bill-research. However, I should like to emphasize the importance of all other aspects of the bill under consideration. The improvement of quality in education requires the discipline of systematic and consistent effort on the part of educational leaders. Research is the most effective tool to evaluate this orderly process. The lag in the use of research is largely the result of lack of funds. Two of the major requirements, trained research staff and climate of acceptance, we have today, but without financial support the research program lags far behind demand for development. Colleges of education today orient efforts toward the improvement of quality with renewed vigor. Staff members are restless to expand present research to secure data which can become the basis for further development of quality. Permit me to list here a few examples of research projects in the College of Education of West Virginia University which have been done in the last year or are currently in progress which need expansion but funds are not available to support further activities: T. J. Brennan, "A Study of High School Dropouts"; E. C. Kennedy, "The Improvement of Reading Skills for College Bound High School Seniors"; B. H. Bailey and Stanley Ikenberry, “Educational Expectancy Levels of Parents for Their Children"; A. N. Hofstetter and Charles Ritchie, "Competencies Needed by Supervisors of Instruction"; R. H. Neff, "Program Requirements for Educable Pupils"; W. V. Wagner, "Criteria for Admission of College Students into Teacher Education"; and K. A. Cook, "Analysis of Contributions of the College of Education of West Virginia University." Other research efforts could be enumerated, but these, no doubt, are exemplary of other graduate institutions, both large and small. In addition to the yeoman efforts being exerted within individual institutions, there are studies of a national and regional character such as Project Talent, a nationwide inventory of a half million talented students, the study of college teaching methods in academic classes and research in curriculum revision. Many other examples could be cited if time permitted. The improvement of quality, quantity, and educational opportunities in America requires systematic and consistent effort based on reliable and valid data. Research is the tool by which such data are secured. The climate of acceptance among educational leaders and academicians for this mammoth task is entirely affirmative. The educational environment presently has two sides of the triangle, staff researchers and permissive environment. The passage of S. 580, the National Improvement Act, will help to establish the base to carry forward this educational obligation to the youth of America. Senator RANDOLPH. Now, I believe we were thinking in terms of Dr. Zacharias speaking next. STATEMENT OF DR. JERROLD R. ZACHARIAS, PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, CAMBRIDGE, MASS. Dr. ZACHARIAS. Yes, sir. I would like to have read into the record a four-page statement that you have. But I would like to summarize it and talk freely about it. Senator RANDOLPH. That will be done. Dr. ZACHARIAS. The truth is that the subject of education is so big that one is likely to talk about it with waves of the hand and refer to the forest and look at the forest. But I am a woodsman in it and I guess I am really coming before you, it occurs to me, to urge that in some parts of the forest, we learn how to stop using hand axes on particular trees and start learning how to use chain saws and bulldozers. Education can easily get way from us, and other countries can run away from us if we are not careful. I am a professional experimental physicist and I am here, strangely enough, to support title III of this bill, because I believe that mathematics and science, improvement in mathematics and science, will not be enough. CURRICULUM REFORM Ever since 1956 the country has been going very strongly on massive programs of curriculum reform. A massive program of curriculum reform sounds expensive until you put it in the total context of what kind of industry you are affecting. Since the education industry is itself a $30 billion a year industry, when you spend $1 million a year here or there on some particular course, you are really not spending a great deal. But you are putting in from the point of view of education a massive effort. The National Science Foundation, every since 1956, has been supporting an ever-increasing program in curriculum reform. But that is only mathematics and the sciences. What we dare not do is let. these sciences be out of balance, let the curriculum be out of balance. So what I want to do is to urge the passage of appropriate measures and appropriate appropriations so that the Office of Education can provide massive educational reform, as has the Science Foundation in the sciences and mathematics. Now, the Office of Education has done a first-class job on modern foreign languages. But that is not enough. What you have to do is to press on what I call the three R's, which are, what just occurred to me, reading, writing, and reasoning. You have to work on history, literature, all of the studies of man, music, the arts, and so on. This cannot be done unless the Office of Education, with its new commissioner, Francis Keppel, has some kind of freedom with which to go ahead. I think this bill, under this title, provides the freedom with which to start that kind of program. CURRICULUM REFORM NOT FEDERAL CONTROL Now, there is one funny issue that always keeps coming up. It came up this morning. It is that people say, once you reform the curriculum with Federal funds, then you are cramping the styles of the States. I think quite the opposite is the case. Suppose there were no Federal money for curriculum reform. You would find that the massive programs and the control was not in the hands of the people, but was in the hands of the book publishers, which is where it is now. Take the subject that I know best, namely, physics. The high schools of this country had well over 50 percent of the physics classes out of one textbook, which I considered a terrible misrepresentation of the subject of physics, with no reflection of the attitude that you, Senator Randolph, expressed just a moment ago, namely, that a profes sional scientist lives his daily life by never saying anything that he knows is wrong. He may be in error, but he never can do it deliberately. You cannot make science that way. So when the Federal Government supports curriculum reform, it is merely adding materials, making materials available to the States and the State supervisors of education have the privilege of choosing & particular curriculum reform or not choosing one from several. So this is a very different situation than control. This is the freedom that you get by having good materials available. You are not going to get good materials until, in my view, the Federal Government puts money into and makes it possible to handle it, into detailed curriculum reform. In my view, no single State, not even the sovereign State of New York-budget of $2.2 billion per year-would be capable of making the kind of curriculum reform that we are talking about. There are just not enough people in New York State who would be willing to peel out of their laboratories, leave their researchers, leave the new books they are writing, leave their scholarly desks, and get into curriculum reform for the sake of one State. I promise you, I know that they will do it for the sake of the country. So take the State you have just been discussing here, West Virginia, or Arkansas. Those States could not, even if they had the best will in the world, could not of themselves just get up and make substantial curriculum reform. It takes drawing on the entire Nation and that is what the Federal Government is for. That is all. Senator RANDOLPH. Doctor Zacharias, I wish to compliment you on, not in a manner of pleasantry, but to express my genuine admiration for the vigor with which you have spoken, especially calling attention to the inability, even in the more populous and so-called richer States, to do this job by themselves. This is something that is very important to stress. We know in West Virginia we must be joined by others if we are to do this task. You mentioned Arkansas and West Virginia. These are the only two States which between 1950 and 1960 lost population; approximately 7 or 72 percent of our people in these two States, for one reason or another, lessening our population figures. We hope to, in a sense, if not in the last few months, certainly in the next few months, arrest this outmigration. But we are conscious of the need for a nationwide approach which [will include certainly our State, West Virginia, and other States. The subcommittee will consider most carefully the contents of your stateDent and your observations thereof. Thank you, sir. Dr. ZACHARIAS. Thank you. (The prepared statement of Dr. Jerrold R. Zacharias follows:) PREPARED STATEMENT OF JERROLD R. ZACHARIAS, PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY This section of S. 580 which is now before Congress, deals with changes in cooperative research program which are necessary to expedite a massive proof curriculum research and development. Programs of this sort represent a new technique for the improvement of the ality of education in our elementary and secondary schools. I do not mean ly that they are new to the Office of Education--they are new to the field education itself. The first such massive program was that of the Physical. ence Study Committee, with which I have been intimately involved since it ** initiated in 1956. In the intervening years the pattern has been applied, *th great success, to most of the sciences and to mathematics, and it is now bning to be applied to other subjects as well. I do not mean to suggest that educational research and development is some. new. Every time a scholar or a teacher sits down to create a new course,. te a new textbook, or to design materials for a new pedagogical approach, is engaged in educational research and development. But traditionally this 4 of activity has been carried on primarily by individuals or by small local By a massive program I mean one which concentrates over a rela-fely short period of time the Nation's best scholars and teachers in any given 1: which makes available to them all the supporting resources they can use; and which charges them with the responsibility for creating or recreating the whole range of tools for the schoolroom: the text, the films, the television pro grams, the laboratory, the teacher's guide, the test and examinations, the collateral reading-anything and everything the teacher can employ and the student can utilize. This was the procedure that was employed successfuly by the Physical Science Study Committee, and that has since been employed successfully by mathematicians, biologists, chemists, and engineers. This concentration in the sciences is no accident. Massive programs of educational research and develop ment are expensive at least, they are expensive in comparison with the sums that have traditionally been spent in such activities. And up to now, the only source of financial support to any extent commensurate with the needs has been the National Science Foundation. This is not to say that the Office of Education has not made substantial contributions. In the field of modern foreign languages a major program has been successfully carried out by the Office of Education, and and it has already made a modest beginning in the field of English. But in relation to the range of activities of which it is capable, the Office of Education has not yet been empowered to move with a vigor equal to that displayed by the National Science Foundation. Meanwhile, Congress has responded to the success of NSF activities by ap propriating year by year larger and larger sums for NSF course content pro grams. What this bill asks is that Congress support a major effort to extend this enormously successful program to those areas which the NSF cannot cover, and which all of us believe are at least as important to young American students as the sciences. These massive programs buy for the schools the kind of quality in education that they can achieve in no other way. The past generation has seen major changes in the problems of education, and in the resources that can be brought to bear in solving those problems. To begin with, we ask more of education. The United States is leading the world into an era of rapid change, social as well as technological. The community from which the child enters school will bear little resemblance to the community in which he will spend the years of his maturity. It is no longer the principal role of early education to make him comfortable within a stable social and economic pattern; today his schooling must prepare him to deal with new patterns, and indeed to help create those new patterns in such a fashion that they will continue to meet American ideals and American purposes. But if we ask more of education, we have also learned how to derive more from it. Over the past few years, we have learned how to learn and how to teach in new ways and with new confidence in our own technology. Education by television and programed learning are the most spectacular of recent achieve ments, but the solid advances in the sheer knowledge about the learning process are perhaps even more significant. We have reached a stage where education is so demanding that it must command the skills of the best scholars and teachers, supported by the best students of the learning process. But we cannot put such men and women into every American schoolroom-there are not enough of them in any single subject to staff a moderate-sized suburban community. Instead we must invent some method by which these people can concentrate their efforts and skills and can embody them in forms which will then represent them in the schoolroom. This is precisely what massive programs of curriculum research and development undertake to do. Materials are produced that enable students to learn. But they can also be used to enable a teacher to teach. The existence of the materials, warranted in quality by the stature of the men and women who created them, serves as a focus for the training of teachers-and without well-trained teachers there is not likely to be any school system worth speaking about. There is good reason to maintain that these massive programs of curriculum research and development are an essential prerequisite for any intensive program of teacher training, whether it is carried on locally or nationally, in existing institutions or by means of television. There is still one more important aspect of this process which, I think must be mentioned. We are trying, in this country, to balance an urgent national need for quality in education with our abiding faith in the values of local control over education and our suspicions of any measures which centralize that con trol in the Federal Government. At times we fear that the two are irreconcilable. Here, they are not. Let me quote from a booklet recently published by the Syracuse University Press, as part of its series on the economics and politics of public education: "Even though the Physical Science Study Committee's course materials, used as the PSSC prescribes, discipline teaching, Federal support does not control the PSSC's new course and never has. Although most of the money for the new program came from a Federal agency, the National Science Foundation, NSF, has concerned itself solely and continually with the feasibility of the undertaking, not with its content. Feasibility has a hard master; it insisted that every major stage in the new course be spelled out, judged by its appropriate peers, and revised on the basis of their judgment. A national sampling of physicists did just that at the MIT conference in December 1956 * * *. "The course passed its final test when it found private commercial publishing, supply, and distributive houses willing to take over further management of the new materials. While large Federal grants made this uniquely thorough schedule of testing possible, no Federal employees had taken part in the evaluation. Scientists, classroom teachers, and educational businessmen, acting in their private capacities, had passed judgment on PSSC * *. The new course did not control-it disciplined. And its discipline was candid and open-put to the test at every step." I have recurred upon several occasions to the costliness of massive programs, and I would like now to put this matter into perspective. Forgive me if I refer still again to PSSC; it is the course with which I am the most familiar, and which has the longest history. Education in the United States costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 billion a year. Of this physics education in the secondary school-the subject with which PSSC dealt-represents less than 1 percent. Let us say in round numbers, that the cost of physics education in secondary school is about $100 million a year. I am sure that is not the right number, but I am equally sure it is not very far wrong. PSSC cost about $6 million. But that is not an annual cost-it is a total cost. If I assume that PSSC affects physics teaching for 20 years (and that is more conservative than I like to be), we can say that PSSC cost about $300,000 a year over that period. Let us be ultraconservative again, and let me assume that PSSC has improved the learning of physics by 10 percent. I know it is more than that, and anyone will tell you so, but I am one of the fathers of PSSC and I must be modest. At 10 percent, PSSC is worth $10 million a year to American education, and all that at a cost of $300,000 a year. That is a 30-to-1 return on your money, and I don't know where you can do better than that. When there are profits of that size to be made, I am not content to limit them to science and mathematics. As a scientist, I am gratified that the National Science Foundation is doing so superb a job in bringing new quality into science education, and that Congress has recognized this continuing accomplishment by continuing support. But as a scientist, I fear an educational system in which science education is of high quality, and other education is second rate. We need to give at least as much attention to social studies, to the humanities, to languages, as we are now giving to science. I say "at least as much," but I, myself, believe we must give more attention to these fields, for they are all much more difficult than science, to teach and to learn. And let me be sure to make it clear that I believe them to be as important as science and technology, and in all but the most material respects, even more important. The proper agency for curriculum research and development in those fields is the Office of Education. It has already made modest beginnings, and has earned the respect of the academic world and the world of education. Spectfully urge this committee to give it the support that will enable it to make a real impress upon this most important work. I re In closing, let me also urge the immediacy of the need. Successes in science and mathematics have stimulated scholars and teachers in other fields, and they are anxious to get on with the work. Their enthusiasm is not likely to survive a long period of repeated disappointments, and it is a hard fact that at present, Marsh Paul E., and Gortner, Ross A., "Federal Aid to Science Education: Two proFrams"; pp. 86-87; Syracuse University Press, 1963. |