Aiding Education

In the 1955 budget message, the Administration has indicated that it will again delay action on one of the nation's most pressing educational problems--the need for elementary and secondary school construction. A national conference is scheduled to meet this fall to discuss the situation, but discussion will hardly rebuild dilapidated school building or provide classrooms for almost 700,000 children who now attend school only part-time. Expanded Federal aid for school building, as contained in a bill introduced by Senator Lister Hill, is the only realistic way to assure an adequate public school system.

The Hill measure would empower the Federal Government to spend $500 million a year on school construction for the next two years. That figure represents at best a stop-gap solution, but it is a start in the right direction and should provide grants until the national conference evolves a long term solution.

The great cost of renovating the American school system makes Federal aid essential. Rapid increases in school attendance are expected to last at least through 1960, and the Health, Education, and Welfare Department estimates that the United States now needs about 370,000 new classrooms. Unless the present low rate of school construction increases sharply, that figure will stand at 470,000 within five years. A capital outlay of between $10 billion and $12 billion is necessary to overcome current deficiencies in school plants; at least that much again would be required in the next five years to accommodate the expected enrollment increase.

Although education is traditionally the province of state and local government, the financial resources of local school districts and poorer states are simply not adequate to meet the present crisis. Under normal financing methods, the states and communities together could supply only about half of the necessary amount--leaving a gap of billions of dollars.

Federal aid to education is nothing new: the government already spends large sums each year on the school lunch program without exerting control. Nor has Federal direction resulted from aid to school building in so-called "Federally-impacted" areas, school districts which include a large number of children of Federal employees or have considerable tax-free government property.

Although President Eisenhower and other Administration officials have frequently expressed concern over the problem, they still apparently resist a program of general Federal aid. A Committee in the last Congress favorably reported such a measure, but the bill died, partly because of the luke-warm attitude of the Administration. The President, in his special message on education next week, should accept the need for an enlarged construction program. Economy is both important and desirable, but the Federal Government should not sacrifice an adequate school system.