I also might add that I think the variance would be greater even between States than between this high and low, as I could find it in the State of New Jersey. If schools are to consider equal educational opportunity, they must receive equalizing assistance in public money on a national basis for both building and expenses so that the flow of wealth can be brought back to the poor community that has shipped its raw materials into the centers of wealth. Equalizing factors cannot be set up on aid to entire States as a whole. Mr. F. E. Pitkin, director of research, Massachusetts Federation of Teachers, offers this as his State's formula for building aid. He takes one-quarter of the building cost times the fraction, the enumerator being the average equalized value per pupil for the State over, as a denominator, the average equalized value per pupil for the town, equals construction grants. This formula should not be construed to mean that Federal building aid should adopt these figures, but it does show a need for adjustment for equalizing aid within a State. Many communities in the State of New Jersey cannot, in the span of the next 6 years, finance adequate school building programs. If this is true of New Jersey communities, it is certainly true of many communities in poorer States. The time for building these needed schools is short. The building work is already 2 years behind the need. How can this Nation meet its desperate need for schools unless the Federal Government recognizes its obligation to assist in this hurried gigantic undertaking? Can the Congress of these United States allow the pages of history to be written showing that they favored social security and Federal housing, but that they would not help provide housing necessary for the education of the people's children, the leaders of the next Congress, if you please? Senator THOMAS. Thank you, Mr. Gifford. We appreciate your coming very much. Mr. McLaughlin, please. STATEMENT OF FREDERICK C. MCLAUGHLIN, EDUCATION DIRECTOR, PUBLIC EDUCATION ASSOCIATION OF NEW YORK CITY Mr. MCLAUGHLIN. Senator Thomas, I am Frederick McLaughlin, education director of the Public Education Association of New York City. Senator THOMAS. What is the Public Education Association? Mr. MCLAUGHLIN. It is a citizens' group which has been functioning up there for about 60 years, solely concerned with the improvement of the city's public schools. We find, of course, that the city's public schools also become State problems in certain cases, and in cases such as the present one, they are partially Federal problems. This citizens' group, I might say, has been extremely active not only in improving the schools but in channeling school problems back to the people to arouse the support of the people and the interest in education. It has had a rather unique history. Recently a national committee was set up under Roy Larson, which you may have heard of, and is patterned somewhat after the PEA in New York City, which is one of the pioneering groups in this field Senator THOMAS. Who were the great founders 60 or 70 years ago of this organization, do you remember? Mr. MCLAUGHLIN. Well, there was a Mrs. E. C. Price. There was a Mrs. Henderson, whose husband just recently died, who was a rather well-known figure in New York City. Probably most of them have been forgotten. This thing came about in the early 1890's. At the present time we have a number of people, such as Margaret Lewison and Samuel Lewison, who have been very active in it. chairman of our school administration. people who have been extremely active. Winthrop Rockefeller is We have a dozen or more Strangely enough, the active people on this committee have children mostly in private schools, and it is their contention that the public schools ought to be good enough so that everybody's children can go to them, even those who can afford private schools. That seems to be the motivating force of this group who are interested. On this question of school buildings, I am supplementing what Mr. Hecht has said on the national scale, by giving you some of the facts concerning one school district in this country. It will also contrast with the presentation you have just heard of a small district-this is New York City, which has about 1,000,000 children in its schools, more than about 15 States. That is one twenty-fifth of the total school children in the country. We had a State survey made last year by the Commission of Education. Some of the facts found, I think, are pertinent to the present investigation. We found, for instance, that we needed 1,800 new school-building projects in New York State at the present time, which would cost about $1,338,000,000. Of this estimated total, approximately $600,000,000, or nearly half, were listed as emergency needs and should be built and ready for occupation by September 1950. New York should be constructing public schools at about five times the present rate, even if we were to meet the long-run needs, to say nothing of these emergency needs. If the State which heads the list of all States in terms of per pupil wealth finds itself in this condition, it is not hard to imagine what the situation is in some of the other States of the Union. Now almost half of these needs in the State of New York are found in New York City where this same survey found building needs totaling more than $500,000,000, $680,000,000 of which about $331,000,000 were listed at that time as emergency needs that should be completed by 1950. The factors which have aggravated this situation in New York are, of course, applied to the country at large. To get back to one or two of them as they affect New York City, first this greatly increased birth rate which developed in the postwar years. All of us are familiar with it. In New York City we have found that we have to find housing for 215,000 additional children by 1953. That equals the entire elementary school population of the city of Philadelphia. These are elementary figures completely. The high schools will be affected, but not until some 5 or 6 years later when this peak reaches them. It represents an increase in New York City between 1946 and 1953 of approximately 50 percent of the total elementary school population. It has been this startling and largely unexpected increase which has thrown school building plans in New York City, and probably most other cities and States of the Union, into complete confusion. New York City has completed a thoroughgoing analysis of its school housing problems as a result of this increased birth rate, and finds that we will need 153 new school buildings, just to house this additional elementary school population. I would like to say that probably this is the most thoroughgoing study of school population trends, and its impact on the building needs of the city that has been done in the United States, so far as I know. It is an enormous statistical job, and it is available to anyone who has need of it. It was done under the auspices of the board of education in New York City. I think plans were made to build some temporary structures where we found that peak loads of students will come along and then pass, and they have made some elaborate studies of this whole business finding, for instance, in that Parkchester development in New York, the Metropolitan Insurance Co. project, that there are peaks and troughs in this business, where you have a housing project, the new families moving into it will have very shortly high birth rates and large numbers of children. Then that will begin to fall off. For instance, in the prewar years in Parkchester the birth rate was far above the city average, whereas at the present time that birth rate has fallen down and it is quite distinctly below the city average, so they have taken all those factors into consideration, and have tried to get at the very minimum we would need to meet this problem in New York City by building some temporary buildings to take care of these overloads, and then abandoning them. I hope we do not follow the pattern of abandoning buildings the way we did in Washington after the First World War. That, however, is at least the present plan. The $272,000,000 is the amount of money we would need, that is the basic minimum, and it does not make any allowance for the old or obsolete structures, which is quite a problem in itself. I would like to say a word about that. We have in New York City 891 school buildings in use at the present time. School experts have found that in order to keep up this school plant, you should replace school buildings on the average of about every 50 years, at the end of 50 years. Some of them may run for 75 years. Others may have been poorly constructed and we find need to replace them in much less than 50 years' time, but following that as an average we have to build 19 new schools each year in New York just to keep even. That does not take into consideration this new population which I mentioned. At the present time, because of the depression and the war years when most building stopped, a good deal of it did, we have now gotten so far behind that we need to replace 229 elementary schools alone. It is estimated that if we do not do anything more about it than we are doing at the present time, inside of 15 years more than half of the buildings in New York City will be beyond this obsolete period of 50 years in age. Three hundred or more than one-third of our schools-and this documents again what Mr. Hecht said are nonfireproof or are only partially so, and it is only through elaborate precautions, many of which interfere with a good educational program, and a lot of good luck, that we have not had a fire disaster in New York City of magnitude. Some buildings are four or five stories high, and only have stairways to get out. They have built fire stairways on the outside in some cases, but it still is a serious situation in a great many of our old schools. There are wooden timbers throughout those old schools. In some of our buildings,- -we have 18 in operation that were built before the Civil War. We have five of them that are more than 100 years old. These, I might add, in New York City have outside. toilets, that is they have to go down and outside of the building. They have got a little building built out there with the most primitive kind of facilities, and we still had five of those at the last survey, which was made a year and a half ago. I think one is due to be replaced this fall. There will be four left. I have made this statement at a board of estimate hearing in New York. "If the United States had had to fight this past war with the kind of obsolete factories and industrial plants that we have to teach our public school children in, we would probably all be subjects today of the German Reich." I think that is a fair statement of where we are with our school building program in the United States. The third factor, of course, in the picture is the additional costs which have thrown all of our postwar plans out. In New York City the board of estimate in 1946 provided $30,000,000 to build 23 new schools. That was the plan that had been drawn up during the war. The estimates stated made plans for building 23 with $30,000,000. With the bids and contracts which were let, it was found that only 12 schools could be built with this money, and they had to be modified considerably, and all the expensive ones were dropped. Postwar building costs have risen. The last figures I saw they had risen 131 percent over the 1940 cost. These enormous capital needs of our public schools must, of course, be placed against the city's wealth and financial conditions. In common with most cities we have a debt limit imposed by the State constitution. We are not permitted a bonded indebtedness, except for certain revenue-producing projects such as subways, of more than 10 percent of the total property valuation of the city. Although property values in New York City have risen about 7 percent since 1940, they are still considerably under the property values listed in New York for 1930. That means, though our income is up, of course, in common with the rest of the country, we still have a borrowing capacity in New York City of less than we had in 1930, which makes this problem the more acute. Despite enormous investments in transportation and other public service enterprises necessary in New York City, schools have received. a greater share of the bonded debt than the average of four other cities in the country exceeding 1,000,000 in population. We have invested nearly double their percentage of bonded indebtedness in public schools if public service enterprises were excluded such as docks, subways, and that sort of thing. For the 6-year period 1937 through 1947, leaving out the four war years, 31 percent of New York City's average bonded debt outstanding was for public schools. I cite this merely as evidence of the fact that the city has not neglected its schools for other enterprises, or failed to do what it was constitutionally able to do. At the present time only 19 States, as Mr. Hecht said, have plans for assisting localities, and New York State is not one of them. I want to say a word about that in a moment. The Public Education Association has not studied patterns for distributing Federal aid for public school construction. I think Mr. Hecht has covered that rather adequately. We do feel one point should be made, and I think Mr. Hecht also made that point which is the United States Office of Education and the State educational authorities should be kept in this picture. We feel that school buildings are as much a part of the school program as the teachers and other parts of the curriculum, and therefore school buildings should be designed and built by school men who know what their problems are and who make the building an integral part of the whole education process. There is a second factor which we would like to bring in. We would like to see the bill bave a compliance clause which would compel the various States in the Union to set up a State-aid program for school construction. We have introduced or had introduced a bill last year covering this problem. We think that the States should participate, and we would like to see some equalization formula involved. The previous speaker mentioned one, and it sounds fairly adequate, but be that as it may, we are not taking any particular stand. We would be glad to see any bill come through. It is obvious to us in New York that even with full State aid, we would not be able to meet the problems in the State of New York, and certainly not in the city. I think that the only way probably we will be able to meet this pattern is with some aid from the Federal Government. We urge and hope very much that this committee will back such a bill, and that the Congressmen will pass it. Thank you very much, Senator Thomas. Senator THOMAS. Thank you. Dr. McClurkin, please. Will you state your name and what you represent for the record, please? STATEMENT OF W. D. McCLURKIN, PROFESSOR OF SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION, PEABODY COLLEGE, NASHVILLE, TENN. Dr. MCCLURKIN. My name is W. D. McClurkin. I am professor of school administration at Peabody College in Nashville, Tenn. Until the war I was a city school superintendent. Since then I have been in college teaching. I am secretary-treasurer of the National Council of Schoolhouse Construction, and am authorized to represent the council. Senator THOMAS. Tell us about Peabody. What kind of institution is it? Dr. MCCLURKIN. It is primarily a graduate teacher-training institute. Senator THOMAS. Is it State supported? Dr. MCCLURKIN. No, sir; it is a private institution. Senator THOMAS. Has it a large endowment? Dr. MCCLURKIN. Yes, sir. Senator THOMAS. Where does it get its endowment from generally? Dr. MCCLURKIN. The original endowment came from a grant of George Peabody, and the General Education Board. The Rockefeller Foundation has also been a principal supporter. Senator THOMAS. Are they still supporting it? |