Harvard, Local Schools Collaborate in Program

The University has combined forces with three public school systems in a joint effort to examine basic hypotheses of American education, it was announced yesterday.

SUPRAD, the School and University Program for Research and Development, embodies a new relationship between a University and public school systems--specifically those of Concord, Lexington, and Newton. This development, asserted Matthew P. Gaffney, Roy Edward Larsen Professor of Education, is aimed at producing a "clinical" relationship, similar to that now seen between medical schools and hospitals.

In this relationship Harvard provides courses, consultative service, and personnel for cooperating school systems. Support by the Fund for the Advancement of Education assures long-range planning. SUPRAD is not, Gaffney said, designed to become a series of short-term panaceas for American education.

Plans now being carried out in the local schools include experiments in the organization of teaching groups, and in teacher advancement and merit. A team of teaching personnel consists of a leader, one or more career teachers, subject specialists, and a number of relatively inexperienced students from the Graduate School of Education.

The team plan creates a system that is hierarchical in terms of prestige, responsibility, and salary. This highly controversial method of advancement depends upon a way to recognize and reward classroom teachers of exceptional ability.

On the classroom level, one innovation is the "contract correcting" study, in which persons such as housewives with good academic backgrounds correct themes at home, freeing the teacher for other work.