental and soul-searching reevaluation of our aims and values. It is one of the sadder ironies of our time that this reexamination of education in a democracy has gained national support largely because of the educational achievements of a police state. As Dr. Robert Hutchins recently said:

History will smile sardonically at the spectacle of this great country getting interested, slightly and temporarily, in education only because of the technical achievements of Russia, and then being able to act as a nation by assimilating education to the cold war and calling an education bill a defense act.

We might as well make up our minds to it. If our hopes of democracy are to be realized, every citizen of this country is going to have to be educated to the limit of his capacity. And I don't mean trained, amused, exercised, accommodated, or adjusted. I mean that his intellectual power must be developed.

In closing, Mr. Chairman, I would suggest, in keeping with the tenor of Dr. Hutchins' remarks, that we approach our duty here not in the spirit of a cold war with Russia but in the spirit of fulfilling our own destiny as a democracy.

This means that the fundamental issue in education as in government today is no less than the assessment of the basic values of a democratic society. The making of the image of what we want to be, the determination of the kind of greatness we hope to achieve, these are the choices that confront us now.

The kind of greatness that we produce in the years ahead will be nurtured by the values that we as a society cherish and transmit, in large measure, through our formal education system. If we fail now, Mr. Chairman, to supply the means for the best system possible our children and grandchildren will have little cause to be grateful to us. At the foundation of our values is the principle which more than any other distinguishes American culture from the older cultures of Europe and from the new totalitarian societies. That is the extent to which we are guided by our faith in the dignity and integrity of the individual. This is the faith which states that man should live in the light of reason, be free to exercise his own moral choice, and develop to the full the latent possibilities within him.

As this faith is translated into the practical problems of our school system it presents a double-barreled challenge, the challenge of maintaining the equality of opportunity for all while, at the same time, stressing the achievement of excellence for those capable of it. The challenge is to maintain both quantity and quality in education, to expand the one and improve the other.

Many people of late, laymen as well as professional educators, have posed the problem in terms of a choice between quantity and quality, a choice between equality and excellence.

I say that we have no choice. We must, if we would survive, have both.

We must have a generally informed citizenry capable of making intelligent decisions on matters of the public good. And we must have gauge learning that our modern, complex society demands. This is the chief problem in the field of education before us.

the highly trained specialists as well as the men and women of broadThe early and unanimous endorsement of S. 2 by this subcommittee over which you preside this morning, Mr. Chairman, will help significantly in providing the means to solve this problem. We must have an educational program to match our times.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator YARBOROUGH. Senator Randolph, I want to thank you for this most excellent statement. This is more than a statement in support of Senate bill 2. This is one of the finest papers that I have heard since I came to the Senate. It is an examination of many of the sources of American greatness, and you have so many fine paragraphs in this paper that I would have to stop and read it over again if I were to try to pick out the best ones. But there is one closing thought that you have in it that I think is worthy of special attention. That is where you point to this latter day debate, in which many of our professional educators and laymen and some of the business organizations are debating whether or not we can have quantity or quality. They seem to take it for granted that our economy will not stand the strain of giving an education to each person up to his or her educational capabilities.

I think it is part of our American heritage and aims that, to use a part of a sentence of yours here, we develop to the full the latent possibilities within each person. I think our economy can certainly stand it because, as you point out, 3 or 4 years back we were using only 3-and-a-fraction percent of our gross national product in the education of our youth. I think now that it is about 4 percent of our gross national product, spent in the education of our youth, and we spend so much more in the combined costs for alcohol, tobacco, and cosmetics. When we add all three, we spend so much more on those three luxuries than we do on education that there can be no doubt about the ability of our American economy to educate the youth of America.

Would you care to add anything else, Senator Randolph? This has been a very fine statement, a very fine state paper on what this Government needs to do.

Senator RANDOLPH. I am appreciative of the generosity of my colleague from Texas, and I would wish the record to show that Senator Yarborough has attacked the problem of education in his own individual efforts in many helpful ways. I recall that he is hoping for, and I know he is vigorously carrying forward, an effort to get legislation through in reference to educational aids to veterans of peacetime military service.

Is that not true, Senator Yarborough?

Senator YARBOROUGH. Yes, the measure is to extend to post-Korean veterans the educational programs of the GI bill of rights.

Senator RANDOLPH. You believe those programs should be extended to post-Korean veterans.

Senator YARBOROUGH. Thanks for mentioning that, Senator Randolph. We will resume hearings on that bill this week.

Senator RANDOLPH. Mr. Chairman, I know the pressure under which you and other Senators find themselves. I am grateful for the opportunity of having given this statement before the members of the subcommittee.

I am very, very delighted that I am privileged to have spoken on the morning when at least one of the very able educators of the State of West Virginia is to be heard. He, of course, will speak for an organization which he will identify, but it has been the responsibility of the members of the West Virginia House delegation, my

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