Education: How to Attract Attention

How to Attract Attention

A few minutes before 9 o’clock one night last week, the lights were dimmed in the grand ballroom of Washington’s Sheraton Park Hotel, and all eyes in the room focused on a large screen behind the speakers’ lectern. In a filmed talk, the President of the U.S. welcomed 1,782 delegates and 422 observers to the White House Conference on Education—the most prodigious meeting of its kind ever held. “We are,” said the President, “faced today with the grave problem of providing a good education for American youth.” How is the job to be done? During the next three days, the delegates were supposed to find some answers.

For months, they had been boning up. The 48 states, as well as Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, had held hundreds of local meetings involving parents and teachers, farmers and bankers, school officials and even governors (TIME, Sept. 12). From most states had come voluminous reports crammed with facts and figures that seemed to indicate a crisis in the nation’s schools. But in spite of all good intentions, the conference’s opening was not without some preliminary bickering.

Ten days before, the Roman Catholic bishops of the U.S. had issued a joint statement saying that the children in private and parochial schools “have the right to benefit” from any aid the Government might extend to the public schools. Glenn L. Archer, Executive Director of Protestants and Other Americans for Separation of Church and State, promptly denounced the statement as “artifice and studied nonsense.” Later the 100 delegates from the A.F.L. and the C.I.O. decided to raise a rumble of their own. The entire White House Conference, they said, had been “stacked” against federal aid to education.

166 Tables. In spite of all this, the delegates heard the President, listened to a speech by Vice President Nixon, and the next morning went to work. They had six broad topics to cover, and the mechanics of the conference were complicated. The delegates were divided up into 166 different tables. They talked for 2½ hours on the topic at hand, came to some sort of agreement, then sent their chairmen off to 16 other tables. These tables of chairmen proceeded to agree among themselves, and each one then sent its leader off to two final tables. From there the last two chairmen were appointed to draw up a report for the convention as a whole.

Inasmuch as the U.S. had been arguing about it for nearly 200 years, Topic 1—What should our schools accomplish?—was, at the least, ambitious. In his opening speech before the round-table discussions began, President James R. Killian Jr. of M.I.T. reported that he had received scores of letters urging the “strengthening [of] the teaching of science . . . more emphasis on high intellectual standards, more attention to the teaching of human relations, to remedial reading, character improvement, citizenship, spiritual education, hand-mindedness, our American heritage, teacher competence, foreign relations, foreign languages, money management, Asia, self-knowledge and sundry other fields.” Nevertheless, said he, the conference would have to cope. “People who disagree on the fundamental principles cannot easily agree on school budgets, or on much of anything else connected with education.”

Just About Everything. At 10 on Tuesday morning, the round-table discussions began. By that evening, the final report on Topic 1 was ready. What should the schools teach? Just about everything, it turned out, from the three Rs to respect for human values to “an awareness of our relationships with the world community.” As might have been expected, the conference sidestepped the question of whether religion should be taught in the public schools.

Topic 2—In what ways can we organize our school systems more efficiently and economically?—revealed the extraordinarily elaborate architecture of the U.S. school system. Some school districts are identical with the county, others with the city and others with the hamlet. Only one in eight has 40 teachers or more; some have thousands of pupils, others have only one or two. And 7,764 out of the 59,270 districts in the continental U.S. have no schools at all. Among the recommendations of the conference: more guidance from the state on population trends, expansion of the U.S. Office of Education.

As the days wore on, the delegates faced even more depressing statistics. After a special survey made by the conference steering committee, former Governor William Preston Lane Jr. of Maryland estimated that the U.S. now needs 203,000 more classrooms, will need an additional 170,000 by 1960. From their discussions, the delegates learned that new classrooms would not be easy to get. Though no state said that it could not possibly afford to build more schools, most reported that there was no “political determination powerful enough to overcome all of the obstacles.”

Among the obstacles discussed were obsolete building codes, state limits on school bonds, the almost total reliance on property taxes to support the schools, and the general resistance of most communities to raising taxes. The final report on Topic 3 suggested better information services within the states, the establishment of state planning commissions for public buildings, changes in local and state tax laws.

Searching Parties. The nation’s schools, of course, have more than one shortage. The conference’s steering committee reported that the U.S. needs 165,000 more elementary teachers and 40,000 more high-school teachers. Where will they come from? Among the delegates’ recommendations: recruitment of high-school students through Future Teacher Clubs and special Career Days; a review of teacher-training programs to make them not easier but more palatable; hiring former qualified teachers, raising salaries, relieving teachers of the nonprofessional duties that could be done by lay assistants.

Of all the topics discussed, none was more fundamental than the need for money. This brought the conference hard up against the ticklish problem of federal aid. Though President Eisenhower had come out for a limited federal program, he warned that “the responsibility for educating our young is primarily local.” Local responsibility, however, varies. In Minnesota, classroom valuations range from $467 to $169,736; in Arizona they jump from $15,761 to $2,123,809. Some states provide up to 86% of the total school budget; others contribute only 6%. Should the U.S. Government step in when the community has done all it can?

Demonstrated Needs. By a majority of two to one, the delegates said yes. But the type of federal aid the majority wanted was limited to school construction. Only half the delegates thought that the Government should help with operating costs, and all warned against any “deterrent to state and local initiative.” The Eisenhower Administration was apparently ready to agree. On the last day of the conference, Marion Folsom, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, conferred with the President and then called for a federal aid program for school construction based on the “demonstrated needs” of both state and community.

Never before had the principle of federal aid seemed quite so official. But this was perhaps not the main achievement of the White House Conference. True enough, the various reports were frustratingly vague. The discussions were so short that each topic received only superficial treatment. Yet almost every state had plans for further conferences: California’s Farm Bureau expects to sponsor 100 local groups; Idaho’s Legislative Interim Committee on Education intends to hold hearings all over the state; Missouri plans to hold 1,700 local meetings. The big gathering may have been nothing more than an attention-getting device, but that in itself was probably enough. “When we go home,” said Neil McElroy, Chairman of the President’s Committee for the White House Conference on Education and president of Procter & Gamble, in his farewell speech, “let us all in our different ways continue this work. A cause like this is so good that it should enlist our energies as long as we live.”

Report Card

¶ Gift of the week: $7,150,000 from the Commonwealth Fund (established in 1918 by the late Mrs. Stephen V. Harkness, widow of the oil tycoon) to ten university medical schools: to Harvard and Western Reserve $1,000,000 each; to Columbia, Cornell, New York University, Tulane and Yale $750,000 each; to Emory (Atlanta) $600,000; to Chicago $500,000, and to Southern California $300,000. Purpose of the unrestricted grants: to help the schools “institute or maintain creative programs in medical education.”

¶ In a chapel talk to his students, Brown University’s President Barnaby C. Keeney derided campus conformity. Said he: “Some day I should like to go to an informal student party and find one or two people in light grey suits or even in brown suits,” find a person who “did not have a striped tie on,” who wore a “variation on the chino [G.I.-type] trousers. Some day I should like to see a tidy dormitory room.”