Mr. BELL. In 1965, of course, was the start of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and you had to tool up for that which is understandable.

How can parental involvement in the education of their children be improved?

Dr. MONACEL. I believe parental involvement today in title I schools is probably as good as it possibly can be. Every title I school in the city of Detroit has a parental involvement body, a council. It also has a regional council representing all of the schools in that region.

In a definitive way they advise us as to the contents of the program as they see it, as it should be in their school. All of those considerations then are acted upon by the regional boards of education before the title I program, in this case, is developed. What I am trying to say is there is vivid and real interaction in our title I school community. I don't think it could be improved upon and sometimes it scares us because it does delay us somewhat.

Dr. WOLFE. I think that is a very important aspect and certainly it is a great problem in urban education because in a big city it is harder to get the community reaction that you can get in the small community or town. I would point out that the Detroit public school system is the only major city system in the country that is really and truly politically decentralized and the decentralization of Detroit really means instead of having one school system, we have eight or possibly nine separate school systems, eight of them with their own elected boards.

They have out in those regions considerable latitude in their class working with the Federal programs as well as the regular school programs and this allows them to have a much greater community involvement and we are very aware of that community involvement. I think that is part of the answer to getting parental involvement, community involvement in the schools of the big cities.

Dr. GOLIGHTLY. Congressman, one of the problems about involvement there is that it gives-or one of the advantages of involvement is that it gives us an opportunity to continue the educational process through the adult years. There is an amazing lack of understanding in a large part of our cities that ours is a representative democracy. Very often our citizens feel that democracy is always direct, of the town meeting sort. Therefore, we would have and we do have continual confusion in a big city.

But what we are able to do in our programs by having the parental advisory body is to let it be known that this is the representative body for parents at the school and then we go to the regional level and it is understood that this is a representative body and we get to the regional board and this is a representative body and then we get to the central board of education and our central board of education has 13 members, one each from eight of the regions and in the regions there are five members there and the person who is the chairman of that region goes to the central board, so there are eight from each of those regions plus five elected at large.

Then we are the representative body and we feel that through this participation we are getting over one of the fundamental principles of an orderly democratic society that it is a representative democracy rather than a direct democracy and that you cannot really have par

ticipation in a city like Detroit where there were in the 1970 census 1,513,601 people. You cannot run a school system at a town meeting level where half of that 1,513,601 citizens would say this is what we are going to do with your title I money.

So we feel that we have a great deal of participation. Dr. Monacel gets upset about parental participation, but I look at them as voters who will be there the next time we have a school board election.

Mr. BELL. How can the misuse in many of the areas of title I funds be prevented?

Dr. MONACEL. If we start with integrity, I think we would have the chief source of preventing misuse of Federal funds. Mechanically in the State of Michigan, the State department of education does have staff assigned to work with me and with Mr. Fort and with others and to, in fact, monitor, after signing off, our program designs. In fact, in a regularized way they do monitor our programs partially for the quality of the programs and to be sure, we are well within the rules and regulations of the law.

It is a difficult question, I believe, for Detroiters to answer. Even though we have endured several audit exceptions, we have a long history of not misusing title I funds. The audit exceptions we have had were on technicalities such as factors of direct and indirect cost factors to the school district.

Mr. BELL. What are the common elements of good title I programs? You mentioned the teaching element and the staff factor which is, of course, one of the elements.

Dr. MONACEL. Part of the data that you have received indicates the growth and we are very proud of that growth as we have stated earlier. To pinpoint precisely what are the exact mechanisms that make for a success is a very difficult thing to do. What we apparently have found are several things.

More people in the school, particularly in a title I school, more professional staff people. We have invented new staff roles such as reading specialists and school social workers assigned to the title I kids and their families.

In addition to that, the influx of material that is through title I gives us an opportunity to build a systematic approach in reading throughout the school, individualizing because you have a lower class size and at the same time systematizing what you are doing and using those factors that I believe Superintendent Porter mentioned the other day, emphasizing the design of performance objectives, finding devices whereby those performance objectives can be measured, and using standardized tests such as Michigan assessment or our test to test the basic skills only as a tool for the teacher of the child, to use criteria reference tests so that any given point in that child day or week or month the teacher knows where the child is and can plan and prepare materials for the child.

So people, materials, and systems seem to be the basic ingredients that we have found to be the cause of much of our success.

Dr. GOLIGHTLY. I think one of the things we have also found is the matter of attitudes. If you have not only people and material, but if you have people who simply respect the children, you don't have to like them, you don't have to love them, you simply respect them as human beings or as potential human beings or adults. I am of the opinion that they don't really become human until about 18 to 24, if

then, and that this is crucial, and this becomes possible when you are able to put more money into the school situation so that the principal or the teacher is not completely harried.

My own children go to schools where they have 38 to 42 kids in a classroom because this is supposedly a better income neighborhood and yet many of the children in that same school need help because they are victims of having moved into a better income neighborhood because there was better opportunity for the parents, you see.

Mr. BELL. Could you tell us at what grade level and at what age level you think title I funds are the most beneficial?

Dr. GOLIGHTLY. Since we concentrate in the elementary schools, I think that the emphasis on the basic skills at the reading level and the writing level and the math level, I think this is crucial.

Mr. BELL. First through fourth grades?

Dr. GOLIGHTLY. I would say first through seventh grade. We get people in universities who come in there reading at the seventh grade level, so I would say you need to push it up through the eighth grade. I think reading is crucial. You can't put all of education on the level of reading any more than you can on math. Some of our schools in Detroit show an interesting correlation. Where we have had a special program in teaching sixth grade mathematics the children tend to read better. It may be they read better because they have had success with mathematics and a pupil who reads better in reading will read better in math.

In a situation like that everybody profits and the child profits, too. Mr. BELL. Do you favor attempts to individualize the programs of remediation?

Dr. MONACEL. I think philosophically and pragmatically in Detroit 4 or 5 or 6 years ago we tried to move away from remediation, which is sometimes a self-defeating thing. I think we want our regular school program to be so strong that we have little need for remediation except in unusual instances.

In the early days of OEO our school district enjoyed some programing where the programing had to be after school and we found that when you work with children after school, most of that work became remedial work and was generally unsuccessful. We found much more success in strengthening the regular program.

Mr. WOLFE. If I may, Mr. Bell, I would not want to be too optimistic that we can do with remediation in a city such as Detroit because we have an exceedingly high transiency rate in our school. We pick up a great many children at all grade levels who have not been our charges until that time. Part of what I was mentioning earlier is our attempt to improve the education of these children as it will pick everyone up where we get him and we will try to bring him up to grade level and this infers a good deal of remediation all along the way.

Mr. BELL. Do you favor placing more responsibility and freedom in the hands of local districts as opposed to State and Federal Government?

Dr. WOLFE. My answer is yes.

Mr. BELL. Of course, that is the direction in which the administration is moving.

Dr. WOLFE. I think part of my answer to several of your recent questions

Mr. BELL. You don't have to go back on it. That is all right.

Dr. WOLFE. I won't go back on it. I think several of the questions you have had relate to something of which I am rather proud. We have a department, a division that works on our special projects and they are broader than title I, but that is a major part of it. Through their efforts and expertise and experience over the past several years I think we have developed a way of working with our separate regions, our communities, in getting real involvement from the community and the region, but at the same time centrally keeping that expertise that lets us watch those programs so that they don't go astray or that there isn't the opportunity for irregularity that you commented on earlier.

It is a very sensitive balance between how you control the programs centrally and at the same time permit real community and regional input. I would certainly not say we have licked all of those problems, but we are sensitive to them and the gentlemen who are here today from the division have a great deal of know-how to do that.

Mr. BELL. This next question is coming up in a number of States. What role do you feel the States should play in providing for education of children who are educationally disadvantaged?

Dr. WOLFE. I think we have to do all we can to educate every child, whether he is disadvantaged or not, and in many ways we don't always know just what educational disadvantageness is, but I think it is real and we have a general consensus of what we mean by that term itself.

I think the State has to pick up the challenge here to educate the disadvantaged and I think we have a pretty good record of trying to do that in our urban centers where frankly we perhaps pick up more than our share of those who are educationally disadvantaged.

Mr. BELL. Do you want to comment on that, Mr. Monacel?

Dr. MONACEL. In one direction Michigan is one of the few States that has designed programs for the disadvantaged under the State aid act, under the so-called chapter III program, which provides $11.5 million which goes into programs in title I schools and in some instances nontitle I schools in that those kids are identified only on the basis of the Michigan assessment test and are not identified through the mechanism of title I.

That kind of help from the State, I think, is obligatory and I am proud that our State is engaged in this kind of effort. If we are speaking about the general cost of educating children, I think we all agree here that through lawsuits across the country, including the State of Michigan, that there is inequity in the distribution of funds within our State certainly based on a differentiated property tax, based on many, many factors that produce by accident of birth lesser chances for a quality education for many children in our State.

Mr. BELL. You are speaking of court decisions relative to those in Texas and California. This is going to be a handicap. I don't know what the answer is, but I think a large part is greater State participation and greater Federal participation.

Thank you very much. You have certainly been very, very informative and we are happy to see the success you have had in this field. We hope we will be able to do our part in helping you continue your great

success.

Thank you for a great job, gentlemen.

Dr. WOLFE. Thank you for having us here.

Chairman PERKINS. Mr. Winford Miller, administrator, Migrant Student Record Transfer System, Little Rock, Ark., who will be ac

companied by Dr. Leo Lopez, Dr. Dale Hilburn, Mr. Vincent Serrano, Mr. Jesse Soriano, Mr. Emmett Spurlock, and Mr. James O. Click.

Can you all get at the table, gentlemen? If you can, I will appreciate it and then we can ask you these questions with some degree of together

ness.

Are there some other people that you brought with you who could sit in the chairs right behind you? I want to state on behalf of my colleague, William F. Ford from Michigan, that he wants very much to participate in this discussion with you and he is going to try to get back here. He is in a caucus and he will be here as soon as he can.

I understand you have some prepared statements. Your prepared statements will be included in the record at this point.

[Statements referred to follow :]

TESTIMONY OF LEO R. LOPEZ, CHIEF, BUREAU OF COMMUNITY SERVICES AND MIGRANT EDUCATION, CALIFORNIA STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

My name is Leo Lopez. I am California State Director for Migrant Children, and I am grateful for the opportunity to appear before you today on their behalf. With me are migrant education administrators from seventeen states, each of whom has come to your hearing this morning to speak on H.R. 69 by Mr. Perkins.

Because of limited time, however, only six of us will offer testimony.

We respectfully urge your support and passage of H.R. 69. It is the only proposal before the 93rd Congress that can save and maintain compensatory education for migrant children in 48 of this nation's 50 states. There is no need to mince words. This committee and the 93rd Congress are faced with two alternatives:

(1) You can, by passage of H.R. 69, guarantee the survival of a migrantchildren program which is one of our country's most significant educational and socially responsive achievements; or . . .,

(2) This committee, by failure to report out H.R. 69, can extinguish the brightest hope these children will ever have to escape from stoop labor to a better life.

To those of us who work with migratory children, there is not a shred of oversimplification in that choice.

It may be argued by some that the President's budget message to Congress provides a third alternative for sustaining the future prospects of migrant children : his proposal for revenue sharing and adjustments of categorical programs. But we would urge the members of this committee not to be misled by the myth of voluntary compliance: that is, local districts willingly-let alone wisely-developing and implementing programs from block grant moneys.

Those of us who have struggled to make migrant education a reality-and to keep it alive in the face of apathy, and even hostility-know from sad experience that consigning funds to local districts under revenue sharing means, inescapably, sacrificing an efficient, coordinated system of proven value to the piecemeal destruction inherent in a splintered program.

To us, revenue sharing relegates an incontestable national priority-the proper education of migratory children-to the whim of a local superintendent who may be hostile to the program. Or he may give it a low priority, spending a fraction of the entitlement for window dressing and diverting the remainder to something that better suits his fancy.

Block grants would mean abandoning a systematic, scientific method of determining impacted districts-as well as monitoring migrant flow-and substituting, in its place, open-handed disbursements to virtually anybody and everybody who claimed a migrant population. Even assuming-in a torrent of optimism-that local districts had the inclination and the expertise to do the job, revenue sharing would still leave the future of migrant children to a fiscal policy closer to geographic roulette, or pin-the-tail on the donkey, than to duty of care for a human resource.

Historically, federal funds are appropriated for specific purposes, and this has been a wise decision. You amended Title I of ESEA, 89-750 out of awareness and conviction that certain children would derive only minimal benefits from ESEA Title I as it was originally conceived.