The Camels Nose Under the School Tent

Mr. Freeman, formerly Research Director of the Education Committee of the U.S. Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, was one of the Committee of Four assigned by the Commit-tee for the White House Conference on Education to prepare an advance factual report on school finance and federal aid. This article is condensed from an address before The Civic Federation, Chicago, October 31, 1956.

The crisis in educational accomplishments in the United States has been observed by many persons. President Harold W. Dodds of Princeton University, for instance, has said: "High school graduates no longer have as firm a grasp on the basic ‘three R’s’ —with all that they imply — as they had a quarter century ago."

Three out of every four fresh­men entering the University of Nebraska in the fall of 1955 were not prepared for regular college English courses.

Rudolph Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read remained on the best­seller list for 37 weeks.

History has become a thing of the past in many public schools ; geography, an unknown and unin­habited territory.

U.S. News and World Report re­lates: "Many students [in Euro­pean countries, including Russia] at 16 have acquired an education that compares with that of an American college graduate of 20 or 22 years."

The Educational Testing Service at Princeton found that 71 per cent of a group of prospective teachers of elementary arithmetic have a long-standing hatred of the subject. They drop it in high school as soon as allowed, avoid it in college, and return to teach an­other generation to detest it.

In the past five years, engineer­ing degrees fell to less than half in the United States while the Soviet Union was doubling its out­put of engineers.

Many see this crisis as due only to a lack of funds. And they feel that this can be cured by federal aid.

Five Fallacies

The case for more finances for the public schools is commonly based on five beliefs:

 1.         "The schools are being dis­criminated against in the alloca­tion of public funds."

The fact is that education has for many years been the largest item of public expenditure in the United States, next to national de­fense. Comprising about one-third of all state and local government expenditures, it is gaining on the other public services. Between 1900 and 1955 public school enrollment doubled, but school costs in price-adjusted dollars increased more than twelve times. The plain fact is that school funds have consist­ently risen faster than enrollment and are continuing to do so. The schools are not being discriminated against.

 2.         "The schools are now receiv­ing a smaller share of the national income than they used to."

 The fact is that expenditures for public education in 1955 were 3.8 per cent of the national income — 4.6 per cent, if we leave out war-connected expenditures — as com­pared with 1.5 per cent in 1900. The United States spends not only more money but also a larger share of the national income on educa­tion than any other country of record, according to the World Sur­vey of Education by the United Nations.

 3.            "The shortages of teachers and classrooms are getting worse and the schools are falling behind."

The fact is that the number of teachers in the public schools has consistently risen faster than the number of pupils. The teacher-pupil ratio has been:

 1 : 36.7 in 1900

 1 : 30.1 in 1930

 1 : 26.9 in 1955

Much of the teacher shortage is due to inefficient use of the avail­able teachers. We have tended to limit rather than extend the serv­ices of good teachers, in contrast to other professions. Despite the declining financial rewards of a college education as compared with the manual trades over recent dec­ades, teaching has been doing better than other professions in attracting candidates; and last year only 1.2 per cent of teachers in public schools left to accept other employment.

As to classrooms, there are many serious shortages all over the na­tion, but they can and will be met if we will avoid waiting for Santa Claus or Uncle Sam to provide them.

4.            "The schools are being man­aged efficiently and are giving the most education for every dollar —but they are not getting enough dollars."

Since we are investing more money in education than in any other public undertaking except national defense, we should seek the cause of unfavorable results in how the money is being spent rather than in the amount we are spending. Dr. Clarence H. Faust, president of the Fund for the Ad­vancement of Education, recently said that, as compared to the need for buildings and teachers and money for expenses, our school sys­tem "needs even more to find ways of making better and more effec­tive use of its resources for the major purposes of education." Many communities are not willing to tax themselves more heavily for what today’s schools are giving their children, yet nonpublic schools — despite their tuition charges — have been expanding three times faster than public school enrollment.

5.             "The states and communities lack the fiscal capacity to take care of the school needs. Federal aid is necessary to provide adequate school support."

The fact is that there is no fed­eral aid except that taken from within the borders of the 48 states. The Education Committee of the President’s Commission on Intergovernmental Relations found no state economically unable to sup­port an adequate school system, and concluded that "federal aid is not necessary either for current operating expenses for public schools or for capital expenditures for new school facilities." At the White House Conference on Edu­cation, the advance factual report of the Committee of Four on school finance and federal aid was altered before it was laid before the par­ticipants, with some of the ques­tions changed in such a manner as to make it difficult to vote against federal aid. Yet the 1,800 Confer­ence participants found that "no state represented has a demon­strated financial incapacity to build the schools it will need during the next five years." Though the citi­zens of even the low income states are not anxious to receive federal school aid, the Governor of pros­perous New York pronounced in favor of federal aid.

It appears that the sponsors of federal aid have far more in mind than the $400-million-a-year initial program proposed. Their real pur­pose is to get a foot in the door, to get the principle of federal respon­sibility for the schools established, and then prove in subsequent years that the amounts were far too small. Beardsley Ruml has already proposed that the federal govern­ment contribute $31/2 billion or more a year to the schools.

Regulation Accompanies Subsidy

It would be naive to assume that the federal government would spend several billion dollars a year for any purpose and have nothing to say on how the money is to be spent. Sooner or later federal ad­ministrators would suggest that schools conform to their ideas of how they should be organized and administered. This is what has happened in all other major fed­eral grant-in-aid programs, as the amounts increased. History teaches that political power inevitably fol­lows the power over the purse.

Judicial opinion has already been expressed on this point, as a matter of fact. The United States Supreme Court, in 1942, pro­claimed:

            It is hardly lack of due process for the government to regulate that which it subsidizes.¹

A Fateful Step

Federal aid in even small amounts, then, is but the first and fateful step in the nationalization of the public schools. And the dominant philosophy among these school administrators is just the opposite of improvement in educa­tional standards and a restoration of learning in the schools. Instead, it is less emphasis on teaching the basic skills and more hours de­voted to the social graces.

E. Smythe Gambrell, as presi­dent of the American Bar Associa­tion, last year declared his belief that federal aid to the public schools could ultimately bring the destruction of freedom in this country; that it would be nothing short of a national calamity for the public schools to become de­pendent upon federal aid.

President Eisenhower, while the head of Columbia University, once said about the proposal for federal aid for schools: "Unless we are careful, even the great and neces­sary educational processes in our country will become yet another vehicle by which the believers in paternalism, if not outright social­ism, will gain still additional pow­er for the central government…. Very frankly, I firmly believe that the army of persons who urge greater and greater centralization of authority and greater and greater dependence upon the fed­eral Treasury are really more dan­gerous to our form of government than any external threat that can possibly be arrayed against us. I realize that many of the people urging such practices attempt to surround their particular proposal with fancied safeguards to protect the future freedom of the individ­ual. My own conviction is that the very fact that they feel the need to surround their proposal with legal safeguards is in itself a cogent argument for the defeat of the proposal."

Again, in 1956, President Eisen­hower warned of "the growth of a swollen bureaucratic monster gov­ernment in Washington, in whose shadow our state and local govern­ments will ultimately wither and die."

So while we hasten to attempt to cure the educational plight we are now in, we must not in our concern about a competitive race with Russia take steps making tragic prophecy of Abraham Lin­coln’s warning that "if this coun­try is ever destroyed, it will be from within." What we must guard against is perhaps not so much the Soviets as our own tendency to yield to expediency instead of fac­ing up to problems.

Education and the State

Once the State has accepted full responsibility for the educa­tion of the whole youth of the nation, it is obliged to extend its control further and further into new fields: to the physical welfare of its pupils, to their feeding and medical care, to their amusements and the use of their spare time and, finally, to their moral welfare and their psychological guidance. Thus universal education involves the creation of an immense machinery of or­ganization and control which must go on growing in power and influence until it covers the whole field of education and embraces every form of educational institution from the nursery school to the university.

Christopher Dawson in The Commonweal, January 25, 1957