EDUCATION LEGISLATION-1963

TUESDAY, JUNE 25, 1963

U.S. SENATE,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON EDUCATION OF THE

COMMITTEE ON LABOR AND PUBLIC WELFARE,

Washington, D.C.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to recess, at 11 a.m., in room 4232, New Senate Office Building, Senator Wayne Morse (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Senators Morse, Clark, Yarborough, and Randolph.

Committee staff members present. Stewart E. McClure, chief clerk; Charles Lee, professional staff member of the subcommittee; Michael J. Bernstein, minority counsel; and Ray D. Hurley, associate minority counsel.

Senator MORSE. The hearing will come to order.

Before I call our first witness, I want to announce for the record that members of the subcommittee have indicated that they may wish to submit written questions to you, Mr. Commissioner. In the event this occurs we would like written answers, and I shall hold the record open long enough for you to provide them.

This applies also, may I say, to representatives of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and to Secretary Celebrezze. It will not be necessary for Secretary Celebrezze to come before the subcommittee on Thursday next. Senator Prouty, however, may submit to him some additional questions for the Secretary to answer for the record; and any other member of the subcommittee who may wish to file any questions under the same proceeding is privileged to do so.

We had planned to recall Secretary Celebrezze so that Senator Prouty could ask him the questions in person, but Senator Prouty, in keeping with his spirit of cooperation, said that he thought all that would be necessary would be to get from the subcommittee the authority to ask any questions in writing, which has been granted the Senator.

On Thursday, then, our last witnesses in these hearings will be Admiral Rickover, Dr. Mumford, of the Library of Congress, and Dr. Sammartino, president of Fairleigh Dickinson University.

I shall announce, on Thursday, the period of time during which the record will be kept open for the receiving of supplemental statements by witnesses who have already testified, either in rebuttal form, or as additional material which they may wish to put into the record, to supplement earlier testimony.

Today, we are honored to have with us Commissioner Francis Keppel, U.S. Commissioner of Education, accompanied by Dr. Peter

P. Muirhead, Assistant Commissioner and Director of the Office of Program and Legislative Planning of the Office of Education.

I have in front of me, Dr. Keppel, the very detailed and lengthy statement of your testimony, and a series of exhibits and supplemental material.

The documents will be made a part of the record.

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. FRANCIS KEPPEL,

U.S. COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION

Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, I am grateful for this opportunity to present to the Subcommittee on Education my support of the National Education Improvement Act of 1963, which embodies the administration's program for the improvement of educational quality and for the increase of educational opportunity. I appreciate the attention and consideration which your subcommittee, Mr. Chairman, has given to the problems and challenges confronting American education. I look forward to the publication of your comprehensive hearings on this bill because I know they will give us all an extremely valuable reading on the needs and prospects of American education.

The challenges that confront us today are the result of rapid changes that have taken place in our society in the last few decades and even the last few months. The need for more and better education grows increasingly apparent with every fresh breakthrough in research and technology, with every social and economic change, with every new international development. As a result, our progress in education has become a matter of deep concern to the Congress, as well as to every State, community, and crossroads in America.

I am convinced that the proposals embodied in S. 580 are directed to meeting educational needs basic to the solution of individual and national problems. The specific provisions for meeting these needs are prudently conceived, practical in approach and appropriate in scope for Federal action. Each of the proposals is related to the others; each will contribute to a strengthening and expansion of our schools and colleges, our universities and other centers of learning. our libraries and our laboratories, and to an extension of educational opportunities to additional numbers of students.

The nature of the proposals in S. 580 and the importance of the program for the economic growth of the Nation, through the inventiveness, adaptability, and skills of its manpower, suggest the need for a restatement of the policy of the Federal Government with relation to education. It is a privilege to be able to suggest the outlines of this policy today, using references to S. 580 to exemplify the points to be made.

Such a policy has to be seen in the setting of our unique educational structure and tradition. Pluralism is a national habit of mind: in education it is embodied in our institutions. There is consensus that our schools and colleges must be strong enough financially and intellectually to be free from any kind of political or social domination. Though we want them to be responsive to the requirements and wishes of the clientele they serve, we want above all to be sure that

and students. We well know that such pluralism brings variety, and at any given moment produces differences in goals and standards. Believing in the free marketplace of ideas, we welcome and encourage differences of opinion and variations in institutional style. As far as I can sense our national mood, there are few who believe that we should give up our decentralized pattern of education. There may be debate on what part the Federal Government should play in education; there is no debate on whether it should direct what is taught to whom and by whom. Such direction we simply do not want, and will not permit.

The goal of pluralism, however, with its related limitation on direction of curriculums or personnel, does not remove responsibility for education from the Federal Government. It only sets boundaries within which it must work. In a complex, technological society that lives and grows by innovation, education cannot be considered solely as a service to the individual in the cultivation of his talents and intellect. It is also an area of essential public investment in economic growth and national security. Educational policy is inexorably linked to equality of opportunity, to full employment, to economic growth, to international trade, to foreign policy. For the Federal Government to neglect the instrument of society best adapted to develop its greatest resource the intelligence of its people would be as foolhardy as to neglect its responsibility in national security. The Government must have a policy and a program; the question is not whether to have them but what policy and what program should be adopted. As the President stated in his January 29 message on education, the policy should be "selective, stimulative, and where possible transitional" S. 550 is the result of an assessment of the present state of education in meeting the Nation's needs. It is based on the dual Assumptions that the national interest requires the maximum development of human potential, and that the personal interest of every citizen requires equality of opportunity. In contrast, the facts are that our educational institutions and our States, despite valiant efforts, are not meeting the standards set by these dual assumptions. Consider our loss of talent because of limited educational attainment: One out of every three students in the fifth grade now drops. out of school before high school graduation. Only 2 of every 10 now graduate from college.

Thirty percent of the high school seniors in the 80-90 academic percentile of their class and 43 percent of the 70-80 percentile fail to enter college.

Consider the social costs of the close correlation between unemployment and low educational attainment:

One of every 10 workers who failed to finish elementary school is unemployed today, as compared to 1 out of 50 college graduates.

In March 1962, persons of 18 years and older who had not completed high school made up 46 percent of the total labor force. Such persons, however, comprised 64 percent of the unemployed.

Consider the inequality of educational opportunity and attainment

in the Nation:

Nearly 70 percent of the young white population have graduated from high school, but only about 40 percent of our nonwhite population have completed high school.

Of our adult population, 25 years and older, 6.2 percent of whites and 22.1 percent of nonwhites have completed less than 5 years of school.

Almost 12 percent of young white adults (age 25-29) have completed college, while only 5.4 percent of this age group in the nonwhite population have done so.

While 11 percent of the total population is Negro, Negroes make up only 3.5 percent of all professional workers. Consider the barriers to college education because of low family income:

Median annual family income is now $5,700. The average annual student cost of attending college is now estimated at approximately $1,480 for public and $2,240 for private institutions. The cost of one student in college for the median family requires well over 25 percent of the income each year. Consider growing higher education needs for facilities compared to actual expenditures:

By 1970, we will have 7 million students in our colleges and universities, nearly 3 million more than we have today. This will require $2.3 billion a year for facilities-over a billion dollars more than we are spending today for this purpose.

By 1970, we will need to graduate 7,500 Ph. D's each year in the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering if we are to continue our economic growth and preserve our military security but in 1960 we graduated only 3,000.

Consider, finally, the changing nature of our manpower requirements and the rising educational levels necessary to carry on the work of the Nation:

The fastest growth of our labor force is that of highly trained professional manpower requiring 16 or more years of education. Since 1952, jobs in this category have grown from 4.5 to 7.5 million.

Technician and semiprofessional manpower requiring 1-3 years of postsecondary education is the second fastest growing category in our labor force. In the last decade over 2 million new jobs were created here a growth of 40 percent.

Jobs filled by high school graduates rose 30 percent while jobs for those with no secondary education decreased 25 percent in the past decade.

The methods proposed in S. 580 to help our institutions to meet the needs shown by these facts, so that a future report to your committee can show substantial progress, are stimulative in nature. They are based on the assumption that the individual State or institution is best qualified to decide how it should proceed to meet the purposes set by the Congress. By selecting certain programs, and by providing matching grants to stimulate new solutions to problems, the Federal Government's policy is designed to strengthen the hand of State and local institutions and to encourage them to adopt programs that will meet national goals. Matching grants and loans are generally here proposed. The long history of such programs in other areas-medical research, highways, the preservation of natural resources-shows that programs of stimulation of local and State activity can accomplish national purposes without bureaucratic direction and loss of personal