Chairman PERKINS. I notice in the committee room a distinguished member from the State of Florida, Claude Pepper, who has been so helpful to the committee in its consideration of education legislation. Mr. Pepper is a distinguished member of the House Committee on Rules.

Congressman Pepper, I understand you are going to introduce Dr. Gordon, a member of the advisory committee on title V in Dade County, Fla. In introducing him, you may make any other appropriate remarks you desire.

Mr. PEPPER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

STATEMENT OF HON. CLAUDE PEPPER, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF FLORIDA

Mr. PEPPER. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I thank you very much for allowing me to appear here today.

It has been interesting hearing the testimony which has already been produced. When I ran for the Senate the first time in 1934, the first plank in my platform was Federal aid for education.

You can imagine with what pleasure I have come to live in a time and be a Member of a Congress which has done so much to promote that old dream that we all had for so long.

I welcome every opportunity to assure this distinguished committee of all the support I can possibly give to your great efforts in progressing the cause of education in this country.

I came today particularly, and I appreciate your allowing me to do so, to present to this distinguished committee a gentleman who is here today to give you the benefit of the large experience and broad knowledge that he possesses in this field of secondary education.

In the first place, Mr. Jack Gordon is an outstanding and very successful businessman in Florida. He is head of an institution that has about $140 million in assets. I have been privileged to be associated with him in that institution for many years and to see the excellence of his mind, to see what an excellent man he is, in the performance of his duties in private business. But his heart has very much been in the cause of public education, or education.

For 6 years he has been a member of the Board of Public Instructors of Dade County. That is the seventh largest school system in the United States.

Mr. Gordon is recognized, I think, as one of the outstanding authorities in the country in the field of secondary education. That was recognized in his appointment to the National Advisory Council on State Departments of Education. I am sure that the committee will find of interest the information Mr. Gordon will be able to bring to you. I am pleased to present him to you today. Chairman PERKINS. Thank you very much.

STATEMENT OF DR. JACK D. GORDON, MEMBER, ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON TITLE V, DADE COUNTY, FLA.

Mr. GORDON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I think I would like to confine myself to talking about title V and the particular additional planning grants which seem to disturb some of the chief State school officers.

First, a minor point on the title V amendment that changes the distribution formula. I might say that the advisory council would agree in the recommendations with the change in formula provided it does not penalize any States, and the agreement on the part of all the States to the changed formula was based on the full appropriation of the authorization.

In the current proposed authorization, some of the larger States would receive considerably lesser sums. It would seem while they wouldn't object to a change, they ought not to be penalized for the change and have to step backward in the application of these matters. Chairman PERKINS. I must observe that I agree with you on that point of view.

Mr. GORDON. The other point, generally, on the question of planning is that I think rather than put this in the context of an argument between Federal control and local control, which seems to be the burden of some of the testimony this morning, what the real problem is, is whether laymen can actually control education, whether they are sitting at the Federal, the State or the local level.

The only way that laymen can control education is to have the thing presented to them in an understandable framework. The goals of education have to be spelled out, specified, they can't just be general goals.

This whole concept of planning implies that goals have to be tied to performance standards. We have to look at the performance and we have to get school administrators to look at performance standards as a framework within which to judge their programs.

For example, we have a system now, speaking very generally, in the country that rejects 30 percent of the students who enter it, that is, 30 percent of the kids who enter school do not graduate from high school. I personally feel that that is a rejection rate far beyond permissible limitation and if you are talking about the performance standards of school systems one of the things you ought to consider as a goal is cutting that rejection rate down to the 2, 3, or 5 percent that would seem more reasonable, and that we ought to understand our educational system in those terms.

If we think that literacy is necessary, and I am sure we do, then we ought to set some standards, it seems to me, and base our judgment of performance upon the reading achievement, for example, of kids in elementary school.

Why can't we say, as we tried to in one way or another, in a school system, that you want second graders to read above second grade level, so that we raise the national norms in reading?

Why can't we use that as a method of judgment? My personal feeling is that the opposition to the idea of stated programs that are goaloriented and budgeting on the basis of those programs are simply ways of stating opposition to letting laymen get at the real questions and make the real policy decisions.

To put it another way, in our school system, we are proceeding to implement a program budget. We have already installed a research. and development unit in our instructional services.

We are applying both under title IV and title III for different aspects of additional funds to implement a program budget and a plan

ning system. It seems to me that I read that the New York City schools had contracted to do the same thing.

I think that any intelligent layman who sits on a board of education or any intelligent layman who sits in any position where he is passing judgment on the expenditure of funds for education, needs better analytic tools than he has now.

At the State level, it seems to me it is quite necessary to have total planning. The only thing objectionable I would see in this legislation, and I understand why, is the optional character of bringing higher education into a State plan.

I don't think you can do a decent job of resource allocation in a State unless you take into account higher education and vocational education, in our State the junior colleges which are not under higher education but under the local school system, and local elementary and secondary education, and for that matter, preschool education under Headstart.

They are all an educational resource. The manpower training programs under the Department of Labor, also. All of these items have to be looked at as some kind of goal and some kind of priority assigned.

It seems to me that we all recognize this, for example, that you can't watch something at a distance through a magnifying glass and you can't read a piece of paper with a pair of binoculars.

Unless we do some long-range planning with some people set aside to look out for 10, 15 years in the States, and decide what that State is going to be like and what their needs are going to be, we are not going to get much of an educational enterprise and we will not get much that we can measure.

After all, we now assume that children will go through school for 12 years and we are talking about 14 to 16 years of education as being the right of an individual. It would seem to me that the planning ought not to be on a year-to-year basis if we are talking about a 12-, 14-, or 16-year process; that we at least ought to be planning through to the independence of the process and use our budgeting as a means of checking every year on some type of self-correcting basis of: Are we getting where we want to go?

All of these things are involved in planning, and in setting up a planning unit and looking at long-range planning.

Chairman PERKINS. Dr. Gordon, are you suggesting an authorization of some 10 or 12 years here?

Mr. GORDON. It is not Dr. Gordon. I appreciate the honorary degree.

Chairman PERKINS. I appreciate the point you are making.

Mr. GORDON. Mr. Chairman, the point is that you don't need 12year authorization to make a 12-year plan.

You do need, and I quite agree and we have seen the effects of this many times in our local school system, the necessity for being able to plan beyond an individual year or individual 2 years, as we do in Florida with biennial appropriations; that we need 4 and 5 years at least in terms of financial planning to have the framework within which we can operate.

But it seems to me that we also need to be able to look out and observe the kind of changes that are going on in the world of work, for ex

ample, that dictate the kind of legislation that you are talking about, the innovations under vocational education.

In a State like Florida, there is the tremendous population growth, and the simple problems of the physical facilities that we will need 10 years from now have to be dealt with now. We can't build a school building in Dade County immediately.

We consider that we need some 2 years of leadtime between the authorization of the school and the time we can expect it. For a high school, we need 3 years. We want to put enough time and effort into the plan to make sure that the school isn't obsolete by the time it gets built.

That simply requires planning. We go ahead and plan on the assumption that funds will become available, which sometimes happens and sometimes doesn't. It would be very nice, and I am sure everybody in the school structure at any level would like to see, to have longer leadtime.

I think the same thing is true in personnel planning, or manpower planning, which is a much neglected field in education. I note under the Higher Education Act amendment it is bringing together the training programs in one place and under one act.

It is certainly a step forward in identifying the manpower needs that all the country's schools are going to need 5, 10, and 15 years from now, and to see whether we can't make the changes in training that will be responsive to these needs.

To summarize, I think in a world which is changing rapidly, where we can see some of the changes as they will appear over a period of time, we are going to have to build and change, I should say, our institutions to be more responsive to those changes, and one name for that process is planning.

People who oppose looking at planning in the terms of the bill, of saying "What do you want to do?" that is setting goals, "What different ways can you get there?" which is the alternative methods, and "How do you know you got there?" which is what evaluation is, seems to me to be in the absence of a substitute advocating nothing but onfaith kind of behavior which is not responsive to the natural world. It may be responsive to the supernatural, but we are not talking about that. I think it is a most important piece of legislation, and it is most important to see that it gets funded.

I might add one thing. That is, that I am the secretary-treasurer of the National Committee for the Support of the Public Schools. I was chairman of a conference here in Washington last December of legislative leaders from the 50 States who came to Washington under our sponsorship.

This was funded by the Ford Foundation. They came to talk about what we consider to be a neglected area in schools. That is, the State legislatures, which appropriate the money and set the rules, and that nobody has really spent the time to explain to them fully the dins of planning and management techniques that are now available for them to observe how money is being spent.

We spent a lot of time talking about the setting up of State planning for education, and I would hope that there would be-I am quite sure there will be from what I have heard since-considerable support

within State legislatures for State departments of education to take the ball on this appropriation when it comes and do an adequate job of planning for the State.

Thank you.

Chairman PERKINS. Thank you very much, Mr. Gordon, for an excellent statement.

I have always felt that one of the problems which has brought about so much frustration has been the lack of a longer period of authorization, for instance, for a period of 4 years, and then get the appropriations out by March or April before the fiscal year closes on June 30, that should be our goal and I think it can be attained.

Let me thank you, Congressman, for coming before the committee. The committee will now stand in recess until 1:15.

Mr. Gordon will return at that time.

(Whereupon, at 12:30 p.m., the committee recessed to reconvene at 1:15 p.m. the same day.)

AFTER RECESS

(The committee reconvened at 1:15 p.m., Hon. Carl D. Perkins (chairman of the committee) presiding.)

Chairman PERKINS. The committee will come to order. A quorum is present.

Will the witnesses who were here this morning come around?
Mr. Goodell.

Mr. GOODELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Page, you were questioned in a rather acerbic if not astringent fashion this morning. I think one of your comments was perhaps taken out of context by the inquisitors.

You were pointing out that you felt, as I understand it, that the poverty program should be coordinated with education groups and agencies locally where they were dealing in education. Although you did not quote it, I presume you were referring to the specific requirement in title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that "The program and projects have been developed in cooperation with the public or private nonprofit agencies responsible for the Community Action Program."

You were pointing out that there is no such provision in the poverty law.

Mr. PAGE. Exactly.

Mr. GOODELL. Requiring such coordination with education agencies where the education program is financed under poverty law.

Mr. PAGE. Exactly. My thought was again, we can guarantee the maintenance of effort in the State by avoiding duplication if we do have this consideration at the State level. I did not mean to make it a point that I felt that the State agency should be taking over Headstart for example.

The point we have made is that Headstart should be under the direction of HEW and, therefore, we could articulate the programs much better with the educational agencies of the State and local districts.

Chairman PERKINS. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. GOODELL. Yes.