Thank you, very much.

We

Senator HUMPHREY. Thank you, very much, Mr. Henderson. appreciate your presence here, and your contribution is very, very good, and helpful.

Mr. Marshall, we are going to take a little time, so if we are over the bells a little, don't worry, we will take care of you.

STATEMENT OF JAMES MARSHALL, MEMBER, NEW YORK CITY BOARD OF EDUCATION

Mr. MARSHALL. Thank you, Senator. I appear on behalf of the New York Board of Education as chairman of the Committee on the Impact of the Increased Birth Rate upon the Public Schools of the City of New York.

I am appearing in support of the proposals to provide for capital funds for school construction. But I am not here to endorse any specific bill.

I am very fearful, Senator, that the widely publicized statement of General Eisenhower which appeared in the papers yesterday, directed at Senate bill 246, to provide Federal aid for the operation of public schools, may be misinterpreted and cause confusion in consideration of the measures before you, which are designed to provide funds for capital improvement; namely, construction of school buildings.

Senator HUMPHREY. May I just interrupt and say that, despite the statement of General Eisenhower, I think he is wrong. I disagree with him and I am glad to say that the majority of the Senate disagreed with him, and disagreed with others that took that position. I surely respect his right to give his point of view; but, as far as his observation on the principles of general education is concerned, I think he was way off the beam.

Mr. MARSHALL. I am glad to hear you say that, sir; but I would like for the record to comment on it, if I may take the time, because it seems to me that the notion that the proposal before you is some way associated with the idea of socialism as suggested by General Eisenbower seems to me entirely without foundation. He is off the beam there.

It is obvious that we are dealing with a function of Government, not interference by Government with any form of private enterprise in any way. Public education has been, as its name implies, an affair of the public. It has been generally regarded in this country as a State enterprise operated and to a great extent controlled by local agencies of Government. We think it therefore apparent that there is no issue of socialism in the question at all.

if we

Senator HUMPHREY. Would it not be more accurate to say, want to be brutally frank about it, that of course education is a socialist institution; it is Government-owned, Government, controlled, and Government-paid for. Some people do not like to admit that, but the fact is that socialism means the ownership and control of the means of construction and distribution.

Mr. MARSHALL. Just as the post office is a Government-owned enterprise.

Senator HUMPHREY. Why, surely.

Mr. MARSHALL. The good general, I think, got his wires crossed, because, if you will recall. sir. a week ano there was a great deal of

publicity in all of the front pages of the papers of a report by the Educational Policies Commission advertising the fact that the general and a great many other distinguished educators opposed the presence of Communist teachers in the schools. Well, that very same report, which General Eisenhower signed as a member of that committee, contains this statement on page 44:

The public schools are now supported primarily from State and local revenues. These in turn are to a large degree derived from taxes upon real property. Such revenues do not respond so flexibly to rapidly rising costs as do other sources. This is one reason why the Federal Government should provide funds to help the States to adjust school expenditures to the new high levels. Whatever the

cost of security may be, our present financial arrangements cannot underwrite the required educational program.

The schools entered the war with an inadequate plant. School building construction, although stimulated somewhat by work relief projects, never fully recovered from the damaging effects of the depression.

Having neglected the ordinary replacement of both buildings and personnel for a decade, the Nation must now pay the penalty in the form of higher State, local, and Federal support. The only alternative is gravely inadequate educational opportunities with accompanying perils to the Nation's future.

And, sir, I prefer Eisenhower in the first week of June to Eisenhower in the second week.

The only issue which seems reasonable is whether or not the Federal Government should provide funds to assist local government in the performance of its duty to provide adequate housing for operation of schools. The appropriation of Federal funds for school construction is not new. Thousands of schools, as you know, were built in this country with WPA and PWA funds, which went either in whole or in part for the construction of those schools. If the present recession extends further, there is no question but that the Federal Government would again encourage the construction of public schools by the use of Federal funds to assist economic recovery, as it did in the 1930's.

The proposal before you requires the States to initiate the school construction program. It specifically fixed administrative control in the States. This principle is precisely in the tradition of education as a State function. The only respect in which it may be said to differ at all from the current practice is that the dollars would come from the Federal Government. Thus, the plan is calculated to provide Federal moneys under local administration. There can be no question, therefore, of centralization of control over the construction of school buildings in the Federal Government.

I think with that in mind, sir, the Senate ought very carefully to review these proposals for the Federal Government going into questions of specifications or contract provisions of one kind or another, because it is very easy to bring the Government into education under the guise of the kind of wages that are paid to the employees of contractors. And I do not want to belabor that point at length, but I think it ought to be considered from the point of view of whether that does not put the Government in control of a feature of education. Senator HUMPHREY. May I say that there has been very full and comprehensive testimony, as you well know, from the Office of Education personnel and from others, as to Federal control in the development of State plans and State standards. I think every one of us appreciate as we enter this field we are on touchy ground, so to speak, and we have to be careful, and we are going to be careful.

Mr. MARSHALL. In other words, we are for this principle of a fair wage scale. We are for the principle of FEPC and for a great many other things, but we have to be careful, in trying to meet one principle and the needs of that principle, that we do not violate the very important principle of a divorce between Federal and local contro! of education.

Senator HUMPHREY. At the same time, we ought to be very careful in the use of Federal funds that we do not underwrite abuses and evils and malpractices which may exist. The whole program should be for the general tendency of lifting up the levels all over the country. Mr. MARSHALL. Of equality.

Senator HUMPHREY. That is right.

Mr. MARSHALL. It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between the source of the money and the control of its use. Our whole Government is based upon a recognition of a division of powers between the Federal Government and the localities and the very essence of democracy lies in the restraint exercised by the several institutions of government.

You will recall that it was argued in 1787 that the Federal Government might control all local government. The fathers of this Republic, speaking in the Federalist, emphasized the fact that the whole plan was based upon a recognition of the division of powers between the various parts of the government. That is true today.

Whereas historically schools have been supported in this country from local real-estate taxes, it has been apparent for a generation that in few communities were such taxes adequate to maintain what is deemed to be normal standards of education.

Senator HUMPHREY. May I just interrupt there, and again call to the attention of the clerk of the committee and the Office of Education that I think for an accurate, and, let me say, an informative financial picture, we ought to have the amount of Federal or tax-exempt properties that exist in most of these States.

In other words, the Federal Government has tremendous reservations in some States, forest reserves, or land reservations, or Indian reservations, all of which may be under particular statutory arrangements tax-free. Besides, there are universities tax exempt that have gone in, taken up all kinds of buildings, and even gone into the actual manufacturing of commodities.

In order to properly document the need of Federal assistance in school construction, I think we have to show what has happened to the property tax base, or to the entire tax base in the respective States as it pertains to educational needs.

Mr. MARSHALL. Then you have public housing in a city like New York.

Senator HUMPHREY. That is right.

Mr. MARSHALL. And certain limited-dividend corporations which construct housing and have certain tax benefits.

Senator HUMPHREY. That is correct.

Mr. MARSHALL. Those all must come into that picture, too, sir. Senator HUMPHREY. I think the record will reveal, and we can get a good deal of this information from local government bodies like the American Municipal Administration, and local finance officers, which reveals that practically every major city in the country has had

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instead of a decrease in its property tax base, has had a decrease through what we call the blight and the slum, with the area breaking down. Therefore, its property value goes down, and tremendous blocks of real estate are taken out of the orbit of taxable property. Mr. MARSHALL. When the income-tax amendment to the Federal Constitution was passed, the whole balance of taxing powers shifted from the localities to the Federal Government. It is only normal, therefore, that the localities should look to the Federal Government as a collecting agency for needed funds where local taxation is inadequate.

To say, however, that the localities must look to the Federal agency for funds does not imply that the Federal Government must therefore control the use of the funds. It does not mean that paternalism must follow, as suggested by General Eisenhower.

One of the basic principles of our Government has been local control of education and the proposals before Congress accept this principle of local control of education. It is no answer to those fears, which envisage Federal control merely because Federal funds are granted, that we must accept the inevitable consequences of leaving the burden on the communities, that children must be left indefinitely in overcrowded, unsanitary, nonfireproof school buildings.

I am sorry to find General Eisenhower falling into the dangerous fallacy that there are rich and poor States as regards education, and some people here fall into that fallacy, too. There are some States

that can proportionally raise more money toward education than other States, and this measure which is before you recognizes that fact. None of the States can presently meet reasonable requirements for new school buildings.

There exists today a specific condition which precipitates the issue more sharply than perhaps might otherwise be the case. I refer to the tremendously increased birth rate. Here we are dealing with an ascertainable fact, not a theory. We know today precisely how impoverished we are nationally in school building construction because we know how many additional children must be provided for within the next few years. Having these facts before us, we cannot sit idly by and wait for the catastrophe to come.

New York State is undoubtedly one of the States relatively well situated financially; yet New York State is not able to provide adequate funds for school construction necessary to meet the demands resulting from the increased birth rate. New York City is, of course, confronted with a crisis in this respect. Neither the city nor the State can alone, from existing tax sources, meet the overwhelming demands for money with which to finance new school-building construction. Certainly if this is true in the Empire State, it is true in other States as well.

Let us now view the facts in New York City. I would like, if I might, to present this chart to you, sir. You have a small copy there. I don't know whether you would like to follow the small one or this large one.

(The chart referred to faces this page.)

Between October 1946 and October 1954 we shall have taken into the public schools in the city of New York in the elementary grades some 215,000 more children than we had in the schools in 1946. This amounts to a 46-percent increase in the elementary-school population of our schools.