" Glaring Inequalities"

In most civilized countries the national treasury pays the bills for public education. The U. S. has given the States an area larger than Italy in land grants for schools, today contributes some $54,000,000 a year for vocational, agricultural and home economics instruction. But U. S. public education in general, costing $2,000,000,000 a year,is the affair, not of the Federal Government, but of the individual communities and States. Last week President Roosevelt sent to Congress a momentous report which recommended that the U. S. begin to support the elementary and secondary schools.

In 1931 a Hoover Commission, leery of Federal control of the schools, vetoed Federal aid, even though it found some sections of the country too poor to afford a decent minimum of schooling. But Depression dramatized the "glaring inequalities" in U. S. educational opportunities. Hundreds of schools closed, thousands of rural children were entirely without schooling. The U. S. Government was forced to use emergency relief funds to relieve the emergency in education. By this year it had spent $2,426,124,204 to keep schools open, build school buildings, teach adults, help youth in the National Youth Administration and CCC. Meanwhile, the National Education Association had sponsored the Fletcher-Harrison Bill to appropriate first $100,000,000, later $300,000,000 a year, for education.

Two things blocked this bill. One was the size of the appropriation. The other was the opposition of the Catholic Church, which has been most vociferous in denouncing Federal control of education. But the pressure for Federal aid had become so great that a year ago President Roosevelt appointed an Advisory Committee on Education to study the matter. As its chairman he chose University of Chicago's hard-working Floyd Wesley Reeves, now on leave from the University as personnel consultant to TVA. Last week the Committee made its report, removed 'the two stumbling blocks.

The Committee recommended that the Federal Government appropriate $70,000,000 for the school year 1939-40 and raise the ante until it reaches $199,000,0001n 1944. Total amount of the appropriation proposed for the six years is $855,000,000. The bulk of the money ($40,000,000 the first year, $140,000,000 the last) would go for elementary and secondary education, the rest for school building, training of teachers, adult education, State educational administration, rural libraries, educational research. The money would be distributed among the States according to their needs. Federal control of what the schools teach would be barred.

Said the Committee: "Glaring inequalities characterize educational opportunities and expenditures for schools throughout the nation. The level of educational service that can be maintained under present circumstances in many localities is below the minimum necessary for the preservation of democratic institutions."

Signers of this report included three men who, as members of President Hoover's Commission, had voted the other way. Two of them were University of Chicago's Professor Charles Hubbard Judd and American Council on Education's George F. Zook. Most significant about-face was made by the third, the Rev. George Johnson, director of education of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. For the Committee had won Catholic support of Federal aid by recommending that States be allowed, if they chose, to give part of the Federal money to parochial schools.

Two days after the report was published, the proposal to aid parochial schools had raised a small but ominous cloud. Said fiery Professor George S. Counts of Columbia's Teachers College at a convention of the Progressive Education Association in Manhattan: "I think that is a very dangerous and vicious recommendation, an entering wedge to destroy the public-school system."

But in Washington a committee of the National Education Association, after seeing President Roosevelt, indicated that the President would support his Committee's recommendations. And in Congress, Senator Harrison prepared to amend his Federal aid bill to conform to the Reeves proposals.

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