Aid Without Control

Federal aid to education is no longer a slogan but rather a massive fact. According to Oregon's Representative Edith Green, sponsor of the Administration's $1.5 billion college-aid bill, the 85th Congress alone considered 683 education bills.* The current federal outlay for 689 education programs amounts to $2 billion a year, dispensed by about 40 separate agencies. "This makes it impossible," says Mrs. Green, "for any member of Congress to know what is being done." The aid comes with strings--not so much crippling directives as warping pressures. Since it traditionally gives aid only for specific purposes. Congress tends to produce crash programs that enrich one segment of education at the expense of others. A classic case is the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which has poured millions into "exotic" language study but not one cent into training college teachers of French, German and Italian. To some educators, who foresee more federal aid as inevitable, all this argues for a smart, strong referee between Congress and U.S. education--something more effective than the U.S. Office of Education, which chiefly administers legislated aid.

Potent Prototype. As it happens, the U.S. has a potent prototype: the National Science Foundation, which has quietly remodeled science teaching throughout the nation's schools and colleges. In fiscal 1963, N.S.F. aims to spend $360,800,000--including $111,600,000 for education.

By uncommon tradition, Congress will unhand the money (or most of it) without strings--grateful that a sophisticated outfit knows how to spend it.

A unique cross between a private foundation and a federal agency, N.S.F. goes back to 1944. when President Roosevelt asked Physicist Vannevar Bush how to muster the nation's wartime inventiveness for "a fuller and more fruitful life" after the war. Bush, who headed the showcase Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war, recommended a federal foundation with a dual function: to set national science policy and nurture neglected basic research. Set up in 1950 as an independent agency within the executive branch, N.S.F. is governed by the 24-member National Science Board, appointed by the President for six-year terms, plus Director Alan T. Waterman, a onetime Yale physicist and researcher (radar), who has been on the job since he was first picked by President Truman.

Outdoing Ford. Waterman, now 69 and due soon for retirement, underplayed the policy-making role originally envisioned for N.S.F., which might have meant "controlling" such vast appliedresearch agencies as the AEC and the National Institutes of Health. (He supports a more fitting policy overseer, the proposed White House Office of Science and Technology.) Instead, he energetically took up N.S.F.'s charter role of fostering basic research throughout the "mathematical, physical, medical, biological, engineering and other sciences." When it opened in a deserted Washington school, N.S.F. had a staff of 40 and a budget of $3,500,000. Now it occupies a block-long white marble building on Constitution Avenue, has 673 employees spilling into four other locations. And since Sputnik jolted Congress into boosting its budget by nearly 300% in one year, N.S.F. has geysered money--$261,700,000 this fiscal year alone, against the mighty Ford Foundation's $161 million.

In fiscal 1962, N.S.F. is spending $17.9 million for fellowships of all kinds, another $85.1 million for 2,126 basic research grants to 400 colleges, universities and nonprofit laboratories. To the tune of $45.8 million, it is beefing up research facilities everywhere--a new solar observatory atop Arizona's Kitt Peak, the U.S.

Antarctic research program, an oceanographic expedition to the Indian Ocean, and Project Mohole's celebrated attempt to drill through the earth's crust.

School Reforms. Unforeseen in 1950, the most impressive impact is on education. Though it works through colleges and universities, N.S.F. has played an indispensable part in reforming school math and science. Joining private foundations, it solidly backed university scientists in the mid-1950s when they began helping the schools after decades of disdain. The scholars produced new thematic courses geared to the real structure of subjects, most notably the high school physics course designed by M.I.T. Physicist Jerrold Zacharias' Physical Science Study Committee. N.S.F. has so far put some $5,000,000 into the project, which now involves 20% of all U.S. high school students taking physics.

N.S.F. has similarly launched 897 summer and year-round institutes to retrain some 35,935 college and high school teachers. And this summer at 154 locations, from Manhattan's Hayden Planetarium to Minnesota's St. Cloud State College, N.S.F. will muster some 7,500 "high-ability" tenth-to twelfth-graders for a rich taste of college science.

In all this, says Director Waterman, "the foundation has had constantly before it the accepted American principle of local control of education." Until recently, N.S.F. has done little to strengthen universities themselves, but this week it will start paying out $5,000,000 to supply undergraduate students with research equipment, from microtomes to computers. Already a campus can get a no-strings bonus amounting to 10% of its previous year's N.S.F. money with no more than an accounting of how the money was spent.

Significantly, N.S.F. has long since interpreted the "other sciences" in its charter to include the social sciences--anthropology, archaeology, economics, linguistics, social psychology, the history and philosophy of science--many of which come close to the humanities. If it did begin aiding humanities, N.S.F. would be out of bounds. But given the growing interdependence of all knowledge, and N.S.F.'s remarkable record for dispensing federal aid without federal control, some wonder what might happen if N.S.F.'s charter were amended to include the simple phrase "related subjects."

* Covering everything from extension of old programs and training for handicapped veterans to appropriations for ROTC and the War College. By last month, the current Congress was already pondering 495 education bills.

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