FEDERAL AID TO EDUCATION

MONDAY, APRIL 21, 1947

UNITED STATES SENATE,

COMMITTEE ON LABOR AND PUBLIC WELFARE,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON EDUCATION,

Washington, D. C.

The subcommittee met at 10 a. m. in room 357, Senate Office Building, Senator George D. Aiken presiding.

Present: Senators Aiken (presiding), Smith, Ives, Thomas of Utah, Ellender, and Hill.

Also present: Senator Cooper.

Senator AIKEN. The committee will come to order.

From where we left off on the 9th of April, we will continue with the hearings on Federal aid to education and the several bills providing for Federal aid to education.

We have a great many witnesses who desire to be heard. I think we have 27 slated for this week and more witnesses desire to be heard next week, and we will hear them then.

We will hold hearings every day this week and expect to conclude them sometime during the next week. There will be provision to hear all those who have something material to contribute to the committee for its consideration when it finally goes into executive session to consider bringing out a bill at this session.

The first witness this morning is Dr. John K. Norton.

Dr. Norton, will you take the stand and proceed with your testimony, first identifying yourself and telling us in whose behalf you are appearing this morning?

STATEMENT OF JOHN K. NORTON, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Dr. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, my name is John K. Norton. I am a professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and I guess I represent myself. I certainly do not claim to represent my university.

Senator AIKEN. Very well.

Dr. NORTON. The testimony that I would like to present deals with need for Federal aid for education and also with the need for legislation of the type proposed in S. 472, Eightieth Congress.

It seems to me that several considerations indicate that these needs exist. They are very great needs and I will deal with them in turn.

First, there should be Federal aid for education because denial of educational opportunity and gross neglect of educational opportunity

are far too prevalent in the United States today. The disparities that exist in the support of education are both shocking and astonishing and I have quoted here in my statement, which I will not read in detail unless you want me to do that, a number of quotations from different national commissions that have studied this matter intensively, and I would like to have all of those quotations appear in the record of this hearing.

Senator AIKEN. Your entire testimony, or the transcript of what you could say, will be printed in the record and the committee will be glad to have you summarize it, bringing out the high spots at this time, and if you have particular material which ought to go in the record and will contribute to the committee's consideration of the bill, we will be glad to put that in, too.

Dr. NORTON. Thank you, Senator.

I think I will read one statement that deals with this problem because it seems to me so fundamental:

Education can be made a force to equalize the condition of men. It is no less true that it may be a force to create class, race, and sectional distinctions. The evidence indicates clearly that the schools of the United States which have hitherto been regarded as the bulwark of democracy may in fact become an instrument for creating those very inequalities they were designed to prevent.

We must deal, therefore, with a situation in which opportunity is a birthright attached to certain families and certain geographic areas. A child born in those favored places has opportunity plus; one born outside has opportunity minus.

That statement can be made with complete evidence that it is true. It seems to me a shocking one for a great democracy like ours.

That is attested by many facts. The large number of adult illiterates; the large number of adults who have never gone to any kind of school; the 2,000,000 children that we enumerated in our last census, age 6 to 15, who were not in school at all; the rejections in the draft which made it necessary for General Hershey to say: "With great pressure on our manpower resources, it is regrettable that we lost so many disqualified who had to be rejected because of illiteracy." The fact that such a thing has to be said seems to me to present a problem that we cannot neglect longer.

If millions are denied the opportunity even to learn to read and write, they doubtless are also denied the health education, the preparation for democratic citizenship, the vocational training, and the other forms of education which are essential for successful and happy living under modern conditions.

Those denials of educational opportunity contribute to, and are contributed to by a series of social ills; therefore the second point that I would like to emphasize to the committee is that there should be Federal aid for education because the social ills which result from denying decent schools to millions endanger the whole Nation. Perhaps we can telescope this point by pointing out that you cannot quarantine ignorance. It either stays where it originates to harm the communities that do not maintain adequate educational opportunity, or it travels all over the country through the mobility of our population, to plague areas that frequently maintain good schools.

It is a startling fact, for example, that of 17,000,000 young men who were examined by the Selective Service, 5,000,000 were rejected

about 1 in 3. When we realize that in the States that are spending least for education, and generally have the least adequate school systems, over half of the young men examined were rejected, we have what to me is an exceedingly disturbing fact and one that we should respond to immediately.

At the bottom of page 4, of my written statement, and continuing on page 5, I have given a number of quotations by national com-, missions as to what they see in this situation, including the social ills resulting from inadequate schooling. I think I will read only one that sums it up:

The national waste due to lack of adequate elementary instruction for millions living in some regions of the Nation is rivaled by that resulting from failure to develop a substantial part of our most promising human talent in all regions.

Nearly every study that has been made in the different States, not only the poorer States, but of the more favored States, has shown that somewhere around half of our outstanding young talent does not have full educational opportunity. These are young people who rate among the highest on intelligence tests or marks. They undoubtedly should go on to college in order to have their talents capitalized, but they do not get the opportunity to have the schooling that they should have. They are prematurely eliminated, often in the high school and if not, then at the end of high school.

So we sum up this second fact that these gross inequalities in educational opportunities have social ills that affect us all, and in such a world as we live in today, I wonder if we can afford long to be weakened by these ills.

Third, on page 6 of my written statements, I have shown that there should be Federal aid for education since the gross inequalities in educational opportunity which exist today are primarily due to inequalities in the financial support of education. There probably will never be an adequate remedy of this situation until the Nation takes account of this fact.

These tremendous inequalities in educational support stem right from the fact that there are great differences in financial ability of the States.

I have one or two charts that I would like briefly to present to you. They are part of a large number that were made available as a result of a nation-wide investigation and this one here [indicating] gives a profile or a picture of the financing of education in the country. There are about three things that that chart shows. First, it shows that there is a shocking disparity in the levels of the financial support provided education. At one extreme are school systems that provide $6,000 annually for every schoolroom or every group of 30 children, and, at the other extreme, those that provide less than $100 a year for a whole classroom.

Now, I don't need to dwell upon the fact that it is not possible to provide a qualified teacher for a year, with the other necessities of supporting a decent education for $500 or even $1,000. I do not know how far we would have to go up on this chart before we would all agree that there would be enough for a decent educational opportunity.

But here, in a word, this chart shows that there are 60-to-1 differences in the financial support of education. Let us remember, we

have not dealt with the children not in school at all. I do not know how much difference there is between the educational opportunity of a child that has $6,000 annually back of the classroom he is in as opposed to one who is not in school at all.

Senator HILL. The members will find these charts on page 40 of this booklet entitled, "Unfinished Business in American Education." Dr. NORTON. In that booklet it is presented in slightly different form. The red parts of the chart there on page 40 indicate what would have to be done to bring all school systems up to the median level of support, $1,600 per classroom.

Senator AIKEN. Is this an up-to-date chart, Doctor?

Dr. NORTON. The dates were for the school year 1939-40, Senator. I want to say a word about the validity of the figures in just a moment. Senator ELLENDER. You say, on the basis of 30 pupils?

Dr. NORTON. Yes; our definition of a classroom unit is approximately 30 pupils in enrollment. It would be 27 in average daily

attendance.

Senator ELLENDER. How is that $6,000 distributed? You say you have gone up to $6,000 and down to $100.

Dr. NORTON. When you see a school system at this level, it means that in this particular school system, for every group of 30 children, there is $6,000 a year available for the support of their education. Senator ELLENDER. And the lowest?

Dr. NORTON. One hundred dollars for every group of 30 children. Senator ELLENDER. Now, what does that cover? The school building, the land?

Dr. NORTON. All current expenses. It does not cover the cost of the school building or debt service. That is just for the teachers' salaries, the supervisors, the superintendents, books, fuel, the janitors' salaries, pension systems and all of the other current expenses. It does not include expenditures for new school buildings and debt service.

Senator AIKEN. That means when you drop down as low as $100 per classroom that probably means $300 for a room containing 90 pupils.

Dr. NORTON. It could mean that. We did, in getting our data from all of the school districts of the United States, actually have districts reported in which there were over 100 children per teacher. If they had $100 per classroom unit of 30 pupils they would have to have 120 children under one teacher in order to have a total of $400 available, but that sum would have to cover not only the teachers' salary but all of the other expenditures. Obviously then, $100 per classroom unit of 30 means either a very short school term, a terribly underpaid teacher and an underfinanced school district, or else a classroom that has an impossible number of children in it. Even then the amount available for a year, $300 or $400, is a pittance and will not usually claim a good teacher. If he is a good teacher he is in an impossible situation with 90 or 100 children to take care of.

Senator ELLENDER. Doctor, what prompted the use of 30 pupils as a median?

Dr. NORTON. Because that is the median for the country. We accepted the judgment of the country in that respect.

Senator SMITH. What figure do you work out as the median figure you are aiming at to equalize $6,000 on the one hand and $100 on the other? About $1,000 or $1,500, something like that?

Dr. NORTON. No; the median as indicated here is just about $1,600. You notice here the 50-percent point. All of the children are represented here from zero to 100 percent. If you go over the 50-percent point, it falls just beyond $1,500 or about $1,560.

Senator AIKEN. But that median would not be applicable today. That is a prewar median.

Dr. NORTON. That would not be applicable in current dollars but if you take what is being expended for education today and reduce it in accord with the rise in the price index, then you have in purchasing power pretty much what is shown on this chart here.

We might pause just a moment

Senator HILL. You mean the proportion would remain the same? Dr. NORTON. Yes; the proportion would remain about the same. In fact, here is an up-to-date chart. I think, probably, these are the most up-to-date figures on what we are spending in the United States today because they were collected from the State superintendents of public instruction by telegram about a week ago and I would like to ask that this chart be entered in the record.

Senator AIKEN. The chart may be received.

Dr. NORTON. If you will look at it a few moments, you will note first that this is not on a classroom basis but a per-pupil basis. The black line is what the various States were expending in 1939-40 per pupil. Then just below the black line we show what each State spent in 1945-46 per pupil (white bar) and then the cross-hatched part indicating the value of the 1945-46 expenditure in 1939-40 dollars. Running out here, you see, it is a little uneven but the general pattern is the same as you have in the first chart for 1939-40.

Now, you will notice here, for example, that New Mexico in 1945-46 spent less in dollars per pupil than in 1939-40 and when you reduce that, on the basis of the price level, it comes down even lower in purchasing power.

New York does somewhat better. In 1945-46 it extended the total expenditure per pupil out here [indicating] in dollars, but if you deflate those dollars in terms of purchasing power, the dollars will be almost the same as 1939-40. Now, you can follow down and you can see there is a pretty close correspondence between the black lines and these cross-hatched lines. This is another way of saying that in purchasing power most of the States have increased very little their per pupil expenditures for education since 1939-40. These figures I am giving you are for the school year, 1945-46.

I am sure we could say without any debate, and I know you are acquainted with the situation in the country, that the schools are in a far worse condition today than they were in 1939-40. I do not have to rehearse for the committee the elements that make up the teacher crisis at the present time. Briefly, there are not enough qualified teachers and there is not in sight enough qualified teachers to staff the classrooms of the country.

So, from the evidence available, I would conclude that these charts that I am showing you, based on 1939-40 data, can be accepted as