Senator MONDALE. Thank you very much.

The committee is in recess, subject to the call of the Chair.

(Whereupon, at 1:10 p.m., the Select Committee was recessed, to reconvene at the call of the Chair.)

TUESDAY, AUGUST 3, 1971

U.S. SENATE

SELECT COMMITTEE ON

EQUAL EDUCATION OPPORTUNITY

Washington, D.C.

The Select Committee met at 10:15 a.m., pursuant to call, in room 1224, of the New Senate Office Building, the Honorable Walter F. Mondale, chairman of the committee, presiding.

Present: Senators Mondale, Javits, and Dominick.

Staff members present: Francis A. Hennigan, Jr., minority staff director; Leonard Strickman, minority counsel; Donald Harris, staff member.

Senator MONDALE. The committee will come to order. This morning we will be continuing our hearings on quality in urban education. This morning we will be focusing on the whole compensatory education movement, and where it stands at this point.

Since both of these distinguished educators are from the State of New York, perhaps Senator Javits would like to introduce them. Senator JAVITS. I am very honored to be here today to greet Dr. Howe and Dr. Smith who are great authorities in this field, and our committee is honored to have you both. I am also very pleased that you are both New Yorkers.

I might explain that our mutual Governor is appearing upstairs before another committee of which I am a member, so if I have to leave, it will only be to hear him. That's just to explain in advance.

I am very grateful to you for appearing, and very pleased that such eminent authorities come from my home State. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator MONDALE. Thank you, Senator Javits.

Dr. Howe and Dr. Smith have agreed to testify without a long prepared statement. After the hearings are concluded today, you both might submit further written reactions to what it is that we are trying to better understand, and perhaps some of our questions will point up our concerns, and will submit responses that might help the committee in its efforts to grapple with this terribly difficult problem.

Dr. Howe, perhaps you will begin.

STATEMENT OF DR. HAROLD H. HOWE, II, VICE PRESIDENT FOR EDUCATION AND RESEARCH, THE FORD FOUNDATION, NEW YORK CITY

Dr. Howe. Thank you, Senator Mondale, and Senator Javits. It's very good to be here, and particularly with my former associate I will have to call him by nickname-Chuck Smith, who worked with me in the Office of Education for a number of years as my special assistant, particularly with concern for the problems of the large cities.

I would like to make some introductory and informal remarks. Perhaps the way to start them is to pick up two phrases, one which you uttered, Senator Mondale, and the other from Senator Javits. Senator Javits described Dr. Smith and me as "great authorities.” We are grateful for that, but I suspect that there is not a great authority on this very difficult subject. At least not an authority in the sense that there is a person who has comprehensive overview of all the detail and innuendo and practice which constitutes this field of compensatory education.

So I'd like to begin by disqualifying myself slightly in terms of being any great authority. In fact, I have to say that I have been out of the United States for 2 full years, working on education problems in India, and have not had the chance to observe in detail the activities that have developed under Federal legislation in the last 2 years.

So perhaps you have a good team to testify here today in the sense that Dr. Smith has been here and has detailed acquaintance with what is going on in many places, and can look at that side of things, and I can look at broader policy considerations.

You wrote me a letter, or your staff did, suggesting that I comment on three or four points. The broad intent of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and particularly Title I of that act, the compensatory education funding title.

Second, something about what has been achieved under the act. Third, what major problems seem to be. And fourth something about the problems of assessment, which in a way combines with the third heading.

I'll say a few words under each of these subheadings.

INTENT OF ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION ACT OF 1965

First of all the intent of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and particularly Title I. Of course, the legislation itself was very, very broad. It was in five major titles, and comprehended quite a spectrum of activity in elementary and secondary education. I won't comment on the remaining titles beside Title I, unless you direct our attention to them later on, but will jump immediately to the point that Title I, which provided upwards of a billion dollars a year in add-on money to local school districts in the United States was designed to make up for environmental handicaps of selected groups of children-children who research was showing at that time

were not being successful in schools, or to put it the way I prefer, children with whom schools were not being successful.

The explanation offered-and I think the explanation still held by many authoritative people is that the difficulty these children are having in schools grows from the difficulties that flow out of a poverty environment, and it was clear by the mid-1960's that very large proportions of our minority group people-blacks, Spanishspeaking people, others-found themselves in the category of coming from poor families and suffering these environmental handicaps. The theory behind the legislation was that it was possible by adding to and improving education services, and focusing them particularly on these groups of childen who were having difficulty in schools, to make them more successful in school.

At the time the legislation was passed' there was no broad educational prescription, no one had an automatic system that was guaranteed to work on behalf of these children. It was assumed that additional energy to provide a whole variety of different kinds of services and many examples were given in the course of testimony on the legislation-it was assumed that these add-on services, ranging from remedial reading activities, to added teachers, to special guidance services, to health services, to meals for children, to a whole shopping list of possible additional aids to make education more effective on their behalf-would somehow solve their problems.

And the Congress, and indeed I think the administration, did not presume to say exactly what combination of things ought to be tried or how they ought to be worked together to produce the desired result.

LOCAL SOLUTIONS

The legislation did, however, say a couple of very definite things. It said that the decision about what was going to be done in the schools was a local decision, and that the prescription to be made for any group of children in New York or Detroit or in a rural area, would be decided by the local school district.

So, again, there was no national prescription. And secondly, the legislation and I am picking out only two important points-said that there should be a concentration of these funds, that by various formulas that were worked into the administration of the program, funds should flow in a concentrated way to provide additional services to target groups and not be spread broadly among all the school population. The target groups being, of course children selected becanse of poverty considerations in their backgrounds.

This, in a very oversimplified way, was the intent of that major title, carrying over a billion dollars a year in the 1965 legislation. I think it has to be said also that as with any piece of legislation, there were compromises made that had to do with getting the legislation passed in the form that it took. There had been a long history in the Congress of efforts to involve the energies of the Federal Government on behalf of the schools, and on behalf of the school children, and it was by and large a history of failure with the exception of the National Defense Education Act.

You could trace it back on the Republican side to the time when Senator Taft was proposing school-aid bills back in the late 1940's and early 1950's. You can find it on the Democratic side in the Kennedy period when various bills were proposed. But all of these floundered.

The passage of the 1965 act was in a sense a very difficult balancing act, which I don't think we need to explore in detail, but it had characteristics about it which made it possible to pass it and which have made it difficult to administer.

BUREAUCRATIC RELATIONSHIP

It set up a whole new set of relationships involving the Federal bureaucracy, the State bureaucracies, and the local bureaucracies in education. And I use bureaucracies not as a term of condemnation at all, but as a word to describe the people involved in the administration of education affairs at the various levels of government.

The new set of relationships set up by the act, in which there was Federal responsibility for seeing that funds flowed in a certain way, State responsibility for approving projects carried through by local school districts, and local school district responsibilities for designing those projects in accordance with the legislation, created a brand new and very tricky set of relationships within which to work. This is still true, and I expect will so continue.

But I think those who are working within this set of relationships have moved, over this period of 5 years, from some very contentious relationships to some relationships which I think are considerably more constructive.

Well, these are some very broad comments on this matter of intent. What has been achieved? I am going to leave much of the detailed comment here to Dr. Smith and just point out some things that occur to me as a person who certainly has no comprehensive view of the United States in this regard.

RESPONSIBILITY FOR DISADVANTAGED CHILDREN

One thing that has been achieved is that as a result of this congressional action, we have put the matter of children whom schools don't serve well on the agenda of every school board in the United States.

There is a sense of responsibility about the problem which didn't exist before. And that sense of responsibility on behalf of these children I think is very broad and general across the country. That isn't to say the people have generally found the solution on behalf of these children, but if you look at the attitudes and actions of local school districts, let's say in the late 1950's and early 1960's, you find a singular absence of the kind of concern for the children of the poor and the children of minorities that now exists very generally. Senator MONDALE. Will you yield there? A few weeks ago, Dr. Marilyn Gittell, a political scientist, appeared before the committee; and I asked her, why is it that 45 years ago the central school systems were the envy of the country and were working so well, and today apparently teachers are fleeing central districts.