Federal Aid to Education

Congressmen will soon have a chance to get their paws on an Administration bill to pass out $300,000,000 to the nation's public schools. Although supporters of this aid to education are reasonably confident that the House and Senate will agree with the measure, they are also understandably nervous. For the last 30 years, the national legislature has consistently batted down so-called "general-aid" education bills, although it has approved such specific programs as land-grant colleges and funds for vocational training.

Federal aid to education is long overdue. The $300,000,000 for this year will just be a beginning towards reviving an educational system that is in notoriously shaky shape. In Detroit, for example, rat catchers and garbage collectors get paid more than school teachers. In the South, which is financially less vigorous than Detroit, many teachers are paid starvation wages, and school buildings make Harvard Hall look like Lamont's Poetry Room.

These conditions are rarely the fault of local or state administration. North Dakota, for instance, spends twice as much percentage-wise of its annual income on education as California, and yet can afford to pay its teachers only half as much. There simply isn't enough money for education--outside of Washington. The proposed bill would deal out the federal funds to each state, giving most of it to the needy, and only a soupcon to such rich states as New York.

Die-hards who complain that this bill is going to give Washington dictatorial powers over the Impressionable Youth of the Nation are talking through their hats. The bill itself is drawn with a delicate feeling for states' rights touchiness; the money goes to the states practically without any strings at all. Any federal bureaucrat who attempted to tell a teacher how or what to teach would promptly be hung from them chandelier in the U. S. Senate.

Not only does the measure guard the sanctity of state boundaries, but it protects such local customs as segregated education (in the South), and state aid to parochial schools (wherever it exists). Any attempt to question the merit of these two traditions would, of course, cause a conflagration in Congress and probably kill the present bill forthwith. That is definitely not the object of supporters of federal aid to education. They rightly figure that if compromise will get some money into the public school system, then compromise is currently the ticket for them.