Education: Lobby Lashed

Few Washington lobbies are more persistent than that which represents the nation’s teachers. Mostly public servants, they have plenty of political sophistication and are well aware that few people can resist any sort of appeal in the name of Education. Many a pedagogical eyebrow raised, therefore, when that great politician and school-lover Franklin D. Roosevelt last week gave the education lobby an unexpected tongue lashing.

In the course of signing a $132,732,000 supply bill for the Department of the Interior, the President took note of a provision allotting the maximum $14,483,000 appropriation authorized for Federal aid to vocational education under the George-Deen Act passed in June 1936. This was 10,000,000 more than the President recommended in his budget message. It was also contrary to the recommendations of a special advisory committee headed by University of Chicago’s Floyd Wesley Reeves, which the President appointed in September to sift pending educational legislation.

Lashed the President: “Much of the apparent demand for the immediate extension of the vocational education program under the George-Deen Act appears to have been stimulated by an active lobby of vocational teachers, supervisors and administrative officers . . . who are interested in the emoluments paid in part from Federal funds. . . . Evidence was read into the records . . . indicating that much of the impetus behind this movement emanated from a single, interested source.”

These strong words fitted no one better than the American Vocational Association composed of 15,000 vocational educators and administrators, whose Executive Secretary Lindley Hoag Dennis has been energetically pushing the George-Deen appropriation from his Denrike Building office. Denying that A. V. A. was conducting a “lobby,” Secretary Dennis attributed any undue pressure to enthusiasts back home.